Word: harrision
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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JED HARRIS: THE CURSE OF GENIUS by Martin Gottfried Little, Brown; 280 pages; $19.95
Jed Harris was a man of great gifts, none greater than his capacity to inspire bitter hatreds. He burst upon Broadway in the 1920s, a charismatic, rather sinister Yale dropout and former pressagent convinced that he could produce and direct plays better than anybody else. He seemed to be right...
His eye for scripts and performers was acute, his ideas often bold and original, and his eloquence-imparted in a notorious whisper that seemed to compel attention-galvanizing. "I never heard anyone talk about the theater with the intelligence and the excitement and the interest that that man had," said...
Moss Hart testified that the prayer of ev ery aspiring playwright was, "Please God, let Jed Harris do my play." Nevertheless, with playwrights from Ben Hecht to Thornton Wilder, he imposed marathon revisions and usually ended by demanding a co-author credit and half the royalties. When he directed Arthur...
Moments before a nervous Laurence Olivier made his entrance in The Green Bay Tree, on opening night, Harris said to him backstage, "Goodbye, Larry. I hope I never see you again." (Olivier would later model his stage and screen characterizations of the monstrous Richard III on Harris. "I thought of...