Vaunting ambition marked the career of Laurence Harvey, and many said, even during his lifetime, that his ambitions far exceeded his actual talent. He died young, and opinions of him expressed after his death were markedly divided - some hated him, many regarded him as a vulgarian and arriviste, and a few seemed willing to forgive him anything. He found stardom in British films well before the age of 30, but he made no secret of his desire to get to Hollywood; however, when he did get there, after the huge international success of 1959's "Room At The Top", his career nose-dived spectacularly,
… More and at once. He won fine reviews for "The Manchurian Candidate", a superb film (though initially a flop at the box-office); almost all his other Hollywood credits were, in one way or another, either grave disappointments or outright disasters. His directing debut, "The Ceremony" (1964), was critically savaged and vanished from sight almost immediately. By the early 1970s, he was doing guest shots on TV shows; ironically his appearances in "Columbo" and