NC’s Treasure – Rosemary Harris | By Keith Martin

“A True National Treasure” North Carolina’s Rosemary Harris By Keith T. Martin

This writer recently had the privilege of facilitating a keynote address with audition with Sir Kenneth Barnes, the RADA President. “I got in… but I sort of Harris is, to use a phrase that is no longer in fashion, a true leading lady. That doesn’t celebrated theatre actress Rosemary Harris for the Southeastern Theatre Conference on the occasion of her presentation with their 2021 Distinguished Career Award. In a wide-ranging interview for Southern Theatre, Harris was exuberant when detailing her early years and the path that led to her stage, film, and television acting career, which has been honored with a long list of awards, including two Tony Awards, five Drama Desk Awards, an Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award. At 94 years young, Harris was born a few months after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic in 1927. Always gracious, she replied to that fact with her usual wit and charm: “Oscar Wilde said, ‘A woman who tells her age will tell anything!’”

From Europe to Asia to America

The noted British actress was born in the parish of Ashby in Suffolk County but spent her early years in Asia. Her father was in the Royal Air Force and stationed in what is now India with his wife and two young daughters. They returned to England, which Harris thought “was a very cold and dreary place.” As a teenager, Harris thought she would become a nurse and applied to a hospital for training. Secretly wanting to be an actress, she found a “little, tiny repertory company in the town where I was living.” In a letter to the theatre, Harris asked, “Before I waste time and money on academic training, can you tell me if I have any ability?” She auditioned and was offered bus fare as her salary. world-class “I had a wonderful time because I played all sorts of different parts in a different play every week,” she recalled. “I got moved up to another theatre company… also a different play every week, but two performances every night. I actually got paid for that, seven pounds a week; half went to my landlady. I had a bicycle to get back and forth to the theatre and was with that company for a year… that was a lot of parts under my belt.” Applying to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Harris had a private did it backwards because you don’t usually start by being a professional actress and then go to drama school. But, in actual fact, it was really quite good for me because I knew exactly what I wanted to learn, which was how best to use my voice,” she said. “I have to rather self-consciously admit that I ended up with the gold medal.” American playwright and director Moss Hart came to England to cast a play that he had written, and the company Harris was working for had her read opposite all the young men auditioning for the show. After three weeks, Hart called her downstage to the footlights and said, “I’ve gotten used to you reading this part for so long; would you like to come to New York?” Harris said yes and made her Broadway debut in The Climate of Eden in 1952 before returning to Britain for classical theatre roles at the Bristol Old Vic, the Old Vic, the National Theatre, the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Royal National Theatre.

Leading Men in the Life of a Leading Lady

The roster of leading men who played opposite Rosemary Harris reads like a Who’s Who of world theatre: Richard Burton, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Peter O’Toole, and Sir Michael Redgrave, among others. Harris played opposite Gielgud in his farewell stage performance. “Oh, that was a wonderful treat, and I’ve still got the letter he wrote [after] we both got cast in the play, The Best of Friends, in his neat, tiny little writing. He was 80 or 82, I think, and it was his swan song. Only occasionally did he stumble, but he got through it beautifully. Later on, we did a television play, Summer Day’s Dream, and we’d rehearse and break for lunch and, being [a] wonderful gossipmonger, John adored nothing better than a good gossip.” Asked to put her stage career in perspective, André Bishop, producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater in New York City, responded: “Rosemary mean just playing all the best and biggest roles; it means being the leader of a company. Rosemary has had great success in England playing opposite Olivier and Gielgud—the famous Olivier Vanya and Gielgud’s final stage performance—but she has had equal acclaim in the United States. She stopped being a Broadway star for a while to start, with Ellis Rabb, the finest repertory company we have ever had, the APA [Association of Performing Artists], which then became the APA/Phoenix. She led it with Ellis, playing small roles and big ones and doing a million other chores that someone has to do in a company.”

The North Carolina School of the Arts

Our conversation took place on her lovely back patio in Winston-Salem, NC, home to the prestigious University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). The school, originally the North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA), was cofounded in 1963 by the late John Marsden Ehle, Jr., an award-winning author and staunch supporter of the arts who has been described as “the father of Appalachian literature.” He became Harris’ husband in 1967—a union that lasted over 50 years, until his death in 2018. “It was through NCSA that I met dear John,” she said, “He was only in Manhattan for one day with the search committee looking for a new chancellor at NCSA, but he found a wife instead!” After marrying, Harris and Ehle relocated to his home state of North Carolina, with homes in Winston-Salem and here in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Penland, NC. An emeritus member of the UNCSA Board of Visitors, Harris holds an honorary doctorate from the venerable institution, and has been a commencement speaker on several occasions. She even stepped in at the last minute to direct a production of The Royal Family for the School of Drama. “The school is very, very much in my heart and so much a part of my life—I admire it greatly,” she said, noting that their daughter attended UNCSA.

