page_title: Jed Harris
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Jed Harris / Early life / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Time magazine, Volume 12 Issue 10. Front cover is a photograph of Jed Harris.
context_page_description: Jed Harris was an Austrian-born American theatrical producer and director. His many successful Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s include Broadway, Coquette, The Royal Family, The Front Page, Uncle Vanya, The Green Bay Tree and Our Town. He later directed the original Broadway productions of The Heiress and The Crucible.
context_section_description: Harris produced and directed 31 shows between 1925 and 1956. By age 28, he had produced a record four consecutive Broadway hits over the course of 18 months and was on the cover of Time magazine. Over the course of his career, his productions gained seven awards, including a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize for playwright Thornton Wilder. Harris directed four actors in award-winning roles in Child of Fortune, The Crucible, The Traitor, The Heiress and Our Town.
  Described by The New York Times as "a flamboyant man of intermittent charm", Harris was famous for his self-confidence, appeal to women, and sometimes outrageous and abusive behavior. Playwright and director George S. Kaufman, who worked with Harris on The Royal Family (1927) and The Front Page (1928), reportedly hated him and once said "When I die, I want to be cremated and have my ashes thrown in Jed Harris's face." Although Katharine Hepburn received scathing reviews in the New York production of The Lake (1933) — an experience she later described as "a slow walk to the gallows" — Harris insisted that she and the show go to Chicago. "My dear, the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you," Hepburn recalled Harris saying. She extricated herself from the contract by offering Harris all the money she had, $13,675.75; "I'll take it," he said. Laurence Olivier, whom Harris had directed on Broadway in The Green Bay Tree (1933), called him "the most loathsome man I'd ever met." In revenge, Olivier used Harris as the basis for his makeup for his 1944 stage (and later screen) portrayal of Richard III.
  However despised he may have been in the theatrical community, Harris directed and produced luminaries such as Leo G. Carroll, Laurence Olivier, Lillian Gish, Basil Rathbone, Elaine Stritch, Ruth Gordon, Walter Huston, Osgood Perkins and Katharine Hepburn. Moss Hart wrote that "every aspiring playwright's prayer was: 'Please God, let Jed Harris do my play!'"
  In an interview shortly before his death, Harris spoke of the ephemeral nature of the theatre. "The beauty of it is that you can create a whole world in a few weeks of rehearsal. But then the whole thing disappears like a breath of air. Nothing remains after your audience has gone. All it represents is a few moments of escape."
  While many of his hit plays were translated into film versions, Harris was hesitant to make the jump to working on films. His first foray into motion pictures was when Broadway, one of his theatre productions, was adapted for a 1929 film. However, starting with The Light Touch (1952), starring George Sanders, Harris wrote the story for a trio of films continuing with Night People (1954), starring Gregory Peck and Buddy Ebsen, and Operation Mad Ball (1957), starring Jack Lemmon, Dick York, and Mickey Rooney.
caption: Producer Jed Harris on the cover of Time (September 3, 1928) during the run of his Broadway hit, The Front Page
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