Jed Harris
Jed Harris (February 25, 1900 – November 15, 1979) was an Austrian-born American theatrical producer and director. Born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz in Vienna, his family moved to the United States in 1901. He grew up in New Jersey, attended Yale at 17 but left in 1920.
Harris built a major Broadway career from 1925 to 1956, producing or directing 31 shows. His early hits include Broadway (1926), Coquette (1927), The Royal Family (1927), The Front Page (1928), Uncle Vanya (1930), The Green Bay Tree (1933), and Our Town (1938). He later directed the original Broadway productions of The Heiress (1947) and The Crucible (1953). His productions won seven awards, including a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Thornton Wilder's Our Town.
He was known for a flamboyant, confident style and was sometimes described as abrasive. He worked with many famous actors, including Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier, Ruth Gordon, Lillian Gish, Basil Rathbone, Elaine Stritch, Walter Huston, and Osgood Perkins. He had a long relationship with Ruth Gordon; their son, Jones Harris, was born in 1929. He also had relationships with Katharine Hepburn and Margaret Sullavan, and lived with Patricia Lynn Burroughs toward the end of his life. He was married three times: Anita Green (1925), Louise Platt (1938) with whom he had a daughter, and Bebe Allen (briefly in 1957). All marriages ended in divorce.
Harris preferred live theater to film, but he did contribute to a few movies in the 1950s, including Night People (1954) and Operation Mad Ball (1957). He died in New York City in 1979 after a long illness. He was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:33 (CET).