Radie Harris was born in New York City in 1904. As a child, she spent her weekends at the theater with her sister where she saw performances by Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, Fred and Adele Astaire, Katharine Cornell, Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Herbert Marshall, Ruth Gordon, and many others. She also went to the movies often and loved fan magazines. She had hoped to be an actress, but a horse-riding accident in her adolescence led to an emergency amputation of one of her legs. She then focused her attention on writing and planned to enroll at the Columbia School of Journalism. However, at 17, thanks to her father’s acquaintance with the managing editor of the “Morning Telegraph,” she landed a job as an assistant to the editor of the Motion Picture Department, where her work included writing movie reviews.

In the mid-1930s Harris began hosting a radio show, “The Movie Club,” on WHN New York. By 1939, she had a regular column in “Variety” alternately titled “Hollywood Runaround” or “New York Runaround,” depending on where she was reporting from. Her radio work was similarly bi-coastal and for many years she conducted entertainment interviews for Mutual Broadcasting System and CBS from either Sardi’s Restaurant in New York or the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. During this time, she was also active in the American Theatre Wing and, along with others from the organization, helped establish the Stage Door Canteen. She later served on the Executive Board of the ATW. In 1949 she moved from “Variety” to “The Hollywood Reporter” where, for the next four decades, she wrote her column “Broadway Ballyhoo.” Harris was well-liked and trusted by those she profiled, maintaining lifelong friendships with such actors as Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Bette Davis, Carol Channing, Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, Rosemary Harris, and Julie Andrews, among many others. She published her autobiography, “Radie’s World,” in 1975, and in 1982 was honored with a Special Citation of Merit from the Publicists Guild of America. Harris died in 2001.