AITKEN. Hon Mrs (Hon Joan Elizabeth nee WILLIAMS) (1936-2022
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When in 2002 Jonathan Aitken announced their engagement, an observer said of his fiancée that she had ‘an elegant air of Weltschmertz’
Elizabeth Harris Aitken, who has died aged 85, began her career as an actress and later founded a successful PR business; but she became better known for her turbulent marriages to the actors Richard Harris and Sir Rex Harrison, which she chronicled in a volume of memoirs, Love, Honour and Dismay (1976).
In the 1980s she endured further discontent as the wife of Lord Beaverbrook’s grandson, Peter Aitken, an investment banker, before eventually finding happiness as the second wife of Aitken’s cousin, the former Tory Cabinet minister and reformed jailbird Jonathan Aitken....
She was born Elizabeth Rees-Williams in Glamorgan, Wales, on May 1 1936, the middle child of David Rees-Williams and his wife Constance, the daughter of the Lord Mayor of Cardiff. Her father would serve as Labour MP for Croydon South from 1945 to 1950, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Ogmore, and subsequently served as Minister of Civil Aviation in Clement Attlee’s administration.
Later on he crossed over to the Liberals, was made president of the party and carried the coronet at the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales in 1969.
Despite his Left-of-centre leanings, Lord Ogmore sent his daughter to finishing school in Switzerland, and when she told him that she wanted to be an actress he insisted that she also do the Season as a debutante. She was presented at court by the Countess of Longford in 1954....
....she met a hell-raising but impecunious young red-haired Irish actor called Richard Harris in a coffee bar in Earl’s Court in 1956.
They began an affair during which she spent the whole of her £50-a-month dress allowance on his rent. When their marriage was celebrated with a glittering reception at the House of Lords in 1957, the sum total of the groom’s fortune was £25....
They divorced in 1969, though they remained good friends....
Elizabeth embarked on an affair with the veteran actor [Rex Harrison] and the couple flew to Tangier only four weeks after he had announced his separation from Rachel (who attempted suicide in response).
Elizabeth became Harrison’s fifth wife in 1971 but Harrison was a notoriously autocratic, pernickety man with a pronounced vein of cruelty. At first Elizabeth enjoyed his obsession with order, but soon she began to find it stifling....
The marriage limped along until finally, in July 1975, the couple parted, after which, in an attempt at catharsis, Elizabeth embarked on her memoir (which she dedicated ambiguously to “RH”).
She also began an affair with Jonathan Aitken, then an ambitious young Tory MP, a relationship that foundered when she took up with his cousin Peter.
She and Peter Aitken married in 1980, but as she recalled, “It wasn’t a marriage really, it was a mistake.” It ended in 1985 in bitter acrimony, and when the dust cleared, Elizabeth found she had very little money left. As soon as she could, she changed her name back to Harris by deed poll....
She was in no hurry to get married again, but in 2001 she met her old flame Jonathan Aitken at a showing of a film featuring her son Jamie and Aitken’s nephew Jack Davenport, both actors.
They married in 2003 at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in a ceremony attended by various politicians, and by a few old lags who had done time with Aitken in Belmarsh. They then spent their honeymoon in the Bahamas at the house Elizabeth had once shared with Richard Harris....
She is survived by her husband and by the three sons of her marriage to Richard Harris, including the Bafta-winning actor Jared Harris.
Elizabeth Harris Aitken, born May 1 1936, died April 15 2022
David Beamish
It was a highlight of the wedding of Elizabeth Harris to Jonathan Aitken at St Matthew’s Westminster in 2003 that when Father Philip Chester asked “Who gives this woman in marriage?” her three sons, Damian, Jared and Jamie, shouted in robust unity: “We do.”
Nuptials figured prominently in the narrative of the bride’s life, and this wedding was her fourth. It opened with John Greenleaf Whittier’s poignant hymn “Dear Lord and Father of mankind/ Forgive our foolish ways”.
When she wrote her memoirs at the age of 40, under the title Love, Honour and Dismay and the surname Harrison, she dedicated her book with ironical ambivalence “to RH”, the initials shared by both of her movie-star husbands, Richard Harris and Rex Harrison. On the dust-jacket, the blonde author in white feather boa displayed a full-lipped smile as she clutched playing cards with pictures of her first two weddings.
Excesses of fame and fortune, and the ravages of alcohol, rendered hers “a story of tenderness, treachery, madness, adultery, drink, ambition and suicide”. Her first two marriages proved “impossible”. In the 1980s she married, briefly and bitterly, Peter Aitken, cousin of the more famous Jonathan — with whom she had also enjoyed a passionate two-year affair in the 1970s.
Then in 2001 there was a chance re-encounter between Harris and Jonathan Aitken. By this time he was a former cabinet minister recently out of prison having served a sentence for perjury. While inside he had reconstructed himself as a devout Christian, a student of theology, dedicated to prayer and to prison reform. One summer evening his nephew, the actor Jack Davenport, was appearing in a short, grim arthouse film called Subterrain. It was a tale of suicidal depression, glue-sniffing and a tramp’s death in a London Tube station. Davenport invited his uncle Jonathan along. The glue-sniffer was played by Jamie Harris, third son of Elizabeth Harris by her first husband, Richard. She too was in the audience.
This reunion in the cinema, decades after their affair, led to further meetings — deftly engineered by Aitken’s sister, Maria, and their mother, “Pempe”, Lady Aitken, (obituary, February 9, 2005) who both thought Aitken’s holy new life was too lonely and that he needed a girlfriend. Aitken was impelled to tell Elizabeth, over a candlelit Chelsea dinner, “Do you understand that God now comes first in my life?” She replied that she had never asked to come first in anyone’s life ahead of God. He became her fourth husband, she Aitken’s second wife. It was to be happy ever after for both, even if it seemed curious to think of Elizabeth Harris, partygoer par excellence, as a chaplain’s wife, which she became in 2018 when Aitken took holy orders to be a chaplain in Pentonville prison.
Family life remained her priority. She was a matriarch to Damian, a film director; Jared, a Bafta-winning actor who played George VI in The Crown and the scientist Valery Legasov in Chernobyl; and Jamie, also an actor. During lockdown she held court on Zoom with three generations of Harrises, down to the latest, her great-grandson Marlon Harris, aged four months.
Yesterday, Easter Sunday, Aitken took the service at Pentonville, as his wife had insisted.
Elizabeth Harris Aitken, socialite, was born on May 1, 1936. She died after a long illness on April 15, 2022, aged 85