The Full Biography
Rex Harrison. Actor. The Huyton kid who made a professor’s disdain into a musical, then spent six marriages and a long voice proving the disdain was a part and also a habit.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a man in Edwardian clothes, talking-singing about why a woman cannot be more like a man, a statue for Higgins. My Fair Lady. What the still cannot show is Reginald Carey Harrison of Huyton, Lancashire, a provincial stage, a war, a voice that was not a singer’s and became the most famous talk-sing in American musicals, and an old man who died in New York in 1990 still playing the rooms.
He was born on March 5, 1908, in Huyton, on the edge of Liverpool. His father, William, was a cotton broker; his mother, Edith, kept the house. The weather was provincial, not Mayfair. He styled himself Rex as a boy because Reginald was a name that did not fit a person who already wanted a stage. Liverpool College. Then the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1924, sixteen years old, a job that would have him. Touring companies. Small parts. The long English apprenticeship that does not make a headline and makes an actor. The West End did not arrive as a coronation. It arrived as parts, then better parts. In 1936 Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears made him a fashionable leading man: light, exact, a cad the stalls would pay to watch. That was the first door. The voice was already the instrument. The face was handsome without being a poster. Hollywood had not yet been invented for him.
Pictures came. Night Train to Munich (1940), a Carol Reed thriller in which the timing had to live next to the plot. Major Barbara (1941), Shaw on film, a Salvation Army argument he could already speak as if it were conversation. He served in the Royal Air Force in the war, a flight lieutenant in radar, and then went back to the work. Blithe Spirit (1945), as Charles Condomine, is the British shop before the professor: Noël Coward’s husband who is all timing, a man talking to a ghost and to a living wife with the same clipped music. Coward, who did not hand out compliments as souvenirs, called him the best light-comedy actor in the world except for Coward. Harrison’s reply, when he heard it, was professional: good actors make you listen; bad ones are better not listened to. He was not pretty in the Hollywood sense. He was a voice and a posture. Hollywood hired both.
Anna and the King of Siam (1946) was the American breakthrough, King Mongkut opposite Irene Dunne, a grown man in a court the studio had built on a lot. He played the king as intelligence, not as a cartoon. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), with Gene Tierney, is the picture people who do not care about Higgins still love: a sea captain’s ghost, a cottage on the Cornish coast the studio invented, a romance that is also a courtesy. Joseph L. Mankiewicz directed the tone; Harrison directed the pauses. Unfaithfully Yours (1948), for Preston Sturges, let him be funny and dangerous in the same bar of music, a conductor inventing murders to his own score. He was, for a stretch, the Anglo-American export of a certain Englishness — not the stiff upper, the dry upper.
The private life was not a Coward comedy. In 1948 Carole Landis, with whom he had been involved while married to Lilli Palmer, died by suicide in Los Angeles. The scandal followed him across an ocean. A complete file holds it without making it the whole man and without sanding it into a shrug. He could be cruel. Colleagues have said so. Wives have said so. The charm onstage was a technique. Offstage it was a habit that did not always include kindness.
Broadway already knew the technique. In 1948–49 he won a Tony as Henry VIII in Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of the Thousand Days, a king who is appetite and law in the same breath. He could have stayed a stage Henry and a film ghost and died respected. He did not. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wanted a Higgins for a musical made from Shaw’s Pygmalion. Harrison’s range, Loewe liked to say, was a note and a half. He would not pretend to be a tenor. He almost refused the part. They built the songs so a speaking voice could ride the pitch — “Why Can’t the English?,” “I’m an Ordinary Man,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” — a talk-sing that became a method other men still steal. My Fair Lady opened on March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger, Julie Andrews as Eliza, Moss Hart directing. Stanley Holloway was Doolittle. The show ran for years; Harrison stayed long enough to own the professor in the city’s mouth. He won the Tony. He created Higgins on Broadway and then, in 1964, took him to Warner’s film for George Cukor. Audrey Hepburn was Eliza on screen. Jack Warner had wanted a movie name; Andrews had been the stage girl. Harrison was Higgins in both weathers that mattered to him. The Academy Award for Best Actor followed. He was fifty-six. He had waited a long time for a statue that was also a receipt.
Around the musical he kept the other rooms. The Reluctant Debutante (1958). Midnight Lace (1960) with Doris Day. Then Cleopatra (1963) as Julius Caesar — a grown man in a picture that was otherwise a weather system about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton — earned him another Oscar nomination and, in a famous wreck, one of the few performances the picture could not swamp. He played the conqueror as a tired administrator with a mind, not a statue in a breastplate. The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) put him opposite Charlton Heston’s Michelangelo as Pope Julius II, another impatient authority in a costume. Doctor Dolittle (1967) was a musical the studio needed to be a second Higgins and was not; the shoot was long, the budget a scandal, the songs a different weather. It did not save a ledger. Staircase (1969), with Burton, was a risk the public did not reward: two men in a marriage the codes of the time would barely name. He was, for a stretch, the most complete light-heavy the Anglo-American stage had: a cad who could also be a precision instrument. The instrument did not retire when the statue arrived.
