Jennifer Harmon, Actress on Broadway and ‘One Life to Live,’ Dies at 82

Jennifer Harmon, who appeared 21 times on Broadway over a span of nearly 50 years and portrayed the villainous Cathy Craig Lord on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, has died. She was 82.

Harmon lived in New York and died Saturday, her family announced.

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Harmon was the fifth actress to portray Cathy on Agnes Nixon’s One Life to Live, following Catherine Burns, Amy Levitt, Jane Alice Brandon and Dorrie Kavanaugh. She worked on the show from 1976 through 1978, when she received a Daytime Emmy nomination. (Robin Strasser had been offered the part but turned it down to play Dorian Lord.)

Harmon had made her Broadway debut in 1965 in a revival of Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You and before the decade was done had returned to the Great White Way in revivals of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and six other plays.

Her Broadway credits included productions of The School for Scandal nearly 30 years apart; Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 1987; Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig in 1993-94; Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in 1997; Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea in 1998; David Hare’s Amy’s View in 1999; Neil Simon’s The Dinner Party and Barefoot in the Park in 2000-01 and 2006, respectively; Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie in 2005; Edward Albee’s Seascape in 2005-06; and Jon Robin Baitz’s Other Desert Cities in 2011-12.

The versatile actress stood by or understudied for the likes of Stockard Channing, Judi Dench, Jessica Lange, Marian Seldes, Blythe Danner and Jessica Lange during her long stage career.

Born in Pasadena on Dec. 3, 1943, and raised in New Orleans, Harmon attended the University of Mississippi and the University of Michigan before moving to New York and joining the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company, which took her to Broadway.

She started out in soaps on the 1974-75 NBC serial How to Survive a Marriage, where her character, Chris, got divorced, remarried and battled alcoholism.

She returned to One Life to Live in the early 1990s to play an attorney representing Erika Slezak’s Viki Lord — as Cathy, she had kidnapped Viki’s baby years ago — and showed up on such other soaps as Another World, Guiding Light and Loving.

Her TV résumé included work on Barnaby Jones, Dallas, The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz, Rescue Me and The Good Wife.

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