Free Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer

irresistible. He had once flirted with an earlier play of mine, but as he always avoided meeting me and the producer in restaurants I wasn’t sure of his intentions and he ended up by turning us down. However, I thought his comedy well suited to the way I write and I lived in hope. Then an American producer announced that he was anxious to make a film of A Voyage Round My Father in which Rex Harrison had agreed to act.
    Some actors of the old school fall into the error of thinking that the characters they play must be sympathetic. Actors of genius, such as Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, know better and realize that the plum roles are given by writers to complete bastards, or at least to persons who are a considerable pain in the neck. Richard III comes on to the stage, seduces a grief-stricken widow over the coffin of the husband he has murdered, and then goes on to do in practically everyone in sight, including the Duke of Clarence and the little Princes in the Tower. But there was never a better part for an actor. Henry Irving did very well out of a murderer in The Bells and Charles Laughton can never be entirely separated from a sadistic sea captain. Rex Harrison, however, seemed not only anxious to appear, in drama as in life, as charming and sexy, he set out to minimize any characteristics which his many fans might find unacceptable in their adored Rex. In the early days of our acquaintance he was playing a homosexual but he was careful, he said, to make it clear that his character wasn’t ‘really gay’. In a Feydeau play I translated, the entire plot turns on the fact that a wife finds her husband incapable of making love and so jumps to the conclusion that he has exhausted himself with other women. When he played the character in a disastrous film version of A Flea in Her Ear Rex Harrison spent hours at the Boulogne studios explaining to me that his fans would not, of course, accept the absurd suggestion that their much-loved star was impotent and Monsieur Chandebise’s incapacity was, at worst, a momentary hiccup.
    When I was told that Rex was to play my father, in a film which opens with his being struck blind, I knew exactly what to expect. I visited him in his London house and he stood, dressed with his usual elegance, rubbing his forehead, his voice rising to that high note of comic petulance which was so effective in the song ‘Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man?’ He made it clear that his public wouldn’t accept the tragic fact that their hero was totally blind. ‘I’m quite sure,’ he told me, ‘that he can see shapes’ It was in vain that I told him that my father couldn’t lift the food to his mouth and my mother had to do it for him, that he couldn’t cross a room without his hands outstretched and his knees knocking into the furniture, that after the retinas left the backs of his eyes, and despite his best efforts to deny his own helplessness, he had no idea of the size of his grandchildren unless he felt them carefully with his hands. Rex’s mind was made up; he wasn’t going to play a character who couldn’t see shapes.
    So filming began, for the first time, in the house, which became, not a home for my new family, but a set, a place where the walls were repainted, bookcases walled over and the garden, unable to act springtime in late autumn, filled with artificial flowers and that uncheckable growth of paper cups which shows that a film unit, with its incessant demands for meals, has been in occupation.
    â€˜Play one of the scenes in a conservatory,’ the American producer said, breathless with enthusiasm. ‘And consider the lighting, Rex. Can’t you just see the lighting possibilities?’ ‘Oh, my God. Yes!’ The Harrison voice went up an octave and he massaged his forehead in a light comedy version of amazement. My father never owned a conservatory but one was constructed, an elegant octagonal