Jane Harker
Publicist on Fiddler on the Roof, Sleuth and Oh! Calcutta
JANE HARKER, who has died aged 95, was a theatre and film publicist who worked on some of the best known musicals of the 1960s and 1970s, including Golden Boy, starring Sammy Davis Junior, Fiddler on the Roof, with Topol, and Stephen Sondheim’s Company, with Elaine Stritch.
She later publicised Sleuth and Oh! Calcutta for the theatre producer Michael White, and her diverse client list included Susan Hampshire, John Alderton, Glynis Johns, Harry Secombe, and the Yoga for Health Foundation.
One of Jane Harker’s specialities was interviewing celebrities. On one occasion she spent more than an hour in a London hotel room trying to interview the actor Lee Marvin. He was otherwise engaged in another part of the suite with at least one female companion and a few bottles of vodka. The only thing she got out of him was a thumbs-up.
In 1963 Jane Harker helped Theo Cowan to set up his PR company and together they promoted films and plays in the West End. She mainly focused on stage productions, but she also helped to promote television personalities including Graham Kerr, “The Galloping Gourmet”, with his unusually shaped wooden spoon marketed as the “spurtle”.
In the company’s busy office at Clarges Street she kept the show on the road and always had time for visitors, especially her numerous nephews and nieces, who were roped in to man the duplicating machines, stuff envelopes or even operate the switchboard. It was a happy, if somewhat chaotic environment.
Jane Mildred Archibald Harker was born on December 14 1920, one of five children, and grew up in Wandsworth. Her father worked as a lobby correspondent at the Palace of Westminster. She was an extrovert child who after school liked to stand on the table and recite The King’s Breakfast by AA Milne. From an early age she took a strong interest in amateur dramatics, nurturing a lifelong love of the theatre.
After beginning her career as a reporter and freelance feature writer under the pen name of Mildred Sussex, she worked for Johnson Matthey from 1939 to 1947, and then, after a year working in the radiology department of St Bartholomew’s Hospital, she joined the Rank Organisation and began working for Theo Cowan, Rank’s then deputy director of publicity.
Jane Harker had married Ron Posse, a childhood friend, in 1943. He was a Spitfire pilot, and his squadron was sent, on Churchill’s instructions, to defend Northern Australia. About a year later he was killed.
After a gap of five years she met and married Sandy Archibald, and they enjoyed 10 happy years together, but he died of cancer and she was left alone again.
She coped with her grief by going off to Jordan to work on David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia. On her return she joined Theo Cowan, an association that continued until his sudden death in 1991. He had settled opposite Jane at the desk they shared for his usual post-prandial nap and never woke up.
As a director of the firm Jane Harker also publicised films such as Zulu, Sands of the Kalahari and Ring of Bright Water. Her theatre publicity also included The Four Musketeers, starring Harry Secombe. Through that show she met Harry Secombe’s daughter Jenny, and together they went on to form their own public relations Company, JJ Enterprises.
Jane Harker never owned a house of her own. A true bohemian and an eternal traveller, she went everywhere with numerous bags, loved parties and was the lynch-pin of a large extended family. Jane Harker, born December 14 1920, died July 4 2016