Rex Harrison A Biography Author:Roy Moseley, Philip Masheter, Martin Masheter This biography is a hypnotic plunge into the heart of a towering egocentrist. Harrison absorbed the rudeness and misogyny of Henry Higgins so completely that it seems all his earlier roles were way stations on the ascent to that summit. Harrison was a smash as Caesar in Cleopatra, giving a marvelously sincere reading of all the best lines in the... more » picture. We recall him fondly as the drumbeating Salvationist in Major Barbara, the brittle hero bedeviled by his wife's ghost in Blithe Spirit, the jealousy-maddened orchestra conductor in Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours, and for the weight he brought to his role as the King in Anna and the King of Siam.
His stage triumphs have included T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, Shaw's Heartbreak House, Chekhov's Platonov and Pirandello's The Emperor Henri IV. This book follows Rex's career both as an actor and wife-chewer. He is a terrible snob, an actor renowned for his rudeness and need for absolute attention on the stage. The authors see Harrison on a par with Gielgud and Olivier, but what Harrison does best, the bravura wit and pouring charm, he does better than anyone else alive.
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor. Harrison began his career on the stage in 1924.« less