Name 10 Facts About This Actor

[Peebs]

9.   Said "I made up my mind years ago that the best parts went to the villain.  I was determined to corner that bad man's market."

[nakano]

10  Got along well with American actors Robert Mitchum, Edward G. Robinson and Alan Ladd. The feeling was mutual.And he wore a full hairpiece from the mid 1950s onwards in his films.He had a great hairdresser i'am sure..

[Terrence1]

Nakano, we need another name, please.

[nakano]

Rex Harrison

[Peebs]

1.  Harrison won two Tony awards for Best Actor :  My Fair Lady and Anne of a Thousand Days.   He won an Oscar (My Fair Lady) and a Tony for the same role.

[nakano]

2.He was a lifelong friend of Greta Garbo.They lived in the same building in NYC.

[Peebs]

3.  Was married five times including to actresses Lily Palmer, Kay Kendall, and Rachel Roberts.  He had an affair with Carole Landis while married to Palmer.  Landis later committed suicide reportedly because Harrison broke off their affair.  

[nakano]

4 .Harrison once observed that stars appeared to be the same people on screen and off. It wasn't acting. Cary Grant was Cary Grant. Gary Cooper was Gary Cooper.

Rex Harrison was Rex Harrison?

"I would think so," he allows. But "I don't even really agree with that now. I don't know what I was at that point, because unless you're a character actor essentially you do use your own elements in acting. I think I was talking rubbish."

He was quite rambunctious in his younger days.

[Peebs]

5.  Almost blind in one eye after a bout of childhood measles

[nakano]

6 .

Claudette Colbert and Harrison appeared together on Broadway in 1978 in a revival of "The Kingfisher." They are social friends as well as costars. Yes, she says, he can be difficult.

"He's very impatient. With everybody," she says wearily. "He likes things his own way, and he's rather difficult during rehearsals."Still, she says, "he's a wonderful actor and a great comedian." Mercia Tinker was his sixth wife. His first was Marjorie Thomas. He left her for actress Lilli Palmer whom he left for actress Kay Kendall who died of leukemia two years later. (Harrison kept the illness secret from her.) Then he married actress Rachel Roberts and he left her for Elizabeth Harris (former wife of Richard Harris).

[Terrence1]

7.)  He was given the nickname "Sexy Rexy"  by Hedda Hopper.

[nakano]

45 minutes ago, Terrence1 said:

7.)  He was given the nickname "Sexy Rexy"  by Hedda Hopper.

8 Sexy Rexy ("Walter Winchell started that, much to my annoyance") .He loathed Hedda Hopper & Louella Parsons."They were extremely impolite to me," he recalls. "If they'd been polite I would have liked them. They had a devilish power. It was ridiculous. People were actually frightened of them! I didn't give a damn. I hated them. I hated them for the way they treated other people."

[Peebs]

9.  When accepting the Oscar for playing Henry Higgins he thanked "two fair ladies" Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews.  Andrews had played Eliza Doolittle on stage with Harrison but was passed over for Hepburn in the movie version.  

[nakano]

10 .He was tough,impatient with fans:"I'm totally antisocial. I don't like going out. I lead a very private life and have my set of friends. I'm not part of celebrity time in any way."As for the idea of celebrity, Harrison says he can do without it, but "You get certain perks." His, for example, is a limo.  "And if you're clever you can make a lot of money." But fame "is very irritating, as a matter of fact, because you get stopped in the street. People come up to you just as you have a large piece of food on your fork about to enter your mouth. They want to say hello or something''After a stage performance of "My Fair Lady," it was late, cold and pouring rain and an old woman was standing alone outside the stage door. As Rex emerged, she asked him for his autograph. Rex told her abruptly to "Sod off"; the old woman was so enraged that she rolled up her program and struck him with it. Harrison's co-star Stanley Holloway, who had followed Rex out in time to see this, commented sarcastically that, for the first time in theater history, "The fan has hit the sh*t!".

 

[nakano]

next Stewart Granger

[Peebs]

1.  Born James Lablanche Stewart.  Changed his name to avoid being confused with that other James Stewart

[nakano]

2. In his book Sparks Fly Upwards,he mentions his affair with Hedy Lamarr in his early days,if i remember well she insisted he did not mess with her hair in bed, as she was going to be on the set later...he wrote in his book  Deborah Kerr  had approached him romantically in the back of his chauffeur-driven car at the time he was making Caesar and Cleopatra.Although at the time he was married to Elspeth March, he states that he and Kerr went on to have an affair. When asked about this revelation, Kerr's response was "What a gallant man he is."^[

[Peebs]

3.  Married three times including to Jean Simmons

[Swithin]

4. Appeared in three films with Deborah Kerr: King Solomon's Mines, The Prisoner of Zenda, and Young Bess; as well as Jungle Safari, a documentary about the making of King Solomon's Mines.

[nakano]

5-'' I haven't aged into a character actor. I'm an old leading man.''He was mistakenly diagnosed with lung cancer in 1980 and had part of his lung and a rib removed, only to find he really had tuberculosis.

[Terrence1]

6.)  One of his wives was  Caroline Lecerf, a 22-year-old Miss Belgium.

[nakano]

7- Spencer Tracy suggested  to the director George Cukor that Granger would be perfect as Norman Maine in A Star is Born after the first choice, Cary Grant, had turned it down. Granger & James Mason were the UK new big actors for Hollywood.Both were working at the Gainsborough Films in the UK.

Though James  Mason was the finer actor, Granger achieved greater popularity in the Hollywood cinema, and it is ironic that Mason's finest role there, as Norman Maine in A Star is Born (1954), went to him only after Granger turned it down. It is to be regretted that Granger's enormous ego (to which he freely confessed) did not allow him to accept the role or the character roles later in his career that might have sustained and enhanced his reputation,he turned down the role of Messala in Ben Hur rather than be billed below Charlton Heston. Although 43 years old, he refused to see himself in character parts.

[Peebs]

8. Took lessons from a retired Olympic fencing champion to prepare for swashbuckling roles in Scaramouche and The Prisoner of Zenda.

[nakano]

9-  Sumptuously produced and directed with visual panache, Scaramouche builds excitingly to its memorable climax, a seven-minute swordfight(with Mel Ferrer) in a theatre taking the protagonists over the boxes, through corridors, down the immense foyer staircase and finally on to the stage where props and curtains are slashed in this great action sequence. Granger is superb in a swashbuckling performance to rank with the best.In 1990 he returned to the theatre, touring England and then making an acclaimed Broadway debut in Somerset Maugham's The Circle with Rex Harrison and Glynis Johns.Rex Harrison's final play.

[Det Jim McLeod]

10. He played Sherlock Holmes in the TV movie version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

next- Robert Young