Five-time Tony Award-winner Julie Harris is recovering from what a hospital spokesperson called "a moderate stroke" in late May.
Harris, 75, suffered the cerebral incident in Chicago, where she was appearing in the new play "Fossils" at the Victory Gardens Theatre. She failed to show up at the theatre for a Saturday night performance, prompting staff members to go looking for her. They found her semiconscious in her apartment, and Harris was admitted to an area hospital in serious but stable condition. Her understudy, Yolanda Lyon Miller, took over the role.
Harris was moved from Grant Hospital in Illinois to Spaulding Rehab Hospital in Boston, where her condition is still closely guarded by hospital spokesperson Judith Torto-lano. "What I'm permitted to say, with the permission of her family, is that she is medically stable and is undergoing intensive therapy," Tortolano told Back Stage.
Ironically, the play in which Harris was appearing centers on a man who has been debilitated by a stroke, waiting for a visit from his old flame, played by Harris.
Eight days after Harris' collapse, the Victory Gardens received the 2001 Tony Award for outstanding regional theatre. Only a day before her collapse, Harris was busy filming the video that would accompany the presentation of the award.
With some 600,000 people suffering strokes each year, according to the American Heart Association, they are the country's leading cause of long-term disability. More than 150,000 people die of them each year. However, recent medical advances have made strokes more preventable and treatable than in the past.