Julie Harris, versatile actress

Julie Harris, 87, the delicate yet steely grande dame of the stage whose performances earned her a record five Tony Awards and 10 Tony nominations, died Saturday.

Ms. Harris died of congestive heart failure at her home in West Chatham, Mass., her close friend and actress Francesca James said. Ms. Harris had suffered a stroke in 2001 and another in 2010, James said.

In addition to her theatrical awards, Ms. Harris was nominated for an Academy Award in 1952 for her indelible performance as Frankie Addams in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding, a role she had created on Broadway.

The actress also appeared in Elia Kazan's 1955 film East of Eden opposite James Dean and later became familiar to television viewers as Joan Van Ark's mother, Lilimae Clements, on the CBS television series Knots Landing.

But she was at heart a stage actress, appearing in more than 30 Broadway plays as well as Off-Broadway and regional productions almost too numerous to count. Throughout a career that spanned more than 50 years, she never lost her passion for the stage.

"What is thrilling about the theater," Ms. Harris told the Washington Post in 1999, "is that it's a forum where people come and for those two or three hours belong to something, to ideas, to a feeling of being a member of the human race."

She said she didn't regret that her performances came and went with no record of them, "because the thing that is so exciting to me in the theater was that very thing - it burns for a time, and then it's gone. Except it's never gone in your head and in your heart."

In many of her best-remembered roles, Ms. Harris held the stage alone or virtually alone, as in her solo performances as Emily Dickinson in The Belle of Amherst, Isak Dinesen in Lucifer's Child, and Charlotte Bronte in Currer Bell and her role as Mary Todd Lincoln in the four-member cast of The Last of Mrs. Lincoln.

It was while performing in Fossils in May 2001 in Chicago that Ms. Harris had a stroke.

The following year, she was honored in a tribute at New York City's Lincoln Center. Although her speech was impaired, she found the words to thank those gathered to sing her praises: "I love you. I love you. I love you."

Ms. Harris was married and divorced three times. She had one son, Peter Alston Gurian.