While married to second wife Lilli Palmer, Rex Harrison began a torrid love affair with Carole Landis, Hollywood's "Ping Girl." The lovers had met while both were under contract at 20th Century Fox, where Harrison was playing commanding leads in Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and where Landis had parlayed a tryst with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck into a lucrative, if short-lived, tenure as a popular second female lead in films starring Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth. With the dissolution of her relationship to Zanuck and her studio contract by 1947, Landis accepted an offer to work in England, making two low budget features back to back for Eagle-Lion, the American distribution arm of the J. Arthur Rank-owned British Lion. (Eagle-Lion had recently absorbed the Poverty Row outfit Producers Releasing Corporation and was expanding its empire to film production.) Keen to follow Landis (herself married, to Broadway producer W. Horace Schmidlapp) to England, a smitten Harrison arranged with Fox to headline a project of his own on British soil, in which he cast himself in a change of pace role as a demobilized RAF flyer who leads Scotland Yard on an exhaustive manhunt after he accidentally kills a British policeman.

Escape (1948) was drawn from a 1926 stage play by Pulitzer Prize winning author John Galsworthy, updated by scenarist Philip Dunne from the aftermath of the First World War epoch to the post-Blitz reconstruction. The property held sentimental value for Harrison, as an earlier film adaptation, directed by Basil Dean in 1930, had starred his old idol, stage actor Gerald du Maurier (father of novelist Daphne du Maurier), in his first talking film. (Also in the cast was Nigel Bruce, years before his immigration to Hollywood and career redefinition as the blustery Dr. Watson to Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes in several films for Universal.) With Lilli Palmer and the couple's 3 year-old son in tow, Harrison set sail for England in August 1947, actually docking in Southampton before Landis. The actor and his family were billeted in London's Hotel Savoy, with Landis eventually settling in nearby. Using the homes and rented flats of friends in town, Harrison and Landis met often during Escape's London shoot but were forced to continue their assignations on a stretch of beach in Plymouth when location shooting for Escape shifted two hundred miles southwest to boggy Dartmoor.

Though Harrison had high hopes for Escape as a career changer (Fox had tried without success to groom him as a successor to Errol Flynn), shooting proved more than a little uncomfortable. Having grown accustomed to the temperate climate of Hollywood and preferential treatment afforded him as a member of Hollywood's A-list, Harrison suffered the constant rain (which scotched his use of golf as an excuse to get out and see Landis) and a more egalitarian studio structure that obliged him to queue up with the crew in order to get his lunch. He was at least pleased to be working again with his The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and a top-flight supporting cast consisting of Cyril Cusack, Maurice Denham, George Woodbridge, and future Dr. Who stars William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. Harrison's leading lady was Irish actress Peggy Cummins, another Fox acquisition who had played the title role in Gregory Ratoff's Moss Rose (1948). Escape went into production as part of a profit-sharing deal between Hollywood and the British film industry in which tariffs levied in the past on American films exhibited in England were waived with a promise from the Yanks to invest in British filmmaking.

After wrapping Escape, Harrison returned to the States and began work on the Preston Sturges comedy Unfaithfully Yours (1948) while his arrangement with Landis continued unabated. Never much of a secret within the Hollywood colony, the Harrison-Landis affair went public at the hands of gossip columnist Walter Winchell in March of 1948. Edgy about the prospect of scandal, Fox went into PR spin to deny the allegations while playing up Harrison and Palmer's happy home life. Though disaster had been averted, the scandal proved to Landis (who had filed for divorce from Schmidlapp) that her lover would never leave his wife. At some point during the evening of July 4, 1948, Landis swallowed a fatal overdose of barbiturates. She had left behind two suicide notes, one addressed to her mother (which was made public) and one to Harrison (which the actor and his wife burned). Never popular among his American peers and sensitive to the presumption of his own liability in Landis' death, Harrison quit Hollywood for many years, working on Broadway (where he enjoyed a hit in 1954 with My Fair Lady, later starring in the film version) and in Continental productions such as Sidney Gilliat's Marriage a la Mode (1955), whose leading lady, Kay Kendall, would become his next extracurricular dalliance and third wife.

By Richard Harland Smith

Sources: Fatal Charm: The Life of Rex Harrison by Alexander Walker (St. Martin's Press, 1992) Carole Landis: A Tragic Life in Hollywood by E. J. Fleming (McFarland & Company, Ltd., 2005) Gerald: A Portrait by Daphne du Maurier (Virago UK, 2004)