Bernard Barrow

Bernard Elliott "Bernie" Barrow (December 30, 1927 – August 4, 1993) was an American actor and collegiate drama professor. He was best known as an actor for his roles as Johnny Ryan, an Irish-American patriarch, on Ryan's Hope (1975 to 1989) and Louie Slavinsky, a kindhearted garbage collector, on Loving (1989 to 1993). He won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in 1991 for his role on Loving.

Early life

Barrow was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in New York City and raised in Yorkville, a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father ran a laundry and his mother also worked there. Barrow had two sisters.

Paul Newman was one of Barrow's classmates at Yale and they appeared together in a student production of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise. Barrow had the lead role, while Newman played a cadet. Later, when Newman needed an audition scene for the Actors Studio, he used Barrow's big scene from the play. One of Barrow's students was Dominic Chianese, who later starred on The Sopranos. He also taught Jimmy Smits and director Joel Zwick.

Barrow appeared Off-Broadway as Jonah Goodman in The Gentle People, a play by Irwin Shaw, in 1946. He was only nineteen at the time and the character was in his fifties. In 1955, at the age of twenty-eight, he once again played a much older man in a production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That same year, he played Joanne Woodward's principal in Rachel, Rachel, directed by his former classmate, Paul Newman.

He was cast as Earl Dana on the CBS soap opera Where the Heart Is, playing the role from 1969 to 1970. This was followed by another CBS soap opera, The Secret Storm, where Barrow played Dan Kincaid from 1970 to 1974. He also appeared in the film Claudine. He was nominated again in the same category in 1992.

In 1992, he starred in a stage production of Barefoot in the Park at the Valley Forge and Westbury Music Fair. He co-starred with fellow soap opera actors Marilyn Chris, Cady McClain, and Walt Willey. He had two children from a previous marriage and two stepchildren.