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To Lisa Rinna, one of the perennially bickering divas of the long-running US reality TV institution The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, her actor husband is never just “Harry”. It’s always, no matter the context, “Harry Hamlin”. “Harry Hamlin is making us dinner.” “Harry Hamlin is a master pie-maker.” “You know, Harry Hamlin plays guitar.” A bit weird, right? But spend a few minutes with the man and it all starts to make sense. “Harry” seems far too pedestrian for the Eighties film heartthrob, who shot to fame as an oiled-up demigod in Desmond Davis’s Clash of the Titans (1981). “Harry” is a bloke you meet down the pub; “Harry Hamlin”, with his debonair drawl and old-Hollywood charm, is a movie star – a man who drifts eruditely between topics ranging from nuclear fusion to Shakespeare. “Aneutronic fusion is one of my big passions,” he says, off-handedly. “I have many passions.”
Appearing over Zoom from his kitchen, the California-born actor and part-time reality TV husband looks about a decade younger than his 72 years. A shock of white hair runs through his neat mid-parting. A pair of thick spectacles frame his tanned, taut face. He’s also full of surprises. His father was a rocket scientist, which goes some way to explaining why Hamlin has been hawking fusion power since the Nineties and is on the board of governors of the National Space Society (whatever that is). He was kicked out of college for presiding over a hippie commune, before graduating from Yale in 1974. Then he studied at the Moscow Art Theatre before film work intervened. In fact, he’s still training to this day.
“I have been in acting class my entire career,” he tells me. Every Saturday at 9:30am, he arrives at The Hudson Theatre in Los Angeles for scene study class. “Every Saturday I want to wake up and say, ‘Okay, I’m going to do The Tempest today, I want to play Prospero’ … Doing the things that the [TV] business would never offer you… these are the things that I enjoy doing.”
It was during one such session that a friend asked him to appear in their new “audio movie” – think an episodic drama podcast – called Unsinkable. The project – produced by Amazon’s Wondery studio – is a dramatised retelling of the British Second World War tanker San Demetrio, which faced a harrowing journey through Nazi-infested waters.
Hamlin plays Able Seaman Mortimer, “an alcoholic who overcomes his addiction, and is able to actually save the day”, he says. It’s an interesting experiment. There’s no narrator to guide the story, instead relying on its ensemble cast to fill in the gaps with their dialogue. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Nathalie Emmanuel, Brian Cox and John Malkovich lend their recognisable voices – not that Hamlin ever got to meet them. “It was made right at the height of the pandemic,” he says solemnly. “I did it solo, with my head inside of a box.”
Not quite Henry V at The Globe then, but Hamlin has done his fair share of work with the greats. In 1980, he was set to star in a film version of Tristan and Isolde with Richard Burton when he was offered the opportunity to act alongside Laurence Olivier in a retelling of the Greek myth of Perseus. “Olivier had been my hero,” he says. “All throughout my drama school, he was the person that I looked up to the most.” And so, he chose to make Clash of the Titans, which would be the hit of his career, albeit via a very fraught production process.
It got to the point where [Real Housewives] was just too much. I’m glad that my wife isn’t on it anymore. Very glad
“The producers didn’t speak to me for 25 years afterwards,” Hamlin says. The actor, who had previously studied mythology at Yale, fought constantly over the script’s myriad inaccuracies, even locking himself in his trailer when the producers suggested Medusa’s head should be cut off by throwing his shield, rather than with Perseus’s symbolic Harpe sword. “They unplugged all the electricity to my trailer and essentially tried to smoke me out,” he remembers. “They were only concerned with making money. I was concerned with making as good a movie as possible, given the limitations of the script.”
Olivier was not too impressed with the film either. Hamlin digs out a letter handwritten to him by the legendary actor, in which he apologises for meeting him “under such circumstances”. “‘It must be odd to see an old man hanging on by his fingernails, undignified really. Well, so many mouths to feed’,” Hamlin reads, laughing. “He was basically indicating that he was doing a stupid movie to make money… to the film’s star!”
