Frederic Russell Harty was an English television presenter of arts programmes and chat shows.
14 Facts About Russell Harty
2.
However, his friend and Oxford contemporary Alan Bennett commented in his 2016 memoir Keeping On Keeping On that Russell Harty "had a third-class degree and taught brilliantly".
3.
Russell Harty began his broadcasting career in 1967 when he became a radio producer for the BBC Third Programme, reviewing arts and literature.
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Russell Harty got his first break in 1970 presenting the arts programme Aquarius, that was intended to be London Weekend Television's response to the BBC's Omnibus.
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One programme involving a "meeting of cultures" saw Russell Harty travelling to Italy in 1974 to engineer an encounter between the entertainer Gracie Fields and the composer William Walton, two fellow Lancastrians now living on the neighbouring islands of Capri and Ischia.
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In 1972 he was given his own series, Russell Harty Plus, conducting lengthy celebrity interviews, on ITV, which placed him against the BBC's Parkinson.
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In 1973 Russell Harty won a Pye Television Award for the Most Outstanding New Personality of the Year.
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Russell Harty remained with ITV until 1980, at which point his show moved to the BBC.
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In 1985, Russell 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.
10.
Russell Harty was the subject of This Is Your Life in December 1980, when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews at the London department store Selfridges.
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Russell Harty began working on a new series Russell Harty's Grand Tour for the BBC in 1987.
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Russell 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.
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In mid-1988 Russell Harty became ill with hepatitis B and was admitted to St James's University Hospital, Leeds.
14.
Russell Harty died in St James' University Hospital on 8 June 1988 at the age of 53 from liver failure caused by hepatitis.