Never an actor of hidden profundities, Rex Harrison's natural
environment was theatrical light comedy in which elegance was preferred
to depth, and urbanity to rough edges. Though, in keeping with the mood
of the late 1930s, he plays an idealistic reporter in Victor
Saville and Ian Dalrymple's
Storm in a Teacup
(1937) and appears in King Vidor's socially conscious The
Citadel (1938), he seems more at home in Herbert
Wilcox's I Live in Grosvenor Square, David
Lean's Blithe
Spirit, or Sidney Gilliat's
The Rake's Progress (all 1945).
His career on stage was as successful as his career in film, and the
two came together in his performance as Professor Higgins in My Fair
Lady on Broadway (1956-8) and in George Cukor's film adaptation (1964),
for which he won an Oscar. It was one of those parts in which character
and actor come to define each other, and though Harrison continued to
give good performances (in, for example, The
Yellow Rolls-Royce, 1964; and in The
Agony and the Ecstasy, 1965, Doctor Dolittle, 1967, and Staircase,
1969), they tended to live under the shadow of Henry Higgins.
