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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Drawing on unpublished sources to which he has had sole access, and on conversations with Harrison himself and nearly one hundred of his friends and family, Alexander Walker traces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.
