
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 8, 1990                   TAG: 9006080723
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FOR REX HARRISON, STARDOM CAME LATE

REX HARRISON went on the stage at 16, and when he died last week at 82, he had done little else but act ever since. But though he became an international star of theater and movies in the middle decades of his life, he was not always - like his other famous British contemporaries Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson - a major star whose name automatically made his vehicles box-office successes.

So great was the fame Harrison won in his late 40s as Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady," the musical version of Shaw's "Pygmalion," that many do not realize, or perhaps have forgotten, that he rose to that sort of stardom only slowly - or that in American films, until "My Fair Lady," he was considered box-office poison.

The reasons for that reputation are not easy to isolate. But then the nature of Harrison's gifts and on-stage persona is not easy to define either.

Despite years of repertory apprenticeship he remained essentially a player of comic parts, particularly in drawing-room stage and screen comedies of a sort not invariably popular with American audiences. Americans always liked "screwball" and slapstick comedy but may not have understood, as British audiences did automatically, the infinite class distinctions that lie at the heart of the plays of such writers as Coward, Lonsdale and Maugham.

It is revealing, in fact, that until a few weeks before his death, Harrison was enjoying yet another New York success in Maugham's "The Circle." It is a dated example of drawing-room comedy that probably would never have been revived but for the presence of Harrison, Glynis Johns and Stewart Granger, for all of whom it was more nearly a personal than a professional triumph.

The point to make, probably, is that - though this is said as description, not criticism - Harrison's range was limited.

He shone in Coward and Maugham, as well as in plays and movies derived from them. He was especially associated with Shaw. Shaw's confident wisdom - embodied in parts combining charm, gab and irascibility - Harrison instinctively projected with immense effectiveness. Thus he was not only a great Henry Higgins, with which everyone identifies him, but also a great Captain Shotover in "Heartbreak House," not to mention his memorable performance, before World War II, in "Major Barbara."

He always moved easily from stage to screen, both in Britain and in Hollywood, where he went in 1946 to play opposite Irene Dunne in the first - as it remains the best - version of "Anna and the King of Siam."

Harrison was odd for American audiences used to Clark Gable and Robert Taylor: lanky, gangly, with long, sunken cheekbones, slanted eyes and a voice like chalk scraping a blackboard. Many did not know quite what to think of him.

Hollywood studios did not know quite what to do with him, either. Though they gamely starred him in a variety of pictures, the only one that seemed to bring out the Harrison we remember from his later stardom was Preston Sturges' "Unfaithfully Yours" - which was a flop. Walter Winchell dubbed him "Sexy Rexy," but American moviegoers seemed not to agree.

Harrison returned to the stage, lending luster to many parts, and went on doing movies of no great distinction. But then, in 1956, came "My Fair Lady" and his fame was made. He did it in London and on Broadway for long runs, did the movie in 1964, and was Higgins again in a 1981 revival.

Almost every movie role he was given thereafter, most of them parts he walked through as if still playing Higgins about to burst into bad-tempered patter, was a variation on that memorable original. On the stage he sought greater variety, and projected his unusual personality into a wider range of vehicles.

But like many another, he was trapped by the part he had done so superbly and rarely was able to escape it, whether through the limitations of his gifts or his own willingness to stick with what he knew only he could have said.

by CNB