My friend and sometime colleague Carey Harrison, who has died aged 80, was a prolific novelist and playwright, and a respected teacher of English.
His early plays were performed at the Traverse theatre in Edinburgh and in the late 1960s he became resident playwright at Granada TV’s Stables Theatre Project, through which his plays were shown on television – I worked with him on the first of these, In a Cottage Hospital, broadcast in 1969.
He went on to write more than 200 plays and 16 novels, of which the best known, Richard’s Feet (1990), won the UK Society of Authors’ Encore award. Carey’s interests were wide-ranging, from nazism and communism to Spinoza, and on to Freud and Jung. He celebrated their competing theories of mind and psychoanalysis in his 2009 play Scenes from a Misunderstanding, mounted at the Jewish theatre festival in Manhattan, New York.
In the 1960s and 70s, he had a career as a political activist, and, with his first wife, Mary Chamberlain, became a “London recruit”, one of a group of young people chosen by the African National Congress to smuggle ANC and Communist party literature into South Africa after their printing presses had been destroyed. The ANC Veterans League described him as “one of the glorious band of internationalists who assisted our liberation movement during the fierce years of struggle, at great personal risk”.
Carey was born in London, the son of the English actor Sir Rex Harrison and his second wife, the German Jewish actor Lilli Palmer, and was educated at the Lycée Français in New York, at Harrow in London, and at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied English. He and I first met when we staged his first play, 26 Efforts at Pornography, at the Traverse in 1967. Carey had written it for Sir John Gielgud; later I had lunch with Gielgud and asked him to do it at the Stables. “Oh, dear boy,” he said, “I’d love to … but I couldn’t bear to spend six weeks in Manchester.”
For a time in midlife Carey taught at the University of Essex and won prizes for his goat-breeding. Then, from 1996 until his retirement in 2024 he served as professor of English at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York, where his polymathic career found expression in the great variety of the courses he taught. His schedule included American, British and Irish literature, Renaissance poetry, Shakespeare and creative writing. He was highly regarded by his students.
Two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, the artist Claire Lambe, whom he married in 1992, their daughter, Chiara, and Claire’s daughter, Zoe; by Rosie, the daughter of his marriage to Mary, and Sam and Faith, the children of his second marriage, to Val Fletcher; and by his stepmother, Mercia.
