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Bernard Barrow

Bernard Barrow built the kind of career that rarely fits into a neat category. Born in New York City in 1927 and raised in Yorkville by Russian Jewish immigrant parents, he moved between acting, directing and teaching, developing a body of work that reached from Off-Broadway theatre to film and long-running daytime television. Barrow was already playing well beyond his years at nineteen, appearing as the fifty-something Jonah Goodman in Irwin Shaw's The Gentle People. After earning degrees from Syracuse University and Columbia University, he completed a doctorate at Yale Drama School in 1957. Paul Newman was among his Yale classmates, and the two appeared together in a student production of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise. Barrow also became a Brooklyn College drama and theatre professor by the age of twenty-two, teaching there for thirty years. His students included Dominic Chianese, Jimmy Smits and director Joel Zwick. His screen work expanded during the 1960s. In Rachel, Rachel, directed by Newman, he played the principal opposite Joanne Woodward. Film roles followed in Glass Houses, Serpico and Claudine, while television offered a succession of judges, reporters and recurring characters. Daytime drama became the most sustained part of his screen career: he played Earl Dana on Where the Heart Is, Dan Kincaid on The Secret Storm and Ira Paulson on The Edge of Night. Barrow's longest role was Johnny Ryan on Ryan's Hope, which he played from 1975 through the series' final episodes in 1989. He had pushed for the part after being told he was too Jewish to play an Irishman, and the resulting thirteen-year run made the character central to his television legacy. Soon afterward, he joined Loving as Louie Slavinsky, winning the role without an audition because of his previous work with the network. His performance earned him the 1991 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor, followed by another nomination in 1992. Whether playing a family patriarch, a judge or a supporting figure in a New York story, Barrow brought the grounding of a theatre practitioner and longtime teacher to the screen.