Rex Harrison

Rex Harrisons

Rex Harrison was married six times.

With his slicked back hair and clipped accent cinema audiences adored the star of a string of hit films including My Fair Lady and Doctor Dolittle. He enhanced his reputation by serving in the RAF during the war. However it’s claimed Harrison’s suave image was a sham. According to the author of a new book the Oscar winner was a cad who treated people with contempt.Eileen Younghusband, who was a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer and served alongside Harrison in the 1940s, says: “He treated us like dirt. We were nothing because we didn’t have anything to do with his film career. He really thought he was someone special.”Eileen, now 93, first came across Harrison when he was already a screen heart-throb. He was an RAF officer while she worked in an operations room. She would encounter him in the mess where men and women mingled over breakfast and afternoon tea, and her illusions were soon shattered.In her book One Woman’s War she writes: “I particularly disliked him because of his table manners. He would fill his mouth with toast and marmalade and eat so messily that the soggy bread would ooze out of the side of his mouth. Quite revolting!”

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.

Eileen also recalls how Harrison used the public mess telephone to call his latest mistress, apparely not caring who overheard.It’s a highly unflattering portrait of one of the nation’s greatest idols but we shouldn’t be surprised.Throughout his lifetime Harrison gained a reputation for being difficult and was often critical of his fellow stars. He also had a tangled personal life, marrying six times and allegedly driving two women to suicide.Harrison, the son of a cotton broker, was born in Huyton, near Liverpool, in 1908, later changing his name from Reginald to Rex. He overcame the partial loss of the sight in one eye following a bout of measles in childhood to first appear on stage in 1924.

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

War interrupted his career and he joined the RAF in a non-flying position, rising to the rank of Flight Lieutenant.By the time the conflict was over he had divorced his first wife Collette Thomas and married German actress Lilli Palmer. Harrison won plaudits for his performance in Blithe Spirit in 1945 and became an international film star in 1946 when he won a title role in Anna And The King Of Siam.At that stage he was earning the huge sum of $4,500 a week but two years later a scandal threatened to derail everything.He began an affair with starlet Carole Landis, 12 years his junior, who committed suicide after his ardour cooled and he refused to leave his wife.

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.

Later Harrison is alleged to have bribed a police officer to destroy a suicide note. He became known as Sexy Rexy for his philandering ways and with his film career apparently in ruins focused on stage work for the next decade.

Harrison

Above – Rex Harrison threw his heart into acting, playing Caesar in the 1963 production Cleopatra.

For once he was eclipsed, by the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

After a series of solid performances he returned to the big time with My Fair Lady, which began its run in 1956, playing the waspish Professor Henry Higgins.However Harrison was not impressed by his co-star Julie Andrews who was cast as Eliza Doolittle, his Cockney protégée.

“If that b***h is still here on Monday I’m quitting the show,” stormed Harrison during their fraught Broadway run.

One of the numbers included the line, “I’ve grown accustomed to your face”, but Harrison is said to have refused to sing it to Andrews whom he despised because she initially struggled with the role.

In FACT Harrison was himself far from perfect and admitted he could barely sing.

“Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical,” he recalled years later.

“I went to a voice teacher for a while but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time.”His poor singing voice mattered not a jot and he won a Tony award for My Fair Lady.Andrews later used a profanity to describe Harrison but said he was such a good actor that she could forgive his boorish and selfish behaviour.Ironically when Audrey Hepburn was later cast ahead of Andrews in the film version of My Fair Lady, for which Harrison won an Oscar, he is said to have thrown another tantrum.

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.

The one very decent thing Rex Harrison did do was look after his third wife, 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.

My Fair Lady

 In My Fair Lady Harrison believed Hepburn was badly miscast and referred to her as “bloody Audrey”
Charlton Heston was another co-star to find him difficult stating after working together on The Agony And The Ecstasy: “Rex was in fact a kind of thorny guy but he was so good it was worth the trouble it took.”Many who met him commented on his huge ego and actor Patrick Macnee said: “He was one of the top five unpleasant men you’ve ever met.”Matters came to a head during filming of Doctor Dolittle in 1967. During shooting in St Lucia Harrison moved his yacht to block the cameras in a contract dispute. His antics were so bad that he was replaced by Christopher Plummer until he agreed to be less tyrannical.There were also heated rows with his latest wife, fiery Welsh actress Rachel Roberts.

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.

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