His breakthrough West End performance was in a play by Terence Rattigan and he made his film debut in The Great Game in 1930.

Harrison claimed that he arrived at Landis’s home to find her already dead from a drugs overdose. But rumours persisted that she was still alive and instead of calling for an ambulance he telephoned his publicist to ask for advice.

He believed Hepburn was badly miscast and referred to her as “bloody Audrey”.

In 1957 Harrison married the vivacious actress Kay Kendall. She did not know she was terminally ill but her doctor confided in Harrison, whose wife Lilli agreed to a divorce so he could nurse Kendall through her final days.

She died two years later aged just 32 leaving Harrison devastated. From that moment he always wore a ring Kendall had given him.

In his memoirs last year Sir Roger Moore remarked: “Rex Harrison could be a rather mean-spirited man and he wasn’t regarded very warmly by those who knew him. The one decent thing he did was look after my lovely friend Kay Kendall when she became ill.

 When Rex was in My Fair Lady on Broadway she used to have to stand at the side of the stage when he sang ‘I’ve grown accustomed to your face’, as he refused to sing it to his co-star Julie Andrews, whom he hated with a passion.

The producers wouldn’t hear of dropping it and so Rex said the only compromise would be if he could sing it to Kay.

Ironically, when he won the Oscar for the film version in 1964, he smiled widely as he dedicated it to his two fair ladies: Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn.

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As Harrison’s fame grew so did his reputation for domineering and unreasonable behaviour on set.

During that period both were drinking heavily and they would frequently stage their cat-fights very publicly at Hollywood parties.

Scandal continued to dog him although he never found himself short of work and went on to appear in more than 40 films.

He divorced Roberts in 1971 but she committed suicide in 1980, apparently after a failed final attempt to win him back.

His fifth marriage, to Elizabeth Rees- Williams, who was 28 years younger and had been married to actor Richard Harris, lasted four years.

“Wives are like gilt-edged stocks,” Harrison once joked. “The more you have the greater your dividends.”

Harrison, who had homes in London, New York and Portofino, Italy, didn’t mellow in old age. When he last appeared on stage in London in the 1980s a promising young female cast member had the audacity to suggest he was getting a line slightly wrong.

He smiled his deadliest smile and replied: “Mmm, how very interesting to be given advice from quite the worst actress on the English stage.”

He never liked the new National Theatre where the actors’ names were billed alphabetically. “Would it help if I changed my name to ’Arrison?” he asked director Peter Hall.

Harrison, who had two sons, was finally knighted in 1989. The honour was no doubt delayed for many years because of his prolific womanising and arrived just in time. He died only 11 months later aged 82 from pancreatic cancer.

He was survived by his sixth wife Mercia Tinker, another in the line of much younger women.

Rex Harrison was a snob and had a terrible temper. He was loathed by many of his peers and treated many of the women in his life atrociously – but no one ever accused him of lacking talent.