During Titans, Hamlin struck up a relationship with his co-star, the Bond girl Ursula Andress, who is 16 years his senior. Rinna, whom he married in 1997, would share on an episode of Real Housewives that Andress summoned Hamlin, then 28, to her hotel room and got pregnant that night. Their son Dimitri was born in 1980; the couple broke up three years later. These days, age gaps between celebrity couples are the subject of endless discourse. Did Hamlin experience similar attention? “Whether people cared back then,” he says, “I don’t care… I mean, I did have a relationship with a woman who was substantially older than I, and we have a beautiful son as a result of that. I wasn’t thinking about the age gap at the time, but I suppose now people think about that kind of stuff much more.”
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Titans was a hit, and Hamlin’s bare-chested exposure led to offers to star in other hokey genre films such as First Blood and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. It wasn’t a path he was interested in, though. Instead, Hamlin risked it all, signing onto the first gay-themed love story to be produced by a major American film studio, 1982’s Making Love. He thinks the casting of two straight actors in the movie was a sign of the times. “Back then, no gay man would have wanted the world to know they were gay, everyone was closeted,” he says. “But the undeniable effect was that a lot of people in the business thought that those of us playing gay roles must be gay.”
While it was a significant moment in queer cinema, Making Love torpedoed Hamlin’s trajectory as a leading man. “No studio wanted to pair me up with a female lead after that – they thought the audience would think, ‘How weird that a gay guy is paired up with a woman’,” he says. “I did nothing but studio features before that. It took 40 years after that movie to do another one.”
Hamlin’s career underwent a number of metamorphoses in the aftermath. The soapy TV drama L.A. Law, which he starred in from 1986 to 1991, got him voted People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1987 – but says that it “beige-d out” the parts he played. “I went from doing extremely interesting stuff, Making Love included, then after L.A. Law people had an idea that I was this guy who wears a tie and carries a briefcase. It was hard to get the good, meaty roles after that.” So maybe don’t see his made-for-TV films such as Poisoned by Love: The Kern County Murders. Do see, though, his Emmy-nominated turn as a suited-and-booted ad exec in Mad Men.
Much like Rinna, who first shot to fame as an actor in TV series including Melrose Place and Days of Our Lives, Hamlin became intermingled with reality television in the late Noughties. He says today that it was born out of the global financial crisis, and the collapse of a fashion line he and his wife had founded together. “We went from [having] an extremely successful retail business to bankruptcy,” he says. They starred in a short-lived reality series together – Harry Loves Lisa – before Rinna joined Real Housewives. Hamlin would pop up on it occasionally, serving as the doting husband to a woman who, over time, became the show’s pantomime villain.
In 2023, following eight years of online trolling and a notorious incident in which she was booed by the show’s fans at a reality TV convention, Rinna left the show. “It became very poisonous,” says Hamlin. “She’s an extremely honest person. So when she sees something that she feels is unjust, or unjustifiable, yeah, she’ll respond to that. But when she does that, she gives ammunition to people on the other side, who will be able to come back and parry with some mean thing. It got to the point where that was just too much.” His voice grows sombre. “I’m glad that she’s not on it anymore. Very glad.”
Still, he has few regrets. When Rinna and Hamlin were debating whether Real Housewives was a good idea for them, they were advised by their friend Bethenny Frankel – the entrepreneur and former queen of the franchise’s New York chapter – that it would be invaluable from a marketing perspective. And in what I’m sure is a total coincidence, one episode of Real Housewives saw Hamlin make the ladies his “famous” Bolognese, which was so well-received that it got Hamlin his own cooking show. “How about that?” Hamlin laughs, before seeming to have a lightbulb moment. “Hold on a sec, let me get something.” Hamlin disappears off-camera, and returns holding a jar that reads Harry’s Famous Sauce. “We’re hoping to launch in a big retailer this September,” he beams, ever the salesman.
It looks delicious. But something’s not quite right. It should read Harry Hamlin’s Famous Sauce, surely?
The first three episodes of ‘Unsinkable’ are out now on Wondery
