TVTimes Magazine
March 20, 1980
CASSANDRA HARRIS is a girl who has always kept in shape, whether on stage or a fashion catwalk. She happily found her feet as first an actress, then as a top photographic fashion model, and now back as an actress — you can see her in Saturday’s episode of Enemy at the Door. This sunny blonde hails from Australia but shudders at the idea of being thought the typical outdoor type — she says she played tennis at school only because it was compulsory — but she does believe in keeping in shape. Cassandra is a frequent glamorous addition to the swimming baths at Wimbledon, Surrey, near the home she shares with her two children and actor Pierce Brosnan, and has a weekly work-out at the Dance Centre in London’s Covent Garden.
“Today’s tracksuits are so good-looking you can wear them anywhere, not just for jogging.”
In between her acting and modeling careers, she has turned to writing . . . Four years ago, Cassandra spent several weeks in hospital having treatment for a heart valve condition. While convalescing she wrote a play about a model girl and submitted it to a TV company — who thanked her politely and sent it back. Not deterred, she followed that up with a book on the same theme but this, too, was rejected by a publisher. More recently she has tried writing a TV comedy series about a model with two children and a Cockney nanny.
“That hasn’t got off the ground either,” she says. “I have these brilliant ideas but I don’t have enough follow-through.”
Cassandra doesn’t have too much luck with tape-recorders either. Soon after she first arrive in London in 1970, she thought it would be an interesting idea to interview some English actors. She called up Michael Caine’s agent who fixed an interview for her. She spent two hours with Caine and when she got home found she had pressed the wrong button on the tape recorder and wiped the tape clean.
Later, she interviewed John Hurt. He took her to lunch, and this time, all she could hear on the rape-recorder afterwards was the clash of cutlery and the clatter of china and glass.
However, she’s not giving up and is now looking around for other successful English actors to interview for a series of magazine articles she plans to write.
Cassandra hopes her latest TV appearance will give a boost to her acting career which she describes as chequered — and which has had more than its share of false and faltering starts.
She had been an actress for 10 years when she left Sydney, with two Australian acting awards, and arrived in London. Appropriately, she was cast as the lead in a TV play about a young Australian girl who arrives, a total stranger, in London. She was directed by Bill Bain who 10 years later, directs her again in Enemy at the Door.
Cassandra’s alternative career as a model was launched by a chance encounter with Sammy Davis Jr., outside the London Palladium. The American star asked if he could take her photograph. The picture appeared in a magazine colour supplement and Cassandra was immediately offered work by a model agency. Peter Lichfield was one of the many photographers who enthused about her.
At the time, she did not realize that becoming a top model with pictures in Vogue and other glossy magazines would one day make it difficult for her to return to her career as an actress.
Then Cassandra met Dermot Harris, brother of the rumbustious Richard, at a party which might have, but did not, lead to her playing Jane Eyre in the film with George C. Scott.
“I didn’t get the part — but I got Dermot,” she says, exploding with laughter.
They moved in together. As she says, it seemed then “quite the thing to do, quite exciting — and had two children quite quickly.” Charlotte-Emily was born in 1972* and Christopher was born a year later. While pregnant with her daughter, Cassandra changed her surname from Gleeson to Harris. “At first I had decided there was no reason for getting married. It was only while I was pregnant that I felt a kind of moral panic and thought, if only for the sake of the children, I should change my name.”
Cassandra and Dermot are no longer together. The children have now accepted another man in their young lives and Cassandra and Pierce Brosnan plan to marry in May.
“I do think being married matters,” says Cassandra. “We both think so.”
Cassandra is 5ft. 8in. tall: Brosnan is 6ft. 2 in. “Apart from everything else I like about him — Pierce is one of the few men I’ve been out with who is actually taller than I am,” says Cassandra Harris.
*Charlotte was actually born in 1971.
