"The Gin Game" is a decent play, a sturdy vehicle, though far from the quality of some of the world-class material Harris had played as a young actress. But I'll never forget the way she gradually revealed that the polite old lady she was playing was actually a bitter loser. When she spoke of a petty act of vengeance against her estranged son, Harris's voice took on a thick and gloating and triumphant quality when she cried, "I fixed his wagon!" Harris had an actor's face, which meant that she could make it beautiful or plain or anything else she wanted to, but her voice was unmistakable: breathy, plaintive, constantly biting into her words like apples and swallowing them down so fast and with such greed that you worried that she would make herself sick on words. Harris's voice was somehow burnt to a crisp, as if her oversized feelings had left this voice a scorched earth terrain that could still somehow bear all the emotional fruit she would need for the winter and beyond.

She was born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and her socialite mother was disappointed in Harris's lack of interest in dating and coming out parties. Harris was a born actress, an overly sensitive girl who would always stay sensitive to others. She did some theater in New York as a young woman before getting the role of her life: Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers's masterpiece on adolescent outsider-dom, "The Member of the Wedding." "I was twenty-four, at that time, and Frankie Addams is supposed to be twelve and three quarters years old, so I was twice her age," Harris said. Harold Clurman, her director, advised Harris to not worry about acting childish or like a child. "Your age doesn't matter," he told her. "You could be fifty-two and still play that part. If you put yourself in the circumstances and properly feel her pain people are bound to think you're the right age."

And so they did, and thankfully Fred Zinnemann used the original cast of the play when he directed his 1952 film of it. This is a performance from Harris that deserves to be legendary. She is a purely poetic actress, and no other actress or actor has ever had more poetic material than "The Member of the Wedding." Harris rips into all of these heightened McCullers speeches with such lyric abandon that it's easy to get lost in Frankie's freakishly insightful observations, her huge emotional needs, her fears and her imperious anger, her longing to fit in and her defiance in the face of more ordinary people. Harris goes all out, and there are very few other actors who have ever been this good so far out on a limb. When Frankie is pulled screaming from the wedding car of her brother and left in the dust as the car pulls away, Harris is so deep down in her character's bottomless adolescent pain that it feels like she'll never make it out again. This is a performance to be savored, to be studied, to be treasured for every McCullers line and every Harris line reading.