Jed Harris
Jed Harris (born Jacob Hirsch Horowitz; February 25, 1900 – November 15, 1979) was an Austrian-born American theatrical producer and director. His many successful Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s include Broadway (1926), Coquette (1927), The Royal Family (1927), The Front Page (1928), Uncle Vanya (1930), The Green Bay Tree (1933) and Our Town (1938). He later directed the original Broadway productions of The Heiress (1947) and The Crucible (1953).
This article is about the theatrical producer and director. For the musician, see Jet Harris.
Jed Harris
November 15, 1979 (aged 79)
Theatrical producer, director
1925–1956
Accolades[edit]
Jed Harris and screenwriter Tom Reed were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Motion Picture Story, for the 1954 film, Night People.[54]
Harris, Arthur Carter and Blake Edwards were nominated for a 1958 Writers Guild of America Award for the screenplay for Operation Mad Ball (1957).[55]
Harris was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981.[56]
Cultural references[edit]
The central character in Ben Hecht's 1931 novel A Jew in Love is modeled in part on Harris.[2][57] John Houseman wrote "Ben Hecht in A Jew in Love has described the mixture of deadly cruelty and ineffable charm of which Harris was capable; when he really wanted something or somebody — and even when he did not — no effort was too great, no means too elaborate or circuitous if it helped to satisfy his craving for personal power."[58]
Laurence Olivier believed that the physical features of the Big Bad Wolf in Disney's 1933 animated film The Three Little Pigs were based on Harris,[5]: 125 whom Olivier called "the most loathsome man I'd ever met".[59] Harold Clurman agreed with Olivier: "That's Harris's face. I mean made into an animal...There was venom in the man."[60] Years later Olivier discovered that Walt Disney indeed had used Harris as his basis for the Big Bad Wolf.[61] Alexander Korda, who had given Olivier his initial roles on film, provided financial support for The Three Little Pigs.[61]
One of the major characters in Ed Ifkovic's Downtown Strut: an Edna Ferber Mystery is Jed Harris, based on him as the director of the Broadway play The Royal Family [1] Archived 2016-07-14 at the Wayback Machine.