International Stardom
Harvey's breakthrough to international stardom came in 1959 when he was cast by director Jack Clayton as the social climber Joe Lampton in Room at the Top produced by British film producing brothers Sir John and James Woolf of Romulus Films and Remus Films. For his performance, Harvey received a BAFTA Award nomination and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, the first person of Lithuanian descent to be nominated for an acting Oscar.
Harvey was cast in the role that had made Peter O'Toole prominent in the West End: the film version of The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961); O'Toole was not established in cinema and Harvey was more "bankable". During the late 1950s and 1960s, Harvey appeared in several major films. In 1960 he starred in BUtterfield 8 and John Wayne's epic The Alamo, released within a month of each other. Other films included Walk on the Wild Side (1962) with Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Fonda and Capucine; the film adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Summer and Smoke (1961) with Geraldine Page, and Darling (1965) with Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. He also appeared as the brainwashed Raymond Shaw in 1962 in the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate. The same year, he recorded an album of spoken excerpts from the book "This Is My Beloved" by Walter Benton, accompanied by original music by Herbie Mann. It was released on the Atlantic Records label.
Harvey played King Arthur in the 1964 London production of the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot, at Drury Lane. He became very good friends with Elizabeth Taylor and his Manchurian Candidate co-star Frank Sinatra, and was a member in good standing of high society, then dubbed "The Jet Set".
Between 1959-65, Harvey appeared opposite three actresses who won the Academy Award for their performances: Simone Signoret in Room at the Top, Elizabeth Taylor in BUtterfield 8, and Julie Christie in Darling. (Geraldine Page, his co-star in Summer and Smoke, was also nominated for a Best Actress Oscar but did not win.)
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