Harris’s socialite ex-wife dies at 85
‘You were always there for us’
THE ex-wife of the late Irish film legend Richard Harris, Elizabeth Rees-Williams, has died in London aged 85.
The couple’s actor son Jared Harris paid tribute on social media to his mother, who went on to wed three times after her nuptials with his father.
Ms Rees-Williams married her first husband Harris – best known for playing King Arthur in Camelot and his later part as Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films – in 1957.
It was Ms Rees-Williams who proposed to Harris and the couple were married for 11 years in which time they had three children together – Damian, Jared and Jamie – who are all actors or directors in Hollywood. The Welsh socialite died at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital on Good Friday after a long illness.
Middle son Jared, known for his roles in Mad Men and Chernobyl, wrote on social media of his mother: ‘She woke up singing, she went quietly in the night, we should all be so lucky for the life lived in between, for the life nurtured, for the families championed, for us it was you, always you, you were always there for us.’
Ms Rees-Williams attended London’s Royal Academy for Dramatic Art (Rada) and was surrounded by future stars such as Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates and Albert Finney but she gained fame as Harris’s husband. When the pair met in London, Harris was directing Winter Journey at Rada. The Limerick-born superstar later revealed it was not love at first sight and found her background off-putting initially but they would later fall madly in love.
The marriage was impacted by Harris’s constant travelling and wild lifestyle that led to alcoholism and infidelity.
They divorced in 1969 and both later remarried.
The Limerick-born actor died aged 72 in 2002 after suffering from Hodgkin’s disease.
Ms Rees-Williams would marry another actor, Rex Harrison, in 1971 – with her son Jared later describing meals at the dinner table as ‘excruciating’.
In the 1980s, she married Peter Aitken, the cousin of her final husband Jonathan Aitken, the politician turned prison chaplain.
The marriage to Peter was unsuccessful but her marriage to Conservative government minister Jonathan, who famously went to prison for perjuring himself and whom she met after chance reencounter in 2001, was much happier.
Her memoir Love, Honour and Dismay was published in 1976 and dedicated to ‘RH’ – it is unknown whether this was meant for her first husband Richard Harris or her second, Rex Harrison.