Lee Harris (South African artist)

Lee Harris (born 1936 in Johannesburg), is a South African writer and performer who has lived and worked primarily in the United Kingdom since 1956.

He was one of the few white members of the African National Congress, where he helped with the Congress of the People and met Nelson Mandela. After moving to England at the age of 20, he acted with Orson Welles and Dame Flora Robson; wrote for the British underground press, including International Times; helped found the Arts Lab, and has been an instrumental figure in the British counterculture movement since the seventies. He published Brainstorm Comix and Home Grown magazine in the 1970s.

Harris was born in 1936 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to immigrant Lithuanian Jewish parents. As a youth, he was one of relatively few whites in the society to join the African National Congress, opposing racial segregation at the time when the apartheid system was being enforced by the National Party, which had come to power in 1948. Harris helped with arrangements for the Congress of the People gathering in the summer of 1955, held at Kliptown, Soweto. The crowd of thousands was surrounded by 200 armed police.

Harris moved to London, England, in 1956 at the age of 20. He studied acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1960 Harris got a role in the Orson Welles Shakespearian adaptation Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles both acted and directed. Harris also worked with Dame Flora Robson understudying the lead and playing a small part in The Corn Is Green.

Harris started writing plays. One was called Buzz Buzz. Lee described his first full-length play, Love Play, as "A boy's journey through the underworld of emotional revelation". John Peter's review in the Sunday Times, 18 May 1969, said, "Lee Harris's Love Play (Arts Laboratory) might have been inspired by some of Artaud's equivocal, visionary phrases: The theatre as “The truthful precipitate of dreams” : “The human body raised to the dignity of signs.”

...
Wikipedia