Laurence Harvey was a vulgar, insecure chancer but he was funny and honest about his many faults, says his friend David Ambrose
The forgotten movie star
KEYSTONE PICTURES USA
T
he 100th anniversary of Dirk Bogarde’s birth earlier this year was celebrated with a front-page story in The Oldie. It’s a safe bet that no comparable tributes will be paid to Laurence Harvey when his 100th anniversary comes up in seven years’ time – born in 1928, he died in 1973, aged only 45. Yet in the only film they worked on together, 1965’s Darling, Harvey got top billing. Throughout the fifties, they were level pegging as the two leading men of British cinema. But neither was an international star, which was something they both hankered after. Dirk took his shot at the end of the decade, going to Hollywood to make Song Without End (1960), a lavish, big-budget and saccharine biopic of Franz Liszt – which sank without trace. Larry, meanwhile, had been in the drab surroundings of a Yorkshire mill town, making a modest little picture called Room at the Top (1959), based on the 1957 novel by John Braine. Against all expectations, it became a worldwide phenomenon, shooting Larry into the stratosphere. While Dirk returned to Britain, co-starring with the likes of James Robertson Justice in a fourth sequel to 1954’s Doctor in the House, Larry was sharing star billing with John Wayne, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda. Nonetheless, ten years later, Dirk was one of the most-respected screen actors in the world. And Larry, as they say in Hollywood, couldn’t get arrested. So what happened? I knew and worked with them both. I had great admiration for Dirk but had, rather perversely, huge affection for Larry. I say ‘perversely’ because the general opinion of him was summed up by the actor Robert Stephens in his
32 The Oldie December 2021
Bottoms up! Laurence Harvey (1928-73) ‘would have had sex with a porcupine’
