Cynthia Harris
Actress best known as the divorcee who rocks the monarchy in the series Edward & Mrs Simpson
CYNTHIA HARRIS, the actress, who has died aged 87, will be forever remembered for her role on television as Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee whose love for Edward VIII rocked the British monarchy and brought its very future into question when he abdicated to marry her.
Edward & Mrs Simpson, Simon Raven’s hugely popular seven-part adaptation for ITV in 1978, depicted events leading up to the abdication, from 1928 – two years before their first meeting – to December 1936, when the King broadcast to the nation: “I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.”
Cutting an aristocratic demeanour as the monarch whose reign lasted just 325 days before he sailed into exile in France was Edward Fox, while Cynthia Harris played the twice-married socialite, seen by some as a scheming gold-digger, with whom he fell in love when he was Prince of Wales.
Expressing her admiration for a complex character, Cynthia Harris said: “Wallis Simpson, as I portray her, does love the King. In her words, he was ‘the most glamorous of men in the most glamorous of worlds’.”
The constitutional crisis that followed Edward’s decision to marry was created not on account of Wallis being a commoner and an American, but because of the monarch’s status as head of the Church of England, which would not countenance remarriage of divorcees.
The Duke of Windsor, as Edward became following the abdication, died six years before the television series. The Duchess of Windsor was said to have objected to the dramatisation, but was in fact too ill to take in the series – it was her proactively evil lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, who objected on her behalf.
Meanwhile, and despite some reviews to the contrary, Cynthia Harris – whose performance earned her a Bafta nomination as best television actress – regarded aspects of her portrayal of Wallis Simpson as sympathetic.
“I see her as an American essentially in a strange land, not particularly familiar with English customs or the way of royalty,” she said. “I see her as a strong lady, a woman of spirit, humour and sadness.”
Although not obviously resembling the character physically, she spoke of her transformation as not being too much of an exertion.
“Under this ginger hair lies the same bone structure as Mrs Simpson,” she said. “So, when you put me in a dark wig and you beige out the freckles, what’s left is a similar facial structure, and I guess that’s what makes this uncanny resemblance when I’m wearing the wigs and the clothes.”
Cynthia Lee Harris was born in New York on August 9 1934. She started drama classes aged 12 and graduated from Smith College, Massachusetts, in 1955 with a degree in Theatre and Literature.
She stayed in Massachusetts to act on stage during five summer seasons (1955-59) with the company at Adams Memorial Theatre, on the campus of another college, in Williamstown. One of her earliest roles in that group was as a caterpillar in Bridge and the Bumblebee (1955).
She then trained at the Actors Studio, New York, with Lee Strasberg, “father” of the method school of acting – identifying with the character’s inner motivations and emotions – and made her Broadway stage debut in 1963. Her best role there was Sarah, a dieting foodie with an alcoholic husband, in the Stephen Sondheim-george Furth musical Company in 1971.
Cynthia Harris continued steadily in New York theatre, mainly at the smaller off-broadway venues, and landed one-off roles on television, but – even just a few years before travelling to Britain to shoot Edward & Mrs Simpson – she lamented: “Commercials support my habit of acting.”
When fame came, she appeared for almost two decades in television and print advertisements for Bradlees as the character Mrs B, the department store’s buyer constantly looking for bargains to pass on to customers. “At Bradlees, you buy what Mrs B buys – and nobody can buy like Mrs B,” ran the jingle.
On television, Cynthia Harris was seen again by worldwide audiences in the first series of LA Law (1986-87) as Iris Hubbard, an intern and secretary to Leland Mckenzie (Richard Dysart). Then, in 1993, she joined the sitcom Mad About You for its second run and remained until it finished six years later.
She played Sylvia Buchanan, who makes jibes at her son, Paul (Paul Reiser), for his “bad” career choice in becoming a documentary filmmaker instead of a doctor, and has a difficult relationship with her daughter-in-law, Jamie (Helen Hunt).
In 2019 she reprised the role alongside many of the original programme’s regulars in a revival of the Emmy Award-winning series, this time with Reiser and Hunt as empty-nesters after their daughter leaves for college.
One of Cynthia Harris’s more prominent film roles was as the landlady of Tom Selleck, Steve Guttenberg and Ted Danson in Three Men and a Baby (1987).
She was co-founder in 1992 of TACT, The Actors Company Theater, in New York, and one of its artistic directors; she also appeared in productions. It closed in 2018, saying that it had fulfilled its objectives, with the city no longer short of theatre groups dedicated to underappreciated and rarely seen plays.
Cynthia Harris’s 1961 marriage to the Broadway producer and theatre company manager Eugene Wolsk ended in divorce 11 years later. She is survived by her partner, Nathan Silverstein.