Laurence Harvey

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Laurence Harvey
Laurence Harvey in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Arthur"
Birth name	Zvi Mosheh (Hirsh) Skikne
Born	October 1, 1928 Joniškis, Lithuania
Died	November 25, 1973 London, England
Spouse(s)	Margaret Leighton (1957-1961) Joan Perry (1968-1972) Paulene Stone (1972-his death)
Notable roles	Joe Lampton in Room at the Top Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate

Laurence Harvey (October 1, 1928 – November 25, 1973) was an Academy Award-nominated Lithuanian-born actor who achieved fame in British and American films.

Laurence Harvey maintained throughout his life that his birth name was Laruschka Mischa Skikne, his real name was Zvi Mosheh (Hirsh) Skikne, called Hirshkeh by his family. He was the youngest of three boys born to Ber "Boris" and Ella Skikne, a Jewish family in the town of Joniškis, Lithuania. At the age of five he emigrated with his family to South Africa where he took on the English name of Harry. He grew up in Johannesburg, and was in his teens when he served with the entertainment unit of the South African Army during World War II. After moving to London, England, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art where he became known as Larry, and from there moved to perform on stage and film where he adopted the stage name "Laurence Harvey", taken either from the shop name Harvey Nichols or from Harvey's Bristol Cream.

Harvey's first major role came in 1959 when he was cast by director Jack Clayton in Room at the Top produced by British film producing brothers Sir John Woolf and James Woolf of Romulus Films and Remus Films. For his performance, Harvey received a nomination for a BAFTA Award and for an Academy Award for Best Actor, the first person of Lithuanian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Harvey appeared in several major films, including Butterfield 8 (1960), The Alamo (1960), A Walk on the Wild Side (1962), The Running Man (1963) with Lee Remick, Darling (1965) and the critically acclaimed The Manchurian Candidate (1962), for which he is best known. He also played King Arthur in the London staging of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot, in 1964 at Drury Lane.

In 1968, in settlement of a dispute with Woodfall Films over the rights to The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Woodfall cast him in their version as a Russian prince. He performed as cast, but was never seen as the Prince in the finished film.^[1]

British actor John Fraser writes in his 2004 memoir "Close Up" that Harvey was gay, and his lover was his manager James Woolf. "As a teenager, he started out living with Hermione Baddeley, a blowsy star of intimate revue more than twice his age. Then he married Margaret Leighton, six years Harvey's senior. When this marriage was over, he married Joan Cohn, widow of Harry Cohn, managing director of Columbia Studios. Throughout all these career marriages, he still managed to string Jimmy Woolf along."

Laurence Harvey and Paulene Stone with toddler Domino. (Splash News)

Harvey was married three times:

Margaret Leighton (1957-1961) (divorced)
Joan Perry (1968-1972) (divorced) widow of movie mogul Harry Cohn
Paulene Stone (1972-1973), with whom he remained until his death from stomach cancer at age of 45, and with whom he had a daughter, the famous bounty hunter Domino Harvey (1969-2005).

[edit] Books about Laurence Harvey

Hickey, Des and Smith, Gus. The Prince: The Public and Private Life of Laurence Harvey. Leslie Frewin. 1975.
Stone, Paulene. One Tear is Enough: My Life with Laurence Harvey. 1975.
Sinai, Anne. Reach for the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey. Scarecrow Press. 2003.

[edit] Footnotes

^ John Osborne, who wrote the screenplay, alleges in his autobiography that Tony Richardson shot those scenes "French", which is movie jargon for a director going through the motions because of some obligation, but with no film in the camera. source: Almost a Gentleman by John Osborne: Faber & Faber 1991, ISBN 0-571-16635-0; page 146