Harriet Ruth Bigus

Harriet Ruth Bigus died at the age of 97 on Thursday, February 5 at The Actors Fund Home in Englewood, NJ.

Born in Kansas City on November 21,1928, the daughter of Isadore and Donna (Koppel) Bigus, Harriet showed an early interest in all things theatrical. This must have been apparent to those around her, as she spoke often in later years of her dramatic childhood antics around the house, the treasured copy of Shakespeare's Complete Works given to her at age twelve by her grandfather, and the strong encouragement she got from her Paseo High School drama teacher. Feeling the pull of the theatre as a young woman, and armed with only an associate degree and an abiding passion for acting, Harriet moved to New York City in the early 1950's to pursue a career on the stage. While auditioning for top directors like Elia Kazan and Nina Vance, and continuing her studies with the legendary acting teachers Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen, she worked many survival jobs, including hat check girl at the Russian Tea Room, and personal assistant to both Paul Newman and Geraldine Page during their Broadway run in Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. For several decades she performed in professional theaters in and out of NYC, including the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Connecticut, the groundbreaking Alley Theatre in Houston, and Off Broadway's Riverside Shakespeare Company. While occasional work in television came her way, she was most at home on the stage. As she continued to pursue acting work into her middle years, she also became passionate about teaching actors, both privately and at schools like the iconic American Academy of Dramatic Art, with a focus on voice and speech training using mostly Shakespeare's works as her texts. Inspired by the language of the Bard and other great writers, she took up the pen herself, writing and performing in a one-woman show about one of her heroes, Abigail Adams. Many completed drafts of a full-length epistolary play about John and Abigail Adams followed, based on their correspondence to each other. In the last 20 years of her life, as performing on stage became untenable, she added poetry writing to the list of her unceasing creative activities, and she regularly wrote poems as gifts for individual members of the staff of The Actors Fund Home, where she spent her last several years. While she never married, she carried a seemingly bottomless well of passion for all things creative and for the people she met in life and the things that made them tick.

She was predeceased by her brother, Kenneth Bigus of Kansas City and his wife, Elma.

Survivors include her two nephews and their spouses, Larry and Ruth Bigus and Edward and Ellyn Bigus; their children, Alex, Liz (Brett) and Aaron Bigus and Jacob (Amanda), Samuel (Esra) and Julia Max Bigus; grandniece Adelyn and grandnephew Izidore; and her longtime close friends, Michael Mastro and Richard Hester of NYC, and Donna and Frank Fleming of Woodbury, CT.

A graveside service will be held at Rose Hill Cemetery on Wednesday, February 11 at 10am. Donations can be made in her name to the Entertainment Community Fund online at EntertainmentCommunity.org.