Pitch PERFECT

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This article was published 22/07/2010 (5874 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Laura Anne Harris was in theatre school at the University of Victoria, a distinguished visiting professor grabbed her by the shoulders and said, "You have a Judy Holliday quality. Always do comedy."

Harris had no idea who Holliday was.

"I’m 17 when he’s saying this to me," the Victoria-born performer recalls. "But I was always in love with old movies . . . and I’m kind of obsessed with the 1950s."

The portentous comment sent Harris, now 25 and remarkably accomplished for her age, on an odyssey to learn about the squeaky-voiced actress who played ditzy blonds but was actually well-read, politically aware and highly intelligent.

She sought out Holliday’s films, read biographies, and ultimately went to a broadcast museum in New York City to watch archival TV clips of the skilled comedienne.

"When I watched Born Yesterday (the 1950 film for which Holliday won the best-actress Oscar, beating out Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis in All About Eve), I thought, ‘She’s a genius.’"

The Toronto-based Harris, who is blond herself but wears a blonder 1950s wig to portray Holliday, wrote the one-woman portrait Pitch Blond and has been touring it to fringe festivals since 2007. It earned five stars from the Free Press and has been selling out at Venue 5.

Like Holliday, Harris has a lot of brains and substance under her sweet exterior and girlish voice. She’s the director of two other shows at this fringe, Psycho Bitch and Tired Clichés, both at Venue 21.

She titled her show Pitch Blond, she says, partly to play on "pitch black" because Holliday was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. It also refers to the high pitch of Holliday’s stage voice (her real voice wasn’t as comically air-headed).

The one-hour Pitch Blond interweaves flashbacks that tell Holliday’s story with a key event: her 1952 testimony before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, where she was interrogated about her possible Communist ties.

The New York-born Holliday, who was of Russian Jewish background (her real surname was Tuvim), played dumb in a brilliant display of evading questions, feigning memory lapses, appearing scatterbrained and turning queries back on her inquisitor.

"They say it was her best performance," says Harris. "(The subcommittee) couldn’t get anything out of her. She was so smart."

The interrogator’s questions heard in Pitch Blond are taken from the actual transcript.

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Holliday, whose work up to 1952 had been mostly in broadcasting, was blacklisted from radio and TV for almost three years. She continued making films, but they were less successful than they might have been, Harris says, because she had been tarred by the Communist accusations. Her movie openings were picketed.

Holliday died of breast cancer in 1965 at the age of only 43. Probably because of her unhappy childhood, she had a quality shared by many great clowns of sadness behind the laughter.

For fringers who’d like to know more, Harris — now working on a play about actress Tallulah Bankhead — recommends Holliday’s 1952 movie The Marrying Kind, a comedy-drama about a couple on the brink of divorce. There’s a memory scene that is deeply touching.

"It’s so sad. It’s about losing a child," says Harris. "It’s a beautiful film."

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca