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Barbara Garrick

Barbara Garrick is an American film and television actor whose career has moved comfortably between daytime drama, feature films, miniseries and prime-time procedurals. Born in Los Angeles on December 3, 1965, she became a familiar presence in New York-based soap operas, often through characters with a distinctly troubled edge. In 1985, Garrick appeared on Guiding Light as the villainous nurse Charlotte Wheaton. She later played Rita Renfield on As the World Turns in 1999, but her most enduring daytime role was Allison Perkins on One Life to Live. Garrick originated the part of the unstable cult member in 1986 and returned repeatedly over the following decades. Her appearances stretched from the original 1986–87 run through storylines in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2010. She was also present during the soap’s broadcast finale in January 2012 and returned for the first-season finale of its streaming reboot in 2013. Few roles in her career have had that kind of staying power. Garrick made her first film appearance as Helen Weaver in Eight Men Out in 1988. That same year, she appeared in Working Girl, followed by roles in Postcards from the Edge, The Firm and Sleepless in Seattle. Together, those credits place her within a run of widely recognized American films from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Another substantial thread in Garrick’s work is DeDe Halcyon Day, whom she played across four adaptations of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City and the 2019 continuation Tales of the City. Her performance in Further Tales of the City earned a 2002 Gemini Award nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Dramatic Program or Mini-Series. Garrick has also appeared in episodes of Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, adding procedural television to a screen career defined by recurring characters and work across several formats.