List of Shrek Characters - Secondary Characters - King Harold

King Harold is the king of Far Far Away, husband of Queen Lillian and father of Princess Fiona. He is voiced by John Cleese.

King Harold makes his debut in Shrek 2. When his daughter Fiona arrives at the castle with her new husband, he is surprised that they are both ogres. He had secretly made a promise to the Fairy Godmother that her son Prince Charming would marry Fiona. Harold hires Puss in Boots to assassinate Shrek, but then succumbs to guilt when Fiona finds out that Shrek is not around. When the Fairy Godmother asks Harold to give Fiona the potion that will cause her to fall in love with Prince Charming, he refuses at first, recoiling from this invasion of her free will, but he is forced to acquiesce by some dark threat of disclosure. In the event, when Fiona states that she loves the old Shrek, rather the new one that Prince Charming is pretending to be, Harold swaps the cup containing the potion for his own. At the ball toward the end of the film, Harold protects Fiona and Shrek from a blast of magic from Fairy Godmother's wand, and it transforms him back into a frog, which is hinted to be his original form, meaning he was the Frog Prince before he married Queen Lillian. Queen Lillian seems content with this turn of events. Afterwards, Harold apologizes to Shrek and accepts him into the family, and Lillian says that he is more of a man for accepting the marriage of Shrek and Fiona than he ever was when he was a human.

King Harold makes a very brief appearance as a frog king in Shrek The Third, in which he dies of a sickness. (The story book The Legend of Shrek and other publications state that the transition from human to frog confused his age and accelerated the aging process.) He tells Shrek on his deathbed that he and Fiona are next in line to the throne of Far Far Away, which Shrek rejects because he cannot imagine an ogre as king. Harold dies after telling Shrek about Fiona's cousin Arthur.

King Harold makes his final appearance in Shrek Forever After, in which he appears very briefly in a couple of flashbacks. In the first, he and Lillian are about to make a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, but they break it off at the last moment. In the alternate reality of the second flashback, Harold and Lillian disappear after signing over the kingdom to Rumpelstiltskin. At the end of the film, the original timeline is restored, leaving the current time a year or so after Harold's death (as seen in Shrek the Third). However, there is a large painting of him in which the face moves, indicating that his spirit inhabits the picture. Unlike the previous films, he is never seen in his frog form.

The king's role is partly a reference to another character that Cleese portrayed: Basil Fawlty from the sitcom Fawlty Towers. The king refers to his "old war wound" (in the UK version – in the US version, it is "the old Crusades wound") to avoid his wife. This recalls Basil Fawlty's use of his "honourable war wound" (a shrapnel wound from the Korean War) as an excuse to rescue himself from unpleasant situations. The two characters share other similar character traits.