What was rex harrison like

According to his memoirs, his background was one of faded grandeur and mystery, and his version of his early life is littered with stories of a grandmother being pushed around her extensive estate in a bathchair while bemoaning the decline in the family's fortunes.

The director Patrick Garland, who knew Rex well and wrote a perceptive memoir of him, once sent a highly experienced researcher to Liverpool to find out more about the star's past. The researcher found no trace of the big house, no lawns, no road where the house once stood, nothing. Harrison, it seems, had made the whole thing up.

There was a persistent rumour but no evidence that Harrison was the son of a local butcher. Whatever the truth, young Rex was his own invention. He turned his life into an act in which everyone else was the supporting cast.

His artistic education was obtained by leaning over the balcony at the Liverpool Alhambra, watching the great heroes of the day - many of them gentleman stars of the Edwardian era such as Gerald Du Maurier and Sir Seymour Hicks.

A great actor, he once concluded, could make you feel as if their entire performance was being directed at you personally. He made it his business to emulate them. The fact that he succeeded in this ambition was down to two remarkable assets that set him apart: a magnetic charm when he bothered to exercise it and an acting technique that was unrivalled.

With his batty headgear Britain's tweed hat makers adored Rex , his long limbs encased in immaculate tailoring, nobody came anywhere near him for sheer panache. He even managed to make cardigans look sexy. His voice had a wonderful astringent rasp. In the jungle of high comedy, Rex was the alpha male silverback, his harem of females lounging around him.

To Rex Harrison, the very concept would have been quite beyond comprehension. To him, waiters were all "wops". Producers were all "bastards" or worse. And women were put on earth entirely for his comfort. The resort to the pronoun was because he simply couldn't remember her name. There had been too many wives and too many affairs. When he died in New York in , from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 82, his funeral posed a problem. I have, for example, the catalogue for Ralph Richardson's things indeed, I am the proud owner of the great man's wallet and it is full of lovely English furniture and Georgian good taste.

By contrast, John Gielgud's furniture and effects amounted to an endearingly feminine riot of gilt and ormolu. Rex Harrison's one most memorable relic looked like a flat, dead hamster. It turned out to be his hair-piece. Rex Harrison would not, however, have got the joke. He never laughed about the one most important thing in his life - himself. He and Henry Tudor had a lot in common.

They were similarly tyrannical, both got through six wives, and both enjoyed fine dining. The matrimonial death toll in both cases was impressive. Two of Rex's women - his lover, the actress Carole Landis, and wife number four, the actress Rachel Roberts - killed themselves. In the case of Landis, goosebumps of horror erupt as you read the accounts of their fling in She was in her 20s and had already been married several times.

She was said to be great company, free with her favours, if a tad unstable. Rex homed in on her like a shark, although he was married to his second wife, Lilli Palmer, at the time. The following year, realising the affair was going nowhere, Landis took an overdose. Rex found her when she was still alive but her pulse was very weak. Instead of immediately calling an ambulance, he spent half an hour thumbing through her address book looking for her private doctor, in the hope of keeping a scandal at bay.

By the time he had found it, it was too late. Yet to set against this appalling stain on his ledger, there was his heroic treatment of the bubbly actress Kay Kendall, best known for the film Genevieve, and with whom Harrison began a relationship with her on the set of The Constant Husband.

Harrison and Lilli Palmer, his wife at the time, calmly agreed to divorce in planning to later remarry so he could marry Kendall who believed she had only anaemia. Harrison then nursed her, protecting her from the truth to the last. Some people say she knew her fate all along, but they both found pretence the best way of coping.

He was genuinely devastated by her death. In , he married Rachel Roberts who would later take the same way out of the relationship as Landis had: an overdose of sleeping pills.

Meanwhile, Harrison's boorish behaviour to others continued undaunted. He memorably compared Rex's talent to a magical fly fisherman who could coax laughter out of an audience by the gentle and precision casting of a line. Rex never fully approved of his Eliza Doolittles, certainly not Audrey Hepburn - "bloody Audrey" he called her.

As for Higgins, he invested so much of his life and romantic appeal in the part that it is now his most lasting monument. For those of us who never saw him perform the role on stage, there is at least the consolation of that wonderful film version.

Britain's actors are a seriously bluechip export - about the only thing left at which the Chinese can't touch us. Senior members of the profession, the knights and dames, are an admirably unpompous lot deeply concerned about their industry.

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 , 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 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 and became an international film star in when he won a title role in Anna And The King Of Siam. 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. 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. After a series of solid performances he returned to the big time with My Fair Lady, which began its run in , playing the waspish Professor Henry Higgins.

My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. 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. In 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.

He had worked with Reed both in the s, before the young director had made his most accomplished films, and in the '60s, when Reed was past his prime. I met Harrison for tea at the Ritz in London and he proved courteous, humorous, and full of stories that tellingly compared the younger and the older Reed.

But Harrison's flashes of ego were the most memorable aspect of our meeting. Much of the action was filmed on a set posing as the Sistine Chapel, where Charlton Heston lay on his back for weeks affecting to paint the ceiling. Harrison's understanding of events was typically self-centered.

It was one reason that, when I turned in my Reed typescript and Harrison died shortly afterward, I demurred when asked to write his biography. As I made my excuses to my publisher and agent, I found I was talking myself into taking the commission.

As an actor, Harrison was a technical genius. His effortless delivery of difficult prose, both onstage and in front of a movie camera, kept him in work for the whole of his life and provided us indispensable performances in films such as "Cleopatra" and "My Fair Lady" , for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was silver-tongued and an eager womanizer, two qualities that allowed him to prosper in the treacherous jungles of Hollywood.

Harrison was a cad of the first order. His black-hole egotism meant he could not appreciate the worth of others, particularly other men, and his attitude to his string of wives six in all and lovers was often hard and heartless. I concluded that he was not someone with whom I could spend the many thousands of hours a book takes to write.

A life of Harrison would be not merely a show business biography but, like that of Henry VIII, an account of the lives of his wonderful wives. I remember describing how the book would almost write itself if one were to give a chapter to each wife and set them against the life of the old priapic bounder. I eventually agreed to write Harrison's life. As expected, Sir Rex he was knighted in turned out to be every bit the spoiled, mollycoddled, slick, smug, insensitive, shallow actor I was expecting.

Each one of his wives, though, was exceptional, starting with his short-lived first bride, the fashion model Collette Thomas whom he married in , and then the actress Lilli Palmer in , a Jewish refugee from Nazism who followed him to America. In Hollywood, Harrison began an affair with the blond starlet Carole Landis.