Actor Rex Harrison Dies At 82

Actor Rex Harrison, known to millions around the world as Professor Henry Higgins in ``My Fair Lady,'' died yesterday. He was 82.

Harrison died in his sleep of pancreatic cancer at his New York City apartment, three weeks after dropping out of the hit Broadway show ``The Circle.''

His attorney, Harold Schiff, said Harrison left the play a week before its scheduled closing because he thought he had a gall-bladder inflammation. He was never hospitalized.

``He just thought he was not well. He didn't want to know'' (that he had cancer), Schiff said.

With Harrison when he died early yesterday were his sixth wife, the former Mercia Tinker, and two sons by prior marriages, Noel and Carey Harrison.

``To watch him and to work with him was a joyful experience,'' said Julie Andrews, who played Eliza Doolittle to Harrison's Higgins for three years on Broadway. ``The theater has lost an extraordinary one-of-a-kind.''

``He was the essence of a great actor, a fabulous technician. . . . He had a wonderful sense of humor, fabulous diction,'' said Audrey Hepburn, who played Eliza in the film version of ``My Fair Lady.'' ``He was the personification of a superb actor, the quintessential actor.''

Witty, urbane and outwardly relaxed, Harrison was for three generations of audiences the very personification of the polished, upper-class Englishman.

But he never really believed himself in the role.

``So annoying,'' he told a 1981 interviewer, ``to find oneself referred to as the `unflappable' Rex Harrison. `Unflappable,' my arse! I'm an actor, and if the indicated public attitude is one of relaxed self-control in the midst of crisis, I can play it as well as the next.

``But don't mistake performance for reality.

``No one - I say again - no one with an ounce of talent was ever truly relaxed before an audience. . . .''

Yet Harrison did play the part so well: From the nonplused husband in Noel Coward's ``Blithe Spirit'' to the steeliness of Julius Caesar in ``Cleopatra,'' to the properly accented Henry Higgins to a medieval pope or the king of Siam (``People usually forget that I was Mongkut, with hair, before Yul Brynner was, without''), Harrison projected a cool, good-humored refinement that made charming reality of even the occasional villain (the murderous husband of ``Midnight Lace,'' for example) that came his way.

He was knighted last year by Queen Elizabeth II, and his acting honors - an Academy Award and New York Film Critics Award for motion pictures, two Antoinette Perry awards for stage performances and the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (not to mention a Golden Globe, a special Tony for life achievement, various newspaper and magazine trophies and the David di Donatello Award) - would have filled the average trophy case to overflowing, but Harrison seldom displayed them and hated to talk about the work they represented.

``That's all very well, of course,'' he said in an interview in 1986. ``But (the awards) are yesterday, you know. The past. Can't go back there. Wouldn't care to. It's all done and gone. Tomorrow's the thing; what's coming up, what's new. If I seem to hurry on, it's because there are still things I'd like to do . . . before I get too old to remember lines.''

But he had always been in a bit of a hurry.

Reginald Carey Harrison was born March 5, 1908, in Huyton, Lancashire, England, and said in later years that he could not remember a time when he did not expect to become an actor.

``It was as natural as hair,'' he said. ``Or having fingers on my hands. Looking back, I can see that it was absolutely frightful arrogance on my part, assuming that I would - and could - act simply because it was what I wished to do. But I was blessed with understanding parents who encouraged me once they realized that I was serious,'' he said.

A memorial service is scheduled June 18 at the Church of the Transfiguration in New York, often called the Little Church Around the Corner. Funeral services will be private.