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v_yhapter Lleven "You stupid, long-nosed English actor! Kay's next film would not have too big an impact on her career as an actress , but it would change her life. In the light comedy The Constant Husband , Rex Harrison plays a befuddled man who wakes up in a Welsh hotel suffering from amnesia—a doctor takes him back to London, where he slowly discovers he is a cad and a bounder, married to a successful photographer (Kay), a human cannonball (Nicole Maurey), and five other women. He goes on trial and, when all his wives offer to take him back and his own lawyer (Margaret Leighton) falls for him as well, he becomes a media heart-throb. Kay began lunching at the Shepperton Studios cafeteria in the early spring of 1954, as pre-production on the film began: costume fittings, rehearsals, meetings with the cast and crew. It was there that she met for the first time her forty-six-year-old co-star. Actor Rex Harrison—tall, slim and handsome (in a rather equine manner)—had been a star since 1936, when he had his first big hits with the stage show French Without Tears and the film Men Are Not Gods. Born in Huyton in 1908, Harrison was schooled in nearby Liverpool and stormed London as a hopeful actor in 1927. The usual years of struggle ensued: repertory companies, small film roles, bit parts in West End shows. Since then, he had scored in such plays as No Time for Comedy and Design for Living and such films as Major Barbara, Noël Coward s Blithe Spirit, and as the romantically deceased sea captain in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. He became somewhat of a sex symbol—not along the lines of a Clark Gable or Errol Flynn but in a more intellectual and high-toned way. Harrison was one of the slim, dark young men who came of age in British film and theater in the late 1930s: Robert Donat, Stewart Granger, James Mason, David Niven, Michael Redgrave, Laurence Olivier. In the 1940s, these men exemplified the British leading man persona: handsome, upperclass , sexy, with a slightly cynical edge. 7 4 The Brief, Madcap Life of Ka4 Kendall Harrison's private life had hardly held still while his career flourished. He married for the first time in 1934; he and his wife, Collette Thomas, had a son, Noel, the following year. By 1940, this first marriage was beginning to fray around the edges, and Harrison took up with the stunningly beautiful Polish-born actress Lilli Palmer. Making her stage debut in Berlin , Palmer had entered British films by 1935 and was quickly a minor, but rising, star. Like Rex Harrison, Palmer varied her successful film career with stage appearances. By the war years, Palmer was one of the busiest actresses in London. Through the early 1940s, Lilli Palmer lived openly as Rex Harrisons mistress while his long-suffering wife did war work; this scandalous situation would come back to haunt Palmer a decade later. Finally, Collette charged Harrison and Palmer with cohabitation and a divorce ensued. The couple married in 1943, and Harrison's second son, Carey, was born in 1944. The attractive and talented Harrisons went on to co-star onscreen in The Rake's Progress, The Long Dark Hall, and The Four-Poster. By 1948 Harrison was in Hollywood starring in Preston Sturges s delightful dark comedy Unfaithfully Yours. An unhappy title, as it turned out. While in Hollywood, "Sexy Rexy," as the press had dubbed him, began a torrid affair with twenty-nine-year-old blonde bombshell Carole Landis, star of such films as One Million B.C. and Orchestra Wives. Landis had also become somewhat of a heroine by touring the war zones and telling of her exploits in the book and film FourJills in aJeep. Landis—who was still married to her fourth husband—somehow got the notion that Rex Harrison was going to leave his wife and marry her. When she was disabused of this idea, she killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates. Harrison found her body, lying on her bedroom floor, on the afternoon of July 5, 1948 (the two had dined together the night before). Lilli Palmer nobly stood by her husband's side through the inquiries and press assaults, but Harrison's name was ruined in Hollywood; he had killed one of their own. Rumors were spreading that Landis had not been dead yet when Harrison...

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