Six marriages sit in the obituaries like a second billing. Colette Thomas, 1934 to 1942, a son, Noel, who would have his own life in music and pictures. Lilli Palmer, 1943 to 1957, a son, Carey, a novelist; the serious rooms still name Lilli when they want the marriage that looked like a partnership. Kay Kendall, 1957 to 1959: he married her knowing she was dying of leukemia, and she died at thirty-two without the diagnosis having been made her daily sentence. Rachel Roberts, 1962 to 1971, a gifted, stormy actress; the marriage ended, and she died by suicide in 1980. Elizabeth Rees-Williams, 1971 to 1975. Mercia Tinker, from 1978 until his death, the last household. The cad was not only a costume. The file has to hold the Oscar and the cruelty and the Kendall marriage that was also a vigil. None of those sentences cancels the others.
Good actors will always make you listen. But if they’re terribly bad, it’s better not to listen.Rex Harrison
The turn is Higgins, and the decision to talk on pitch rather than fake a song. A lot of actors in musicals try to become singers. He made the speaking a music. The revivals were a man visiting a part that had already become a climate. He knew it. He did it anyway. The gates wanted Higgins. He had Higgins.
Six things most people never knew
- Huyton is the first room, not a Mayfair invention. Lancashire. Liverpool Rep at sixteen. The disdain is a part he built, not a birthright.
- Blithe Spirit is the British shop before the professor. Coward. Timing. A husband who is a joke and a wound.
- He would not sing Higgins as a tenor. A note and a half. The talk-sing is a refusal that became a method.
- He is Higgins on stage and on film. Andrews was Eliza first. Hepburn was Eliza on screen. He is the constant.
- Six marriages are in the file. The cad was not only a costume. Kay Kendall’s last years were a marriage he entered as a vigil.
- He was knighted in 1989 and died the next year still a working actor. The Circle on Broadway. The last rooms were stages, not a ranch.
The wives and the colleagues have had to share a man who is a professor and a habit. Friends from the West End describe a professional who was first on the verse and last to leave a slight. Noel and Carey have had to share a father the public still addresses as Higgins. The Harrison in a late revival was a man who had already been a climate and was now a clerk of a part. Both are the life.
The later years
He did not become a Hollywood ranch elder. He became an English actor who happened to have an Oscar and a part the tourists still hummed, and he kept taking the work that would have him. In 1974 he published a memoir, Rex, at the nudge of Harold Macmillan and other men who thought the life should be between hard covers. The book is charming and incomplete, as memoirs by charming men often are. The stage was the truer autobiography. Pirandello’s Emperor Henry IV on Broadway in 1973, a madman who may be the only sane person in the room. Rattigan’s In Praise of Love in 1974, opposite Julie Harris, a marriage with a hidden diagnosis — a part that sat close to the Kendall years without announcing itself. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra in 1977. The Kingfisher with Claudette Colbert, a light comedy he could still time in his sleep and refused to sleep through. A 1981 revival of My Fair Lady that was a man visiting his own statue and still hitting the consonants; Nancy Ringham and, on the road, other Elizas walked into a part Andrews and Hepburn had already made civic. Heartbreak House in 1983, Shaw again, Captain Shotover, an old man who is also a weather. Aren’t We All? in 1985, again with Colbert. He was not coasting. He was practicing the same exactness on smaller bills, in rooms that still required the verse to land.
On June 17, 1989, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him. He called it a marvelous moment. He had waited past eighty for a honor the trade had assumed would come sooner. Sir Rex was still a working name. In 1989 he played Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton in London with Edward Fox, a butler who is the only adult on an island. Then Somerset Maugham’s The Circle: a tryout at Duke University, Baltimore, Boston, and, on November 14, 1989, Broadway at the Ambassador, opposite Glynis Johns, Stewart Granger, and Roma Downey. He was eighty-one, thin, precise, still making a room listen. Reviewers who had come for a souvenir found a performance. Pancreatic cancer was found not long after. He left the production in May 1990, three weeks before the end. The play closed when he could not return. The last thing an audience saw him do was Maugham, not Higgins. That is the right last bill.
He died in his sleep on June 2, 1990, at his Manhattan apartment. He was eighty-two. Mercia was the household. The obituaries led with Higgins, as they had to. The better ones remembered Huyton, the RAF, Coward, Landis, Kendall, the note-and-a-half, and a man who had been on a stage almost every year of a sixty-five-year working life. He was cremated. The talk-sing did not go with him. It had already become a method the next musicals could steal without naming the thief. A second book, A Damned Serious Business, came after he was gone — more shop talk than confession. The shop talk is the honest remainder. He had treated acting as a trade: learn the verse, hit the consonant, leave the room. The trade outlived the man.
People who wanted only the statue missed the last decade on purpose. He had given them Higgins twice, in the two rooms that count, and then he had kept showing up for Maugham and Shaw and Coward as if the statue were a job of work and not a retirement plan. That is the honest remainder. The tourists still hum the professor. The file also has an old knight in a Maugham comedy, making a balcony of people listen because the consonants were still in order.
After he was gone
Every Higgins since still pays him a tax. Every actor who speaks on pitch in a musical still owes the refusal. Hepburn and Andrews still arrive in the Eliza sentence. He is the constant in that sentence. Huyton is the first room. The Oscar is the climate. The slight is the file.
He came out of Lancashire, timed a Coward husband, talked a professor into a song, won a statue, married too often, and died in New York still working. If you only remember Higgins, you have the still. If you remember Huyton, the talk-sing, and the six names, you have him.
Portrait: Allan Warren · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons