Three British greats....

[julian_craster]

Class of 1908: Michael Redgrave in Kipps (1941); and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964); John Mills in Ice Cold in Alex (1958)

John Mills, Michael Redgrave and Rex Harrison: Britannia ruled the screens

Daily Telegraph

11/02/2008





As John Mills, Michael Redgrave and Rex Harrison celebrate their centenaries, David Gritten praises three distinctive actors who were proud to be British

The coming few weeks will mark the centenaries of Michael Redgrave, John Mills and Rex Harrison - three towering British film actors who made an indelible impression on audiences in the post-war era and beyond.



Watching their best work now, it is striking how much our film industry has changed, and how it was possible for accomplished actors to carve out long-term careers in British roles.



Redgrave and Mills, especially, succeeded in conveying the qualities we British prided in ourselves in the 1950s; retrospectively, they defined the virtues that helped this country through the dark years of wartime. No British actor today is remotely as emblematic of our national character.



As for Harrison, he laboured through a series of largely humdrum roles in his early career, finally becoming a huge international star in middle age. Again, none of our current crop of actors can hold a candle to stardom of that magnitude.

Technically, Redgrave (born March 20, 1908) was the most accomplished - an outstanding stage actor who also thrived on the big screen. His film debut, in 1938, was in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (happily re-released recently), as an easy-going, seemingly rather vacant young man, who turns out to be sharper than he seems.





It's a telling fact. Redgrave was brilliant at portraying concealment and withholding - in films as varied as The Browning Version (1951), as an emotionally repressed schoolmaster; The Dam Busters (1955), a film suffused with understated heroism, as Dr Barnes Wallis, inventor of the "bouncing bomb"; and The Captive Heart (1946), as a Czech on the run from the Nazis who assumes the identity of a British officer in a German PoW camp.

The thought has long occurred that had he been born later, Redgrave would have made a perfect hero in John le Carré's spy stories.

His education (private school, then Cambridge) gave him a patrician air - ideal for the stoic dignity and stiff upper-lip demeanour that informed British war films of the 1940s and 1950s.

If Redgrave was clearly officer class, then Mills, physically at least, was one of nature's NCOs. Redgrave was greatly admired by critics and his acting peers, but it was Mills (born February 22, 1908) who captured the cinema-going public's affections.

It's easy to see why. He excelled as the common man who finds reserves of heroism in extreme situations. And by God, he was British: as the great polar explorer in Scott of the Antarctic (1948), a prisoner-of-war in The Colditz Story (1955), and a corporal nicknamed "Tubby" in Dunkirk (1958), who takes charge of his men when their officer is killed.

Mills already stood for a certain brand of Britishness before the war was over, thanks to his role as one of a group of stranded sailors in Noël Coward's patriotic In Which We Serve (1942). He personified what we wished to regard as our national attributes in that war: decent, ordinary, cheerful and mild-mannered, but resolute and brave in a crunch.

Yet there was another reason he was so beloved. By 1939, after his appearance in Goodbye, Mr Chips, Hollywood studios were wooing him as a potential contract player. But Mills remained rooted in Britain, serving our film industry as a reliable leading man.

He was often compared favourably with the likes of Laurence Olivier, who was ready to dash off to the glamour and money of Hollywood at the drop of a hat. In an acting career spanning almost 70 years, he usually seemed quintessentially English.



Redgrave and Mills, both of whom married actresses (Rachel Kempson and Mary Hayley Bell respectively) and became patriarchs of acting families, grew to typify a certain British film acting style - clipped, reserved, emotions firmly reined in.

The Dunkirk spirit, if you will. It was adopted by a generation of slightly younger actors - Kenneth More, Richard Todd, Trevor Howard - all of whom contributed to a post-war idea of quiet heroism among British leading men.

This style was being parodied long ago, and seemed to have fallen out of favour for good. But there are signs that it may yet enjoy a renaissance.

Consider James McAvoy's recent performance as the wronged suitor Robbie in Atonement: one could easily imagine a young Redgrave or Mills playing the role. McAvoy's scenes with Keira Knightley vividly recall Trevor Howard's work with Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945), a film for which Atonement director Joe Wright has stated his profound admiration.

Rex Harrison (born March 5, 1908) is a different animal altogether; not for him the reserve and restraint of Redgrave or Mills. But he was the most famous of them all.

This was not just for his acting or singing. Harrison ("Sexy Rexy" to the press) was married six times, became a tax exile for a spell - and as My Fair Lady's lyricist Alan Jay Lerner noted: "He has, shall we say, a unique approach to human relations." That meant he could be a tyrant, and many of his fellow actors (notably his My Fair Lady co-star Stanley Holloway) openly loathed him.

Yet can we honestly imagine anyone else as the overbearing Henry Higgins? Harrison, with his brusque manner and curious habit of talking his way through songs, is irreplaceable.

Post-war, his film prospects looked bright, both in Britain, where he starred for David Lean in Coward's Blithe Spirit, and in America, partnering Irene Dunne in Anna and the King of Siam (1946). But much of his subsequent work was mundane.

He seized the Higgins role with gusto, correctly sensing a last big chance. By the time My Fair Lady opened on Broadway, he was 48; when it became a global film hit he was 56, and already playing the parent of teen stars such as Sandra Dee in The Reluctant Debutante (1959).



