Noel Harrison

Pop singer Noel Harrison first drew major attention in music circles during 1969 when his recording of Michel Legrand’s “Windmills of Your Mind” climbed to number eight on the British charts. The track had gained widespread exposure the previous year after appearing in the Steve McQueen film The Thomas Crown Affair, which helped push it into the public spotlight.

His formal entry into mainstream recording came in 1966 with a self-titled album issued by Decca, although earlier fame had already surrounded him through his lineage as the son of actor Rex Harrison, best known for portraying Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, and through his own television work as Mark Slate in the series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., itself a spinoff of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He kept releasing material through 1970, issuing multiple albums on Reprise and scoring a modest success with his interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” before departing Hollywood to settle in Nova Scotia. While there he presented the television series Take Time, which spotlighted assorted songwriters, and maintained an active singing schedule.

A decade later he relocated once more to Los Angeles, where he resumed writing songs and took on occasional acting roles. Screenwriting joined his professional credits when he penned several soft-porn films. Beyond performing and recording, Harrison also directed projects and published written work. He later assumed the role of Henry Higgins himself and appeared in stage productions of Camelot, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. In the 2000s he returned to Great Britain, where he performed intermittently and issued two further albums, Hold Back Time in 2003 and From the Sublime to the Ridiculous in 2010. Harrison died at his Devon residence in 2013 after suffering a heart attack.