After Six Decades on Stage, Rosemary Harris Finds Mecca in a Meaty New Role

By Harry Haun
17 Jan 2012

Rosemary Harris
Rosemary Harris
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Rosemary Harris, 84, is the soulful, candle-lit heart of Broadway's new production of The Road to Mecca, Athol Fugard's rumination on the feminine spirit in a man's world.

*

With Rosemary Harris' appearance in The Road to Mecca at the American Airlines Theatre, the actress officially enters her 60th year as a Broadway star. It's a big year for diamond jubilees — Elizabeth II on June 2 and Rosemary the Majestic on next Nov. 13.

Like all great artists who keep their heads down and do the work, Harris was astonished that this milestone had snuck up on her. "Oh, my gosh!" she exclaimed at the news. Then, after doing the math in her head, she nodded, "Yes, '52 — yes, yes."

On Nov. 13, 1952, the regal, RADA-trained actress emerged from the faux Main Stem flora 'n' fauna of British Guiana improbably named Mabel, a missionary's daughter, in Moss Hart's The Climate of Eden. The play lasted 20 performances, but it got her and two others in the cast (Penelope Munday and Ray Stricklyn) Theatre World Awards. The other two never appeared on Broadway again, but, by Harris' count, it has taken her 25 Broadway shows — all of them plays — to make it to Mecca.

"The Theatre World Award was the first award I ever got, and it meant so much because it was the first professional pat-on-the-back that you get," she recalled.

By the time it was presented, however, she was back on the boards in Britain, playing The [never-named] Girl upstairs in The Seven Year Itch. "I remember thinking that I really wasn't quite right for it and saying to someone, 'Marilyn Monroe should be playing this. It's right up her alley.' And then, of course, she did.

"I wasn't that keen on what Eva Le Gallienne would have called 'boulevard comedies.' I wanted to be a serious classical actress. I'd rather have held Peggy Ashcroft's train than played comedy on the West End. The Seven Year Itch ran for a year, and, as soon as it finished, I hightailed it down to the Bristol Old Vic to do classical Shakespeare, and then a year later I graduated and got to the Old Vic.

"I did Desdemona opposite Richard Burton and John Neville. They both played Othello, and I was the one and only Desdemona between them. Then I was in Tyrone Guthrie's production of Troilus and Cressida. When that came to the Winter Garden in New York, I came with it. That was when I decided I wasn't going back.

"I felt much freer here. Of course, the name Old Vic was a sort of 'Open Sesame.' You just had to say Old Vic, and people didn't really care if you carried a spear or you had been playing leading parts. It just had a sort of cachet to it. But I just loved being here. I can't exactly define what it was. I never felt my roots were very deep because my childhood wasn't in England." (A Royal Air Force brat, she grew up in India.)

 Continued...