It's been a right Carry On for evergreen star Anita Harris

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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After two miscarriages and falling victim to a £1 million fraud, the Swinging Sixties sweetheart is back in style

The trademark Titian fringe appears unchanged, and her brilliant dark eyes scan the room like searchlights, riveting the attention of everyone present.

This slim, youthful creature is Anita Harris, sweetheart of the Swinging Sixties who, 40 years ago, set the world alight singing her first major chart hit, Just Loving You, and whose appearance in uniform, as the seductive Nurse Clarke in Carry On Doctor, has become one of the most enduring of all male fantasies.

She's well used to comments that her looks are two decades younger than her 66 years. 'People are always asking me about it,' she says. 'I have to tell them that it doesn't happen by magic.

Sparkling: Anita Harris in Come On Jeeves

Sparkling: Anita Harris in Come On Jeeves



'As you grow older, you have to work at keeping in shape. In my case, that means an hour of revitalising exercise every day, and being extremely careful about what I eat and drink.'

Her health and fitness regime was turned into a cookery book and video, Fizzical Food, which became a number one best-seller and is about to be reissued.

For the past three months, Harris has been packing theatres around Britain as the star of the P.G. Wodehouse comedy, Come On, Jeeves, in which she plays Mrs Spottsworth, an eccentric American millionairess. Every night, the show-stopping highlight is her acrobatic Charleston, in which she swings a rope of pearls round her neck like a lasso.

But now, the girl who started out as one of the most glamorous pop singers of the Sixties is poised to face the greatest challenge of her career: the title-role in a multi-million-pound television drama series, The Casebooks Of Verity Lake. Specially written for her by her husband, painter and writer Mike Margolis, it revolves around the eponymous Victorian music hall performer.

'It will be by far the most ambitious thing I have ever attempted,' Harris says. 'Verity is a figure of mystery. She sings, she dances, she fights, she makes love, but what really motivates her is the intrigue of crime detection.'

At the same time, Harris has been writing what promises to be an unprecedentedly frank autobiography.

Naughty nurse: Harris in Carry On Doctor

Naughty nurse: Harris in Carry On Doctor

Outwardly, her career has been a glittering success story. The chart hits of the Sixties and Seventies and her seasons at the London Palladium gave way to her appearances in the Carry On films, then to her years as an acclaimed and highly paid international cabaret star.

She appeared in seven Royal Variety Performances and starred for two years in Andrew Lloyd Webber's West End musical Cats.

But, privately, she and her husband have faced a series of terrifying traumas that would have destroyed some couples.

She lost two longed-for babies in devastating miscarriages and then, in 1985, at the peak of her career, she and Margolis lost their entire life savings when a Swiss bank collapsed and its directors were arrested after an investigation by the Fraud Squad.

Finally, in 1994, while her husband was recovering from arterial surgery, Harris underwent surgery of her own for suspected breast cancer. She bravely continued with an appearance in the French And Saunders Christmas Show, while awaiting the all-clear.

She says: 'People everywhere have the most terrible things to face in their lives. When I hear about people losing their homes, my heart goes out to them. Mike and I know what that feels like.'

The youngest of three children, Harris started her performing career at the age of eight as an ice skater. At 16, she landed a job as a dancer with the Bluebell Girls and spent six months in Las Vegas. 'My parents were appalled. I was a little convent girl with no experience of life or of the world.'

Her mother was even more aghast when her hair was dyed blonde.

In Las Vegas, she rubbed shoulders with Frank Sinatra, Mae West and Vic Damone. 'Watching those great performers, it gradually dawned on me that singing was what I really wanted to do.' 

Back in London, she joined the Cliff Adams Singers, then went solo - meeting Margolis when he auditioned her and he soon became her manager.

The turning point came in 1966, when she was starring with Harry Secombe at the London Palladium. During a recording of Top Of The Pops, Dusty Springfield introduced Harris to her brother, Tom, who handed her his song, Just Loving You.

Anita's recording of it went to number two in the charts, sold two million copies, won her a double-gold disc and transformed her into a star.

Further chart hits followed, including The Playground, Anniversary Waltz and Dream A Little Dream Of Me. She co-starred with Frankie Howerd on the West End stage and lent definite sex appeal to Carry On Doctor and Carry On Follow That Camel.

But though now a star, she was still easily hurt. 'At one celebrity-studded event at the Royal Albert Hall, I heard someone say to Paul McCartney: "Oh look, there's Anita Harris." Paul's response could be heard all over the room. "Ugh!" he said. "Miss Saccharine!" I was devastated.

'Twenty years later, Paul turned up again at another celebrity event, came over, planted a big kiss on my cheek and said: "You're great!"'

Her eyes sparkle with mischief as she relates this. 'So you see, maybe, like a good wine, I improve with age!'

She married Margolis in 1973 and they longed for children. But on a hot summer day in 1977, when she was five months pregnant, she suffered a devastating miscarriage.

As she was carried, bleeding profusely, to the ambulance, Margolis heard one of the ambulance men mutter: 'Well, we've lost her. She's a goner.'

Anita recovered, but, two years later, while performing in cabaret at the Paris Hilton, she suffered a second miscarriage.

By the mid Eighties, Harris was at the peak of her career  -  the highest-paid cabaret performer in the world with five sold-out seasons at the Talk of the Town.

But she was about to be devastated by another personal tragedy. Having been approached by Princess Anne to join a charity event sponsored by the Geneva-based Banque du Rhone et de la Tamise, she and Harris and Margolis were persuaded to move their savings to the bank.

Then, in February 1985, the couple were at their home in Hyde Park Gate, when they were watching a TV news bulletin which showed the London office of the bank being raided by the Fraud Squad.

Says Anita: 'Gradually it dawned on us that all our money - everything we had both worked for all our lives - had gone. We never got any of it back. We lost our home, and it ended by costing us over £1 million. Without doubt, the shock and strain of it all cut short my father's life.'

Happily, a lifeline came in the shape of the role of Grizabella the Glamour Cat in Cats. After two years in the hit show, Harris went back on the road, starring in plays and musicals. She even sang Leonard Bernstein's Mass at the Barbican.

Then, in 1994, while her husband was recovering from arterial surgery, Anita discovered a lump in one breast. She underwent a biopsy, X-rays and a mammogram.
The lump was successfully removed at the Princess Grace Hospital and she awoke to her husband's kiss and the words: 'Do you think you would be up to the BBC's French And Saunders Christmas Show?'

She bravely joined them and remembers: 'Dawn and Jennifer, who knew what had happened, presented me with the most beautiful bouquet.'

When the tour of Come On, Jeeves, ends later this month, Harris will prepare for her return to the recording studios to cut a new album of Christmas songs by leading British composers.

Then will come her autobiography, a DVD of her concert triumphs, a possible fitness DVD arising from her Fizzical Food bestseller, and the start of filming on Verity Lake.

'After all those difficult and sometimes frightening years, it feels as if we are moving into calmer waters at last,' she says.

'Mike, thank God, has been given the all-clear by the hospital and, career-wise, I have never been busier.'

In a voice that is strong and true, she sings to me some lines, written by her husband from her latest CD, The Essential Anita Harris:

Face up to your fears/And close the door on sorrow/ A brand new bright tomorrow/ Is waiting there for you...

Such sentiments are the true Anita Harris spirit. She adds: 'I don't claim that we are any less vulnerable for surviving the bad times, but as a woman I feel very blessed.'

Come On, Jeeves is on tour until July 19. For information, visit www.anitaharrisofficialsite.com

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