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Rex Harrison 'treated colleagues like dirt and phoned his lovers too loudly'
Rex Harrison, the actor, ate with his mouth open, treated colleagues 'like dirt' and telephoned his lovers too loudly, his former colleague reveals
He was a heartthrob for a generation of film-lovers, Oscar winner and sometime dashing war hero.
But it appears colleagues of Rex Harrison were less than impressed with his star quality in real life.
Eileen Younghusband, who as a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force officer worked with him during the Second World War, has revealed him to be a cad who treated colleagues “like dirt” and irritated them by eating with his mouth open and using a communal telephone to ring his lovers.
Mrs Younghusband, now 93, said Harrison, star of My Fair Lady, was “quite revolting”, and had continuously rubbed his wartime peers up the wrong way.
Mrs Younghusband, who has written a book about her experiences, said Harrison thought he was “something special”, looking down on colleagues because they “didn’t have anything to do with his film career”.
Eileen Younghusband (Warren Allott)
Speaking at Hay Festival, she said she had met him when he worked as an RAF Officer, while she served in the top-secret filter room plotting enemy aircraft to help thwart Nazi attack.
“He really thought he was somebody special,” she told an audience. “He would often come into the filter room, stand on a balcony and look down.”
She added she would encounter him regularly in the mess, where men and women mingled over breakfast and afternoon tea, and were furnished with a telephone.
“He would be there and he was ringing up his next lover,” she said. “He went through five lovers in the end I think; this one was the second.
"There he was, with all these endearments at the top of his voice. He treated us like dirt, we were nothing. We didn't have anything to do with his film career."
Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison in The Ghost and Mrs Muir (1947) (Alamy)
Harrison also, she said, had low standards of basic decorum.
In her book, One Woman’s War, she explained: “I particularly disliked him because of his table manners.
“He would fill his mouth with toast and marmalade and eat so messily that the soggy bread would ooze out of the side of his mouth. Quite revolting!"
Harrison, the English actor who received Tony and Academy Awards for his work on stage and screen, famously had six wives, and reached the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the RAF during the Second World War.
He was just one of the famous men Mrs Younghusband, who features in the BBC series, Britain’s Greatest Generation, shared her opinion on, also proclaiming Sir Edward Heath, the former Prime Minister, “asexual”.
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (Rex)
When asked about how her own wartime generation compared with today’s, she told an audience "This generation I think are mollycoddled more than we were. Their parents look after them too much.
“We were taught to take decisions and challenges, and get ourselves out of a mess if you get into one."
Despite her important wartime work, her husband and son never learnt of her contribution in their lifetimes, after she signed the Official Secrets Act.
Even after it lifted 30 years later, she said: “We were so busy trying to make a living, it never seemed to come up.”