For years it was said that Harrison’s ignoring of Shakespeare cost him his knighthood. (Obstinately staying alive, he finally became Sir Rex last year.) Untrained in a formal sense, Harrison was the last of England’s gentleman actors, elegant figures who approached acting much as they did playing cricket or taking tea. As an apprentice with the Liverpool Repertory, Rex cared less for studying his craft than for dancing the Charleston with the local flappers. He became a star in the dinner-jacketed world of Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward. (Just before his death he was playing in a Broadway revival of Somerset Maugham’s 1921 “The Circle.”)
Well, it was always in his face, wasn’t it? The crinkly, cynical eyes, the faintly mocking smile. He was a man of the world, he was Sexy Rexy, who had six wives including the brilliant Lilli Palmer, the luminous Kay Kendall, the self-destructive Rachel Roberts. It was his worldliness that got him the part of Henry Higgins in the 1964 movie of “My Fair Lady.” Hollywood, with its transcendental idiocy, was bypassing Harrison, until with impudent shrewdness he sent director George Cukor two playful nude photographs of himself. He got the part and of course won the Academy Award. Was he a lightweight? Yes, but only if you understand how this gentleman actor expressed something that has recently, and unforgettably, been defined as the lightness of being.
