Laurence Harvey brought a cold, clipped stillness to the screen and rarely anything warmer. It made him the right man for a handful of parts and a blank in the rest; even the film that made him needed a charm he did not have.
Fi1m perspective
Joe Lampton gets off a train in Room at the Top (1958) with one suitcase, looks up at the houses on the hill and asks who owns the biggest. Laurence Harvey plays that look well. He has the cheekbones and the resentment, and he can stare at a hill as if it owed him money. Then Joe has to talk his way into those houses, and Harvey cannot do it. His vowels wander, and the people who are supposed to be won over by him seem to be doing it on their own.
That film is where his career turns. Born in Lithuania and raised in South Africa, he had been in British films since 1948, in supporting parts in programmers and then under contract to Romulus, before Joe Lampton got him noticed abroad. Hollywood followed: Colonel Travis in The Alamo (1960), then Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) for John Frankenheimer. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s he worked in British and international films, directed three of his own, appeared on television, and turned up as himself in Orson Welles's F for Fake (1973) shortly before he died.
What he could do was cold. The clipped, refined accent and the level gaze were built for the cad and the outsider, and when a script wanted a man with nothing moving behind the eyes he was exactly right. That is why The Manchurian Candidate is the performance people remember: Raymond Shaw is a man who has been emptied out, and Harvey's detachment stops looking like a limitation and starts looking like the point. Miles Brand in John Schlesinger's Darling (1965), another smooth and hollow man, is the other part critics tend to bring up in his favour.
What he could not do was warmth, and most films need some. Outside those few roles he was regularly called wooden, and many of his later films were indifferent even by the standards of a working actor taking what came. In Room at the Top we watched a town full of people fall for Joe Lampton and could not see what they were seeing, and it kept us at arm's length from a film we otherwise admired. Simone Signoret, playing the married woman Joe actually loves, gives it the feeling he does not.
He described himself as "a flamboyant character, an extrovert who doesn't want to reveal his feelings. To bare your soul to the world, I find unutterably boring." He was as good as his word. Cast him as a man with nothing underneath and you have a performance; cast him as a man people are meant to love and you have a film with a hole where its lead should be.
Biography
Laurence Harvey, born Zvi Mosheh Skikne on 1 October 1928 in Jonischkis, Lithuania, was an actor. Educated in South Africa, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before making his screen debut in the late 1940s.
Harvey achieved prominence with his performance as Joe Lampton in Room at the Top (1958). He played Colonel William Travis in The Alamo (1960) and Raymond Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Other notable credits include Butterfield 8 (1960) and Darling (1965). He died on 25 November 1973.
