Fatal Charm: The Life of Rex Harrison - Hardcover

Walker, Alexander

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312092849 ISBN 13: 9780312092849

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1993

Synopsis

Charm has always been a dangerous gift. For Rex Harrison - who drove two women to suicide for love of him - it was fatal.
For decades, Rex Harrison was the king of the English stage. My Fair Lady immortalized his persona as the epitomal English gentleman; yet, beneath those easy manners, that cool wit and sophistication, lurked an ego of tyrannical proportions. Always in need of a woman to stand at his side, Harrison married six times; both Carole Landis, a young starlet, and Rachel Roberts, the troubled actress who was his fourth wife, killed themselves. And yet his devotion to his third wife, Kay Kendall, was such that he protected her from knowledge of the tragic illness that would fell her just two years into their marriage.
Drawing on unpublished sources to which he has had sole access, and on conversations with Harrison himself and nearly one hundred of his friends and family, Alexander Walker traces the public and private life of this brilliant actor, from his genteel beginnings in the suburbs of Liverpool through hard times and triumph on the English stage to his arrival in - and eventual retreat from - a Hollywood he found prurient and unkind. And he reveals the dark nostalgia of the actor's last years, when the man who had made famous such British symbols as Henry Higgins and Doctor Dolittle grew embittered as he was denied, almost to the end, the honor he coveted - the title of Sir Rex.
The definitive biography, Alexander Walker's Fatal Charm portrays brilliantly Rex Harrison the greatest high-comedy actor of his generation - and Rex Harrison the man, whose charm was fatal indeed.

About this title

Book Description

The classic biography of Rex Harrison, one of the greatest comedy actors of his generation.

About the Author

Alexander Walker is the author of over twenty books about the cinema and its stars, including bestselling biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Peter Sellers and Audrey Hepburn. He has also written standard works on the coming of the Talkies, a monograph on Stanley Kubrick, and the fullest account to date of the British film industr from 1960 to 1985. He has been the London "Evening Standard's" influential film critic since 1960 and has been named "Critic of the Year" three times in the British Press Awards. A prolific broadcaster on television and radio, he wrote and narrated four series of "Film Star" for the BBC. Alexander Walker was born in Ireland, and educated there, on the Continent and in the United States.

Edition details

• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312092849
• ISBN 13: 9780312092849
• Binding: Hardcover