Family Tradition: Daughter Jennifer Ehle

Harris’ daughter is a film, television, and theatre star in her own right. Jennifer Ehle is a two-time Tony Award-winning actress who said, “My mother is the most extraordinary, wonderful person I’ve ever met, and that I think I ever will meet. She is radiant, she is brilliant, she is hilarious. She’s a force of nature and a force of life with the biggest heart, spirit, and soul of anybody.”

Even as a young child, she wanted to be an actress, Ehle said, “because Mummy has so much fun!

Ehle is grateful to have had her mother as a model: “As an artist, she is extraordinary… Her technique is just so refined, and I think she gets better and better and better and better and better.” After seeing Harris’ most recent Broadway performance, Ehle spoke with pride about her mother: “Just to watch her command that stage and that language—she’s just a consummate artist.”

Spider-Man and the Lady with the Bun

Harris gained new generations of fans when she appeared as Aunt May in director Sam Raimi’s film trilogy Spider-Man from 2002 to 2007. She explained that “you never know whence cometh your help, because it sometimes comes from the most unexpected quarters. Jennifer did a film in Australia with a wonderful actress, Cate Blanchett, and I got to meet Cate when she came to England.”

Blanchett later did a film, The Gift, and convinced Harris to play a cameo role of the grandmother in a single-day shoot on her day off from the Broadway production of Noel Coward’s Waiting in the Wings.

“As luck would have it,” Harris recalled, “the director of that film was Sam Raimi, and when they were discussing just who might play Aunt May, Sam said, ‘Well, it’s funny you should mention that, because I’ve just directed an actress who has white hair and a bun,’ which is a characteristic about May. ‘I think she would be just right for the role.’ And who were they to deny him? I want to impress on young people that you never know where the help is going to come from, and you do depend on the comfort of strangers. That’s what it’s all about really, people helping you, giving you a leg up and a helping hand because you can’t do it on your own.”

Advice for the Next Generation

Harris recalled a time in England after World War II when America was helping Britain and other Allies get back on their feet through a five-year effort called the Marshall Plan. When starting out to be an actress, she said, “I gave myself a five-year plan and said to myself, if I haven’t got anywhere by then, I’ll do something else, I’ll go back to my nursing. I’ve got ‘Plan Number 2’ standing by. You don’t want to waste your life doing something that you’re not going to compete very well in… change horses and do something else. But certainly, give it a fight, give it a go for five years. Accept any job you are offered, sweeping the stage or dressing the wigs or whatever… just do anything that needs to be done to make yourself so useful they can’t manage without you.”

Harris is known for arriving at the very first rehearsal of a play with lines memorized. “I don’t want to waste anybody’s time,” she said. “It’s a lovely feeling to go to rehearsal [off book] because you don’t want to hold anybody up. You should do your homework. Any actor who says, ‘I can’t learn my lines until rehearsal,’ that’s nonsense, just laziness. The point of rehearsal is that you [figure out] how to do the words, not to learn the words. If you know the words, you find all sorts of wonderful new ways of thinking about them.”

She believes that sometimes success is simply about luck and chance, “lucky chances, lucky breaks… there will be some there, I promise you, along the road. It’s just knowing and being ready for them. As Hamlet says, ‘the readiness is all.’”

Rosemary Harris in My Fair Lady, Photo by Joan Marcus

My Fair Lady & Thanking the Audience

Harris made a triumphant return to the Broadway stage with her 2018-19 appearance in My Fair Lady, the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion. In June 2019, Harris received a special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre from the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing. She concluded her acceptance speech with a thank you to audiences.

“If Playgoers didn’t come to see plays, none of us would be here,” she said. “As they rather crudely say in England, ‘Bums on seats.’ If we didn’t have bums on the seats, none of us would have a job, but of course that’s what’s happening now because of the pandemic. I’m not living in New York at the moment and it must be heartbreaking seeing all the theaters dark because theatre is the lifeblood of New York, or one of the arteries. I’ve got friends in New York and it must be very sad.”

What makes Rosemary Harris unique? Perhaps Lincoln Center Theater’s Bishop said it best. “Her talent is intelligent, graceful, disciplined, understated and utterly glorious. It always has been. And she is beautiful. She has generously given her life to the theatre and has become, in the process, a true national treasure.”