Julian Barry wrote or rewrote screenplays for several notable films including The River, Eyes of Laura Mars, and Rhinoceros, Me, Myself and I, and A Marriage - Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz.
16 Facts About Julian Barry
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Julian Barry appeared as himself in the film documentary Pablo, about the graphic artist and film director Pablo Ferro.
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Julian Barry was raised in the Riverdale neighborhood of The Bronx.
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Julian Barry played saxophone for his high school band, and traveled to jazz clubs in New York City to hear jazz performed by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.
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Julian Barry was drafted into the US Army during the Korean War and served until 1953.
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Julian Barry was cast in the 1955 Orson Welles production of King Lear at New York City Center theater.
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Julian Barry continued working on Broadway as an actor in the musical Shinbone Alley, where he was stage manager, Julian Barry stage managed the Budd Schulberg treatment of The Disenchanted, about the real life adventures of F Scott Fitzgerald.
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Julian Barry stage managed seven other Broadway productions, appearing as an actor in several of them as well, and he worked in the Broadway theatre in this capacity through the mid sixties when he started writing full-time.
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In 1969, Julian Barry was hired by Columbia Pictures to write the screenplay for Lenny.
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Julian Barry suggested to theatre director Tom O'Horgan, who was fresh from his success with the musical Hair, that the Lenny screenplay be redone as a play and the play was a hit starring Cliff Gorman.
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Julian Barry was nominated that year for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Adapted from Another Medium, as well as a Jeff Award for his directorial efforts on the Lenny stage show in Chicago.
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In 1983, Julian Barry wrote the book for Jean Seberg, a musical biography of the American actress and political activist who committed suicide in Paris in 1979.
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Julian Barry ventured back into opera writing the libretto for Zyklon, an opera about the life of German-Jewish scientist Fritz Haber.
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Julian Barry met his second wife, Patricia Foley when he hired her for a Chicago production of Guys and Dolls to play the role of Sister Sarah Brown, opposite Tony Bennett.
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Julian Barry later married and divorced film producer Laura Ziskin, who died in 2011.
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Julian Barry died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, on July 25,2023, at the age of 92, from complications of heart failure and kidney disease.