Рассел Харти: Өмір жолы мен мансабы

English television presenter

Harty was born in Blackburn, Lancashire, the son of greengrocer Fred Harty, who ran a fruit and vegetable stall on the local market, and Myrtle Rishton. He attended Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School on West Park Road in Blackburn, where he enjoyed appearing in school plays and met, for the first time, the then English teacher Ronald Eyre, who directed a number of the productions. Thereafter he studied at Exeter College, Oxford, where he obtained a degree in English literature.

On leaving university, he taught briefly at Blakey Moor Secondary Modern School in Blackburn, then became an English and drama teacher at Giggleswick School in North Yorkshire. "I got a first class degree, and was a hopeless teacher", Harty later said. However, his friend and Oxford contemporary Alan Bennett commented in his 2016 memoir Keeping On Keeping On that Harty "had a third class degree and taught brilliantly". Harty's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography also states he was awarded a third class degree in 1957. Among Harty's pupils at the Giggleswick School were the journalist and television presenter Richard Whiteley and the actors Graham Hamilton and Anthony Daniels. In the mid 1960s Harty spent a year lecturing in English literature at the City University of New York. A documentary on Salvador Dalí ("Hello Dalí") directed by Bruce Gowers, won an Emmy. Another award winning documentary was Finnan Games about a Scottish community, Glenfinnan, where "Bonnie Prince Charlie" raised his standard to begin the Jacobite rising of 1745, and its Highland Games. In 1972 he interviewed Marc Bolan, who at that time was at the height of his fame as a teen idol and king of glam rock. During the interview Harty asked Bolan what he thought he would be doing when he was forty or sixty years old, Bolan replying that he didn't think he would live that long. (Bolan subsequently was killed in a car crash at age 29 on 16 September 1977.) In 1972 he was given his own series, Russell Harty Plus (later simply titled Russell Harty), conducting lengthy celebrity interviews, on ITV, which placed him against the BBC's Parkinson. Initially shown on BBC2 in a mid evening slot, Harty's chatshow ran until 1982 before being moved to an early evening BBC1 slot in 1983 where it was now simply titled Harty. The show ended in late 1984, though Harty would continue to present factual programmes for the BBC for some time afterwards. In 1985, Harty was invited to the Prince's Palace of Monaco, by Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, to conduct his first interview since the death of Grace Kelly in 1982. He was the subject of This Is Your Life in December 1980, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the London department store Selfridges. In 1986 he interviewed Dirk Bogarde at his house in France, for Yorkshire Television, at Bogarde's invitation. He began working on a new series Russell Harty's Grand Tour for the BBC in 1987.

For the last six years of his life, his partner was the Irish novelist Jamie O'Neill. Latterly they resided in Harty's cottage in Giggleswick, North Yorkshire. Harty was a friend of the playwright Alan Bennett, who talks about him and his family, in relation to Bennett's own family, in the essay "Written on the Body", taken from his semi biography Untold Stories.

In mid 1988 Harty became ill with hepatitis B and was admitted to St James's University Hospital, Leeds. Around this time The Sun tabloid newspaper began publishing stories about his health and private life, claiming that the disease was "related to an HIV/AIDS" infection, and that Harty was in the habit of using teenage male prostitutes. He died in St James' University Hospital on 8 June 1988 at the age of 53 from liver failure caused by hepatitis. At his funeral Alan Bennett commented in his eulogy that "the gutter press had finished Harty off."