George Harrison Marks — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

George Harrison Marks (6 August 1926 – 27 June 1997) was an English glamour photographer and director of nudist, and later, pornographic films.

Born in Tottenham, Middlesex in 1926 to a Jewish family, Marks was 17 when he married his first wife, Diana Bugsgang. He worked as a stand-up comedian in variety halls towards the end of the music hall era, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in a duo called Harrison and Stuart. Marks left the act in 1951 to develop his photographic career, taking pictures of music-hall performers and showgirls. The model and actress Pamela Green was performing as a dancer in a 1952 revue called Paris to Piccadilly, a version of the Folies Bergère in London. She became Marks' lover and began working with him as a model. Their relationship ended in 1961. During the 1960s Marks had a relationship with another of his models, June Palmer, and he married his second wife Vivienne Warren in 1964.

While he was filming The Naked World of Harrison Marks he began a relationship with Toni Burnett, an actress and model who made a brief appearance in the film. In 1967, the year the film came out, Marks and Burnett had a daughter, Josie Harrison Marks. Marks' and Green's business partnership was dissolved in the same year, and in 1970 Marks was bankrupt.

In 1971 he was tried at the Old Bailey for dealing in pornography by post. Marks and Burnett married in September 1973, but they split up around 1978. In 1979 Marks began a relationship with Louise Sinclair, a teenage glamour model.