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.