A singer who acts rarely and chooses oddly. On screen Debbie Harry is cool, still and hard to read, and directors with strange films have used that well. Nobody has yet given her enough to do.
Fi1m perspective
In Videodrome (1983) Debbie Harry wears red. Everything else in David Cronenberg's film is beige and brown, the colours of an office on a wet afternoon, and Delphine White dresses Nicki Brand so that she is the one thing in the frame you cannot help looking at. That is a fair picture of what Harry does in films. She does not do a great deal, and she is difficult to look away from.
She came to acting from Blondie, formed in New York in 1974, and had taken small parts, and a lead in the neo-noir Union City (1980), before Cronenberg gave her Nicki Brand opposite James Woods. She dyed her hair for it and has said the point was to be somebody other than the person she had built for the band. It worked. On her first night with Woods's Max Renn, Nicki asks him to hurt her, and Harry plays it flat and calm, as a request rather than a dare. We found that more unnerving than anything the rubber and latex did later, because nothing in her face suggested she thought she was being brave. Our review called her good and underused, and both hold: she is the film's poster and she is off screen for most of its running time, which is the shape of the part rather than a failing of hers.
The rest of the career is a short list. John Waters cast her in Hairspray (1988) as Velma Von Tussle, and she is funnier as a villain than the Cronenberg part allowed her to be. There were character parts in the 1990s, Cop Land (1997) among them, alongside solo records and Blondie's reunions, and she has kept appearing into the 2020s. She has said she takes scripts from directors she admires and who scare her a little, and that her oddness fits the odd films she is offered. That is about right. The persona she carries in from music, controlled, unhurried, slightly amused, suits horror and satire and not much in between, and no director has tested whether it could carry something ordinary.
What she has never had is a part the size of her presence. Cronenberg came closest and then kept her out of the picture for long stretches. If you want to see what she can do, Videodrome is still the place, and you will spend a fair amount of it waiting for her to come back.
Biography
Debbie Harry is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Born Deborah Ann Harry on 1 July 1945 in Miami, Florida, she was adopted as an infant and raised in New Jersey. She is best known as the lead vocalist of the rock band Blondie, which achieved prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Harry has appeared in numerous films and television productions. Her acting credits include the role of Nicki Brand in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Velma Von Tussle in Hairspray (1988), Delores in Cop Land (1997), and supporting parts in Spun (2003) and My Life Without Me (2003). She has also appeared in television series such as Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (1996).
