Chat with Rex Harrison

Actor, Wit, and Stage Icon

About Rex Harrison

In 1956, during a blisteringly hot Broadway matinee of My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison abandoned the score mid-performance—not out of error, but invention—improvising rhythmic, half-spoken lyrics that startled audiences into rapt silence. That moment crystallized his revolutionary approach to musical theatre: rejecting bel canto for conversational precision, treating song as heightened speech. He didn’t sing Eliza’s transformation—he orchestrated it through vocal texture, timing, and a razor-edged irony that made Professor Higgins both monstrous and magnetic. His Shakespearean training at the Old Vic sharpened his command of iambic pentameter, yet he wielded it like a scalpel, not a banner. Unlike contemporaries who leaned on vocal power, Harrison weaponized pause, pitch, and diction—evident in his Oscar-winning turn in Camelot, where Lancelot’s self-loathing emerges not in grand soliloquies but in clipped, brittle asides. He redefined leading manhood for the postwar stage: intellectually restless, morally ambiguous, and utterly uninterested in likability.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Rex Harrison:

  • “How did you develop Higgins’ speaking-singing style for My Fair Lady?”
  • “What was it like working with Julie Andrews before she became famous?”
  • “Did your Old Vic Shakespeare training influence how you played Lancelot?”
  • “Why did you refuse to record the My Fair Lady soundtrack with the original cast?”

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Rex Harrison win the Oscar for My Fair Lady instead of the film's lead actress?
Harrison won Best Actor in 1965 for his portrayal of Henry Higgins, while Audrey Hepburn—who played Eliza—was famously denied a nomination. The Academy’s decision reflected his unprecedented vocal innovation: he performed all songs in a rhythmically precise, semi-spoken baritone that redefined musical acting. Critics noted his performance carried the film’s thematic weight—Higgins’ emotional arc and linguistic obsession drove the narrative far more than Eliza’s transformation. Additionally, Hepburn’s singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon, undermining her eligibility under Academy rules at the time.
What was Rex Harrison’s relationship with George Bernard Shaw’s estate regarding Pygmalion?
Shaw vehemently opposed any adaptation of Pygmalion into a musical, calling it 'a vulgar travesty.' After Shaw’s death in 1950, his estate granted conditional rights to Alan Jay Lerner only after demanding Higgins remain unsentimental and Eliza’s independence intact. Harrison insisted on preserving Shaw’s ending—Eliza leaves Higgins—and refused reshoots that implied reconciliation. His fidelity to Shaw’s textual and philosophical rigor earned rare praise from the playwright’s literary executors.
Did Rex Harrison ever perform Shakespeare on screen with full text, or did he always adapt?
He delivered the only commercially released, fully uncut Shakespearean performance of his career in the 1972 BBC Television Shakespeare production of Antony and Cleopatra—filmed live on studio sets with original pronunciation coaching. Unlike his Hollywood roles, which trimmed verse for pacing, this version preserved every line and employed iambic variation as dramatic punctuation. Critics noted how his Antony used rhetorical collapse—breaking meter deliberately—to signal psychological unraveling, a technique he’d refined over decades at the Old Vic.
How did Rex Harrison’s military service in WWII shape his stage persona?
Commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1940, Harrison served in North Africa and Italy, where he organized morale-boosting performances for troops using minimal props and improvised scripts. This forged his signature economy of gesture and reliance on vocal nuance over spectacle. He later credited wartime censorship—where double entendres had to bypass military censors—with refining his wit: 'You learned to say three things at once, none of them printable, all of them understood.' That layered irony became central to Higgins and Lancelot.
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