Jennifer Harmon, who appeared 21 times on Broadway over nearly 50 years and built a long career in daytime television, has died at 82. Her family said she died on Saturday in New York.

Harmon was best known to soap viewers as the villainous Cathy Craig Lord on ABC's One Life to Live, where she worked from 1976 through 1978 and earned a Daytime Emmy nomination in 1978. She was the fifth actress to play Cathy on Agnes Nixon's series, a role she later returned to in the early 1990s when she appeared as an attorney representing Erika Slezak's Viki Lord.

Born in Pasadena on Dec. 3, 1943, and raised in New Orleans, Harmon attended the University of Mississippi and the University of Michigan before moving to New York. She joined the APA-Phoenix Repertory Company and made her Broadway debut in 1965 in a revival of You Can't Take It With You. Before the end of the 1960s, she was back on Broadway in revivals of The Cherry Orchard and The Wild Duck, and would go on to build a stage résumé that stretched from Blithe Spirit in 1987 to Other Desert Cities in 2011-12.

Along the way, Harmon stood by or understudied for Stockard Channing, Judi Dench, Jessica Lange, Marian Seldes and Blythe Danner, work that reflected both her range and the trust theater producers placed in her. Her credits also included The Sisters Rosensweig, The Little Foxes, The Deep Blue Sea, Amy's View, The Dinner Party, Barefoot in the Park, The Glass Menagerie and Seascape, as well as productions by Noël Coward, Wendy Wasserstein, Lillian Hellman, Neil Simon, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Jon Robin Baitz.

Harmon started in soaps on the 1974-75 NBC serial How to Survive a Marriage and later appeared on Another World, Guiding Light and Loving. Her television résumé also included Barnaby Jones, Dallas, The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere, Homicide: Life on the Street, Oz, Rescue Me and The Good Wife, the kind of list that marked her as a reliable character actor rather than a marquee name. That is how she worked for decades, moving from Broadway to daytime and back again, and it is why her death closes the book on one of the more quietly durable acting careers of her generation.