Rex Harrison was it seems an utter shit.
This whole article is well worth a read because there are too many incidents of utter-shitness to quote, but here’s a flavour:
The second occasion took place a year or so later at another provincial hotel. A permanently sniffing and scowling Harrison was having lunch in the restaurant, and nothing the young waiter did seemed to please his famous guest, who proceeded to shout at and humiliate him from the serving of the entrée to the delivery of the dessert.
Finally, when the lunch was over, the waiter returned to the table and said, ‘Oh, forgive me, sir, but there’s something under your chair’. Harrison, irritated as usual, sprang up to look, whereupon the waiter leaned back on his heels, raised his right fist, rocked forwards and hit the star so hard that he ended up flat on the floor with blood gushing from his mouth.
‘If it’s the last thing I do on Earth,’ he lisped from a horizontal position, ‘I’ll have you fired from this hotel, and any other hotel in the country!’ ‘You can do what you like,’ said the waiter with a shrug. ‘I’m going to enlist in the Army this afternoon, so it won’t do you much good!’
Lilli Palmer, his put-upon wife of the time (the second of six), was there to witness it all. She would later say that it was the best day of her life.
On one such night, an elderly fur-wrapped woman, who had been standing alone in the rain outside the stage door for the best part of an hour, made the mistake of asking Harrison for his autograph. Rex, impatient to rush off to his next row at a restaurant, told her to ‘sod off’ and went to walk past to his smart chauffeur-driven car. This so enraged the woman that she promptly rolled up her programme and hit him with it, not once but repeatedly, hard on the head and shoulders, much to the amusement of his co-star, Stanley Holloway, who had just emerged from inside the theatre. Holloway later declared that it was a rare but welcome case of the ‘fan hitting the shit’.
. Harrison was much the same with his co-stars. His initial reaction to Julie Andrews, who was playing opposite him as Eliza Doolittle, was to bark at their director: ‘If that bitch is still here on Monday, I’m quitting the show!’ He was just as cold and aggressive to Audrey Hepburn (or ‘Bloody Audrey’ as he tended to refer to her) when she replaced Andrews in the movie version of the musical: believing her to have been badly miscast, he proceeded to remind her of his opinion throughout the production (which was more than a little ungracious seeing as he would not have been in the movie himself had Cary Grant not turned down the part).
He eventually tired of residing in Portofino after the complete breakdown of domestic relationships with his Italian staff, clashes with a local Communist mayor, random illegally-rigged road blocks, an act of sabotage to his Jeep and, last but by no means least, a bungled attempt by his disaffected former gardener to shoot him. ‘You’ve no idea,’ his current wife had screamed at him during one of their recent ugly squabbles inside their beautiful villa, ‘how the people hate you! They haaaate you!’ It had taken twenty-five years, but the message finally got through.
