British actor, internationally known on stage and film, the winner of an Academy Award, three Tony Awards, a New York Theater Critics Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Order of Merit of the Italian Public. He appeared in over 40 films and plays, including his signature role of Professor Henry Higgins in the musical My Fair Lady (on stage, 1957; on film, 1964).
The sophisticated king of light comedy, Harrison grew up in the northern English town of Huyten, the son of cotton broker William Reginald Harrison and homemaker Edith Carey. Stage-struck since boyhood, he played hooky at age 16 and read for a role in the play Thirty Minutes in The Street at the Liverpool Repertory. To his astonishment he was hired, and spent the next nine years touring and training with various repertory groups learning and polishing the craft he felt he was born to follow. “I never wanted to do anything else.” He made his London debut in 1931 in Getting George Married and earned rave reviews in the 1936 London production of French without Tears, launching his film career. During the day he worked on camera and when shooting was finished, he would head for the theater for his evening performance, one in which he usually played the very personification of the polished upper class English gentleman in a drawing room comedy.
In 1934 he made his first marriage to Noel Collette-Thomas, they had one son, Noel. Harrison shelved his acting career in 1941 to join the Volunteer Reserve of the Royal Air Force. Two years later, prior to his 1944 release, he made his second marriage to actress Lilli Palmer with whom he had another son, Carey. Returning immediately to the stage in I Live In Grosvenor Square (1945), he held leading roles in the film version of The Rake’s Progress and in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. His performance in the Broadway production of Anne of the Thousand Days in 1948 earned him his first Tony Award.
Hollywood offers followed in the late ‘40s and after settling there with his family, Harrison’s name was often linked with starlets in the tabloid headlines, most notably with actress Carole Landis. The actress committed suicide on 4 July 1948 allegedly due to her
disappointing affair with Harrison, who was completely oblivious to his paramour’s despondency and erratic behavior. Resultant publicity gave Harrison the nickname “Sexy Rexy” coupled with an inevitable divorce from Lilli Palmer which became final in 1957.
Harrison’s first American film was Anna and The King of Siam in 1946 followed by The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and Unfaithfully Yours (1948). Continued success on stage and screen followed, but it was his creation of the role of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage musical My Fair Lady (1957), followed by his Oscar winning performance in the film version in 1964, that made him a superstar. Harrison’s inability to carry a tune showcased his improvisational talent to talk lyrics in a musical range of one and a half notes.
Harrison wed comedienne Kay Kendal in 1957, “whose vitality and joy infected me as nothing had ever done before,” knowing she was terminally ill. For the last two years of her life, he had somehow kept her from knowing she had leukaemia. She died in 1959 at age 28.
Harrison next wed and divorced actresses Rachel Roberts and Elizabeth Harris, the former wife of actor Richard Harris. With each divorce, rumors spread that the callousness of Henry Higgins reflected Harrison’s true inner nature. Harrison was unfazed, remarking that “so many people want to be liked.” Cultivating his persona as a haughty, irascible charmer, Harrison told the New York Daily News in 1972 that he had “mastered the art of tail-coated actors who used to wander around the stage as if it were their dressing room.”
Harrison continued his career on stage and screen apace. His well-known films include Cleopatra in 1963, where his performance of Caesar earned him an Oscar nomination, The Agony and The Ecstasy in 1965, The Yellow Rolls Royce in 1964 and Dr. Doolittle in 1967.
He made his sixth and final marriage in 1978 to Elizabeth Tinker to whom he dedicated a book of his poetry If Love Be Love, published that same year. In 1974 he published Rex, An Autobiography followed posthumously by A Damned Serious Business in 1991.
While performing at age 81 in May 1990 on Broadway in The Circle, (“I never intend to retire, never,”) Harrison, now unsteady on his feet and diagnosed with a gall bladder infection, temporarily withdrew from the show. Unaware that he had pancreatic cancer, he died in his sleep three weeks later with his wife at his side, on 2 June 1990 at age 82 in New York City.
Link to Wikipedia biography