Jennifer Harmon, the stage and television actress who appeared in One Life to Live, How to Survive a Marriage and Dallas, died Saturday, May 9, at the age of 82. Her relatives announced her death and did not reveal a cause.
Harmon’s career began on Broadway in 1965 with You Can’t Take It With You, and over the next five decades she moved between theater and daytime television. She was the leading lady of the NBC soap opera How to Survive a Marriage from 1974 to 1975, then joined the ABC soap One Life to Live as the villainous Cathy Craig from 1976 to 1978, becoming the fifth performer to play the role. She earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1978 for outstanding lead actress in a drama series.
Harmon also appeared in Dallas in 1979 as a secretary, and her final TV appearance came in The Good Wife in 2010. On stage, she built a Broadway résumé that included The School for Scandal, Blithe Spirit, The Sisters Rosensweig, The Little Foxes, The Deep Blue Sea, Amy's View, The Glass Menagerie and Seascape. One of her last professional roles was in Other Desert Cities in 2011, where she initially covered for Stockard Channing before eventually taking the part permanently.
Harmon was often cast as an understudy to actresses including Judi Dench and Jessica Lange, a quieter part of her career that reflected how often producers trusted her to step in without losing momentum. That was also the friction in her resume: she was never just a backup, but a steady presence who kept landing major parts when the work demanded it. Tributes on social media reflected that long memory, with one fan writing, “We lost the brilliant and delightful Jennifer Harmon this past weekend. Another star dimmed,” while others called her a “stunning actor” and said, “What a great actress. God bless.” For viewers who knew her from daytime drama and theater alike, her death closes the book on a performer whose range carried from Broadway in 1965 to television work nearly half a century later.
Born into neither a soap-opera dynasty nor a Hollywood headline cycle, Harmon built her name the old-fashioned way: by working, waiting and delivering. What remains now is the record of a career that moved easily between Broadway and television and left a mark large enough that a two-year turn as Cathy Craig could still be remembered decades later.
