Bennett, Farrell, Harris, Redford, and Turner to Receive Kennedy Center Honors

Six-time Tony Award winner Julie Harris, Oscar-winning actor/director Robert Redford, singers Tony Bennett and Tina Turner, and ballet great Suzanne Farrell will be presented with the 2005 Kennedy Center Honors on December 3. The honorees will also be saluted at a gala the next evening at the Kennedy Center.

Harris, who will turn 80 in December, made her Broadway debut in 1945 in It’s a Gift, and has since appeared on the Great White Way over 30 times. She won the Tony as Best Actress in a Play five times: I Am a Camera (1952), The Lark (1956), Forty Carats (1969), The Last of Mrs. Lincoln (1973), and The Belle of Amherst (1977). She also received four other nominations in that category: Marathon ’33 (1964), The Au Pair Man (1974), Lucifer’s Child (1991), and the revival of The Gin Game (1997), and a nomination for Best Actress in a Musical for Skyscraper (1966). In 2002, she was given a special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.

Harris also starred in the film versions of I Am a Camera and The Member of the Wedding; and starred in TV versions of Pygmalion, The Belle of Amherst, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln, and Lucifer’s Child. Her best-known film role was as Abra in East of Eden, and she starred for many years on the CBS drama Knots Landing.

Redford, who turned 68 last month, appeared five times on Broadway, including Tall Story, Sunday in New York (for which he won a Theater World Award), and the original production of Barefoot in the Park, in which he played the lead role of Paul Bratter; he also played the role in the film version opposite Jane Fonda. Redford won the Oscar for Best Director for Ordinary People, and has appeared in more than two dozen films including The Sting and The Way We Were. His new movie, An Unfinished Life, co-starring Jennifer Lopez and Morgan Freeman, opens this month.

The Kennedy Center Honors Gala will be taped for television and shown on CBS sometime in December.