Carey Harrison, son of Rex, offbeat writer of avant-garde plays and champion goat breeder

Yahoo

05-02-2025

Carey Harrison, who has died aged 80, was the son of the actor Sir Rex Harrison and made his own mark on stage and screen as a playwright; he was also an undercover anti-apartheid activist and champion goat breeder.
A Daily Telegraph interviewer in 1990 found Harrison 'tall, bearded and attractive in a rather rumpled way', and recognisable as the son of Sir Rex by 'the familiar crinkle around the grey eyes' and his 'palpably charming, slightly hesitant manner'. He ploughed an artistic furrow very different from that of his matinée idol father, however.
Whereas his half-brother Noel Harrison made use of their father's contacts to pursue a career as a singer and television actor, Carey puzzled his family – 'they felt I was an alien in their midst' – by becoming an avant-garde dramatist.
'I grew up with extraordinary people around our dinner table: Noël Coward (who told me I was the reincarnated version of himself), Laurence Olivier, Peter Ustinov and John Gielgud,' he told the Telegraph in 2013. 'They were very sweet to me, but at the same time I think they put me off the pursuit of fame because it never seemed to make them happy.'
His first play, an offbeat literary comedy called Dante Kaputt!, was staged at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, in 1966. Among more than 40 subsequent stage plays were Twenty-Six Efforts at Pornography (1968), Madcap (a Pirandello adaptation, 1976) and Midget in a Catsuit Reciting Spinoza (2011); many were premiered at the Byrdcliffe Theatre, an arts venue in Woodstock, New York.
To subsidise his theatrical work he wrote episodes of popular television series such as Take Three Girls, Nanny, By the Sword Divided and the 1990s reboot of Doctor Finlay. His outstanding TV venture was the BBC's six-hour biographical mini-series Freud (1984), starring David Suchet; Harrison subsequently turned his script into a novel.
He also wrote dozens of radio plays, including Harrison's Bigwigs (1995), a series of portraits of 17th-century notables, with a cast including Gielgud and the author himself. In 2005 the Telegraph's radio critic Gillian Reynolds named Hitler in Therapy, Harrison's play for the World Service, as 'the best listening experience of the year'.
He was born Rex Carey Alfred Harrison, in London, on February 19 1944. His mother was the German film star Lilli Palmer, the second of Sir Rex Harrison's six wives. Rex (né Reginald Carey) Harrison did not find his newborn son prepossessing, declaring on first sight: 'Darling, he's ours and we love him, but don't let's show him to anyone.'
After the war Carey lived with his parents in Hollywood and later in New York, in a grand house with a pool; Esther Williams taught him to swim. Lilli Palmer told an interviewer in 1951 that she had promised him 'a wonderful childhood … in return [for] complete obedience' with the result that 'at seven, Carey's a highly civilised little human being'. With his parents often away working, however, he was essentially raised by governesses.
He was educated at the Lycée Français in New York before being sent back to England to board at Sunningdale and Harrow, spending alternate holidays with his mother and father after they divorced in 1957.
He went on to read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he met his lifelong friend Eric Idle, whose son Carey was named in his honour. In his memoirs, Idle recalled Harrison as 'a polymath' in their student days: 'I watched him on the train home [from a trip to the Dordogne] carry on four simultaneous conversations – with a Frenchwoman in French, an Italian businessman in Italian, a German traveller in German, and me in demotic English – in his deeply rich Harrovian voice.'
Harrison trained as a theatre director in Leicester, where his early plays were staged, and went on to work for the National Theatre under Laurence Olivier. His first television play, In a Cottage Hospital, was broadcast by ABC in 1969.
Active in Left-wing causes, in 1972 he was recruited by exiled ANC members to join a secret network nicknamed the London Recruits. Harrison and his wife, the writer Mary Chamberlain, arrived in Cape Town in the guise of migrants in search of a new life; in fact their aim was to distribute subversive literature, secreted inside false bottoms in their luggage.
Aware that the mission was dangerous – they were warned, Mary Chamberlain recalled, that 'inciting resistance by force would carry a hefty sentence, preceded undoubtedly by torture' – they spent several months in Cape Town, travelling all over the city in order to purchase some 7,000 stamps, in small batches to avoid suspicion.
They then posted the 7,000 books they had smuggled – Harrison driving around Cape Town, his wife dashing out of the car to place the parcels in postboxes a few at a time – to selected addresses. By the time they returned to Britain they had done much to demonstrate to journalists and other professionals that the ANC, despite its leaders having been imprisoned or driven abroad, was still a going concern.
Harrison's politics were a puzzle to his vehemently Right-wing father, and they never really connected. 'I had a great fondness and admiration for him, but was wary of giving too much of myself to him, because he didn't have much time for his children,' he recalled after Sir Rex's death in 1990.
For several years Harrison lived in East Anglia while lecturing at the University of Essex and raising goats. 'I was a sort of hippy, except that in my half-German soul there's an organised and regimented competitive side. That led to me showing my goats and winning rosettes: something no good hippy would allow himself to do.' For several years he was editor of the British Goat Society Year Book.
In 1990 he decided to 'explore the German part of me' by means of Richard's Feet, a 650-page novel about an English lawyer who fakes his death and sets up as a pornographer in postwar Hamburg. Described by the Telegraph's Patrick Skene Catling as a 'brilliant, appalling, gigantic novel', it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and followed by three vivid sequels, all attempting to get to the bottom of how Germany had produced 'the best philosophers, the best music, [and] also … the death camps'.
For the last 25 years of his life Harrison found a berth as Professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. As well as staging his plays in New York he began to act in them, including the role of his own father in his 2013 drama Rex and Rex.
Twice divorced, Carey Harrison is survived by his third wife, Claire Lambe, whom he married in 1992, and by three daughters and a son.
Carey Harrison, born February 19 1944, died January 22 2025
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