Why Rex Harrison was a brilliant actor – and a nasty piece of work

“You’ve no idea how the people hate you!” Rex Harrison was told by Rachel Roberts, the fourth of his six wives. I think he had an inkling. A waiter punched his lights out in Nottingham (“the happiest day of my life,” said Lilli Palmer, Sexy Rexy’s second wife); Michael Rudman, a director, pointed out to Rex, “if anyone’s a c--- round here it’s you”; his neighbours in Italy blocked the road, to persuade Rex to move away; his cars were sabotaged in Portofino; staff were always walking out and an ex-butler blasted at him from the bushes with a shotgun.

Nevertheless, the extent of his single-mindedness was breathtaking. Elizabeth Harris, Rex’s fifth wife, could never get over his “total lack of contact with people,” and even my friend, the late Patrick Garland, who directed him in a stage revival of My Fair Lady in the 1980s, was astounded at Rex’s “selfishness, arrogance and unreasonableness”. He called the actress playing Mrs Higgins “a bad-tempered obstinate old Northern Irish b----”. Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews, his illustrious Eliza Doolittles, were “suburban” and falsely refined. Wilfrid Hyde White was “essentially an amateur” and Laurence Olivier, for good measure, was “that b------”. When, on Broadway, Rex’s radio-mike kept picking up Mickey Rooney, who was playing next door, Rex said: “I thought the little s--- had so much energy, he wouldn’t need radio-mikes.” Because he had casting approval, Rex would reject anyone who was any good, believing “audiences were only interested in him”. When an understudy for Eliza went on, she reported to Garland: “He looks at me with such absolute hatred, and with eyes of such cruelty, my hopes and spirits are completely dashed.”

Yet the paradox with this fastidious actor is that if he seemed to be delighting in his own unpleasantness, it’s because out of it he’d created a comic style. The ringing clarity of Rex’s enunciation was always ironic, derisive, giving a sense of impatience and rebuke. On stage and screen, he was light, crisp, detached, cruel – and mesmerising. Donald Sinclair, the pompous and eccentric vet upon whom James Herriot based Siegfried Farnon, always disliked being impersonated by Robert Hardy. Asked to name the actor he’d prefer to see in the role, Sinclair said: “Oh, Rex Harrison. Someone with manners.” Allowing for the incongruous image of Rex stomping up a muddy field in Yorkshire, this makes sense. For Rex created a high comedy of fine manners, which was never mannered, camp, as Hardy was. He was his own confident invention, conscious of his mellifluous cascading vocal delivery, his behaviour and personality as cultivated as a cucumber in a greenhouse. 

Dressed up in togas in the 1960s romp Cleopatra, opposite Elizabeth Taylor, for example, he might still be acting in Blithe Spirit, snapping at Elvira. “Oh there you are!” he says, faintly unimpressed, as Taylor is unrolled with great ceremony from a carpet. Despite the epic’s depiction of politics, power, civil wars in Egypt and Rome, and what-have-you, Rex’s Caesar can’t really be bothered. When the Library of Alexandria is burnt to the ground his comment is: “So I’ve been told. I’m extremely sorry.” Night Train to Munich, Anna and the King of Siam, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Unfaithfully Yours, The Honey Pot, Doctor Dolittle, and his Oscar-winning turn in My Fair Lady (“the biggest success of my career”) – the key to a Rex performance was his scorn, which sweeps audiences up because he always had authority, and masculinity. He never backs down. Even when he played a homosexual, in the underrated Staircase, opposite Richard Burton, he still came across as himself – and in interviews spoke about it as if he didn’t know the true nature of the role. “It’s about two men living together, absolutely no servants, so they can’t give dinner parties.” 

Though, at a pinch, George Sanders and Dennis Price were similar, in their playing of brittle cads and gentleman fops and flops, they lacked, I think, Rex’s knife’s edge, his glint. He had an anger that propelled him – had propelled him out of Liverpool, where he was born in 1908 in modest circumstances as Reginald Carey Harrison. In later life, only Terry-Thomas dared call him, pointedly, Reggie. Noël Coward, too, saw through the aristocratic pretences. Were it not for acting, Coward told Rex cattily, “you’d be selling second-hand cars in Park Lane.” Elizabeth Harris, the daughter of Lord Ogmore, was increasingly unamused by her husband’s “stifling grandiose moods”.

The manufactured charm is what was important, however; the prestige and polish. Rex had complete control of it. He never strained for his effects. You can always taste the champagne. Look at his rendition of I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face, where Higgins (whom he plays like Sherlock Holmes) realises he has fallen in love with Eliza and is coping with his own reluctance. The actor is completely absorbed in the reality of the moment, the artfulness of his achievement quite beautifully concealed.

Yet in real life there was less delicacy and urbanity, only bleak farce. When Rex’s valet was dispatched to fetch his hats, and was stabbed in the street, Rex said: “Now I suppose I’ll never get my hats.” Continuing with headgear, he expected customs officials and policemen to doff their caps, and complained to their governments. When he received his knighthood, he was cross the Queen didn’t know who he was and told her she was “badly briefed”. One area of protocol where Rex genuinely hadn’t a clue was with wine. He was known to send back the wine in his own house: “It’s all right on the nose, but I feel a little too much sun was on it in September.” Could he conceivably have been taking the p---?

The biggest unanswered question, though, remains over the Carole Landis business, and whether Rex was a murderer. Landis, with whom he’d been cheating when married to Lilli, “accidentally” took an overdose and died in 1948. Rex had been with her that night, found her body in the bathroom, but waited hours before calling an ambulance. He destroyed a suicide note, gave perjured evidence at the perfunctory inquest, and later said: “I felt no guilt complex.” Landis’s family still blame him.  There was to be further tragedy, in 1959, with the early death from leukaemia of Kay Kendall, his third wife. Rex never told her she was ill.

Next was Roberts, who despite her vivacity never got through to him. She was fatally drawn to the dash Rex cut, to the Hollywood world Rex represented, but the chill with which Rex surrounded himself could never be warmed up, so she drank herself silly. “I lived entirely through him,” she confessed, before killing herself in Los Angeles, by swallowing bleach, on November 26 1980 – the very night Rex opened there, in the My Fair Lady tour. “I still love my special, dynamic, silly, crusty, unbearable Rex,” she’d said five years earlier. Sir Rex died peacefully in bed in 1990, his final flourish being to tell his two sons, Noel and Carey, how much he couldn’t stand them.