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The award-winning actress was nominated for both an Oscar and an Emmy for related projects. She also wrote books.

Now, Barbara Barrie has passed away at 95.

According to her daughter, her death was medically assisted after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Barrie will be remembered for her writing, her acting, her activism, and more.

She was 95

On Wednesday, October 28, the actress and Oscar nominee died at her home in Manhattan.

Jane Harnick, her daughter, told The New York Times that her mother’s death was medically assisted.

Barrie had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

This was not her first fight with cancer, and cancer was not her only serious health battle.

It’s clear that she decided that, at 95, she did not want to fight what doctors told her would be a losing battle.

In 2014, Barrie received a diagnosis of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2014.

IPF is a degenerative disease with an unknown cause (thus why it is idiopathic), though there are known risk factors such as smoking and GERD.

The scarring of lung tissue in someone with this disease normally results in declining lung function and an average of 4 years from diagnosis to death. Barrie clearly beat those odds.

Twenty years earlier, in 1994, she was successfully treated for rectal cancer.

She went on to write two books about surviving cancer, encouraging people to get early screenings and stating that detection was “more important than acting.”

She’d been winning acting awards since over 60 years ago

Even with her very astute priorities made clear, we should emphasize that her acting career was singular.

In 1964, Barrie received the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for One Potato, Two Potato. Films about interracial relationships were distinctly uncommon at the time.

After 1979’s Breaking Away — her most famous role — she received an Oscar nomination.

Though she did not take home the Academy Award, the film did win an Oscar for best screenplay.

She reprised her role on the television series that followed the film, which resulted in a 1981 Emmy nomination.

On top of her extensive work in film and television and on stage, and on top of her books, she also led a personal life.

In 1965, she married Jay Malcolm Harnick — also an actor but also a director and producer.

Together, they had two children: Jane and Aaron Harnick. Though Jay passed away in 2007, both children are still alive.

In the early ’70s, Barrie signed her name to the “We Have Had Abortions” campaign to push for human rights against archaic laws. Like other heroic women of that time, perhaps she did not imagine that so much of her good work would be undone in her own lifetime.

Our thoughts are with her family and loved ones at this time.