But Higgins did the trick for him, and he reinforced it with a not entirely dissimilar performance, chewing the scenery as the animals' friend Doctor Dolittle (1967).

His best-known 1960s work seems more mannered and dated than Mills's and Redgrave's in the previous decade. Yet today, when our brightest young actors readily master American accents to advance their careers, this trio of centenarians have one thing in common: there's never any question where they came from.

[dremble wedge]

Redgrave and Mills are certainly greats but I've never been convinced by Harrison.

[Dave Rattigan]

name='dremble wedge']Redgrave and Mills are certainly greats but I've never been convinced by Harrison.

Keep thy foul heresies to thyself.

[Harleybloke]

No Alistair Sim? Shameful!

[ShirlGirl]

name='dremble wedge']Redgrave and Mills are certainly greats but I've never been convinced by Harrison.

That's what I was thinking!

[ShirlGirl]

name='Harleybloke']No Alistair Sim? Shameful!

That's what I was thinking!

[ShirlGirl]

As John Mills, Michael Redgrave and Rex Harrison celebrate their centenaries,

What an odd thing to say! Should we be expecting them to return for the occasion?

[penfold]

name='dremble wedge']Redgrave and Mills are certainly greats but I've never been convinced by Harrison.

Agree entirely. Harrison was fine playing shallow superficial characters, but unconvincing otherwise. He simply didn't have the range or depth of Mills or Redgrave...they were great actors...he was a star. I also disagree with his appraisal of current actors...Tony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, Day Lewis all hold Hollywood in thrall and are, IMHO, at a similar level to the great actors of the thirties and forties...then again, the writer says what I thought when I saw McAvoy in Atonement....he could be anything he wants to be.

[batman]

name='penfold']Agree entirely. Harrison was fine playing shallow superficial characters.

Having just read the biography of Harrison called 'Fatal Charm', in those roles he was more or less playing himself. When a theatre goer thumped him for refusing an autograph during the London stage run of 'My Fair Lady', Stanley Holloway (who loathed him) said 'That's the first time I've seen the fan hit the shit'.

[Lady Lois]

name='batman']Having just read the biography of Harrison called 'Fatal Charm', in those roles he was more or less playing himself. When a thumped him for refusing an autograph during the London stage run of 'My Fair Lady', Stanley Holloway (who loathed him) said 'That's the first time I've seen the fan hit the shit'.

Brilliant! I'm afraid I do not rate Rex either... he was simply dreadful in "Major Barbara"

[Windthrop]

name='batman']Having just read the biography of Harrison called 'Fatal Charm', in those roles he was more or less playing himself. When a theatre goer thumped him for refusing an autograph during the London stage run of 'My Fair Lady', Stanley Holloway (who loathed him) said 'That's the first time I've seen the fan hit the shit'.

Harrison had a very narrow range and if My Fair Lady hadn't happened IMHO he would have been touring the provinces in his later years and not gracing Broadway and the West end. The bios where there are positive references to him are Richard Fleisher and George MacDonald Fraser both of whom say positve things about him.

[yorkist]

Can some one confirm something I was told years ago about Rex Harrison.

That he had only ONE EYE,according to what I was told he lost the sight in one eye due to a childhood accident,is this true?.





Yorkist

[batman]

name='yorkist']Can some one confirm something I was told years ago about Rex Harrison.

That he had only ONE EYE,according to what I was told he lost the sight in one eye due to a childhood accident,is this true?.





Yorkist

It wasn't mentioned in the biography I read.

[Windthrop]

name='yorkist']Can some one confirm something I was told years ago about Rex Harrison.

That he had only ONE EYE,according to what I was told he lost the sight in one eye due to a childhood accident,is this true?.





Yorkist

He did have one eye - when I saw him The Admirable Crichton nearly 20 years ago, his other eye was going and you could see that the rest of the cast were very careful not to get in his way or trip him up.

[dremble wedge]

There's definitely only one i in Rex Harrison.

[batman]

I am confused .... when did he lose the eye? I just had a quick shufti through my book and there is no mention of him losing an eye, in fact there is a paragraph eulogising about the 'imperiousness' of his eyes!

[Windthrop]

name='batman']I am confused .... when did he lose the eye? I just had a quick shufti through my book and there is no mention of him losing an eye, in fact there is a paragraph eulogising aboutthe 'imperiousness' of his eyes!

He had a glass eye - was only publicly revealed after his death. Leo McKern had one as well - though played games with his by shocking people taking it out and putting it on plates before the waitress collected them

[batman]

name='Windthrop']He had a glass eye - was only publicly revealed after his death.

I just wondered how he lost it ... 'Fatal Charm' was published in 1992, did the eye story not emerge till after then?

[Windthrop]

name='batman']I just wondered how he lost it ... 'Fatal Charm' was published in 1992, did the eye story not emerge till after then?

That might explain it - there have been bios since his death, it isn't that big a deal really and the biographers have plenty to work on with suicides, marriages, arrogance, and alienation from his own children.

[batman]

name='Windthrop']That might explain it - there have been bios since his death, it isn't that big a deal really and the biographers have plenty to work on with suicides, marriages, arrogance, and alienation from his own children.

It was really busy that eye!