Debbie Harry

The waitress who didn't want to be blonde

Debbie Harry wasn't born with that name or that hair color. Angela Trimble was placed for adoption in Miami when she was only a few months old and grew up in New Jersey as Deborah Ann Harry. Before music became a real option, she worked as a secretary at the BBC and served drinks at Max’s Kansas City club in New York.

And that was certainly not the American dream.

In 1974, she founded Blondie with guitarist Chris Stein. But film was always there as a natural extension of her striking image and her magnetism in front of the camera. Her first major role was in Union City in 1980. That low-budget production allowed her to step away from the microphone and try her luck under the direction of Mark Reichert.

The press of the time didn't quite know where to place her. She was not a method actress, but her physical presence on screen was hypnotic to the directors of the New York avant-garde.

The Face of the New Flesh

David Cronenberg saw something in her that other filmmakers had overlooked. In 1983, she took on the role of Nicki Brand in Videodrome. That performance as a woman obsessed with pain and the television signal definitively pulled her away from teen pop.

It worked.

She didn't mind getting covered in blood or appearing with cigarette burns on her chest. That year, specialized critics realized Harry could carry a cult film without relying on her chart hits. Yet Hollywood never fully trusted her with leading roles in big-budget blockbusters.

She took on the challenge of working with John Waters in Hairspray in 1988. She played Velma Von Tussle with an impossible wig and a sarcasm that stole every scene. During this period, she balanced her solo music career with appearances in independent films that barely had commercial distribution.

Luxury Supporting Roles and the Reality of Taxes

But the industry is cruel to women who grow older.

In 1997, she returned to Blondie after a long hiatus caused by Chris Stein's illness and serious legal problems. In 2003, she worked under Spanish director Isabel Coixet in My Life Without Me. She played the protagonist's mother with a restraint that surprised many. It was a dry role with no trace of the New York aesthetic that made her famous decades earlier.

In 2019, she published her memoir titled Face It. Its pages recount everything from a sinister encounter with serial killer Ted Bundy to the total bankruptcy she suffered in the 1980s due to a multimillion-dollar debt with the U.S. tax authorities.

In 2023, she took part in Dolly Parton's album Rockstar to record a new version of the song Heart of Glass. Blondie toured the UK in 2022, generating gross revenue of over twelve million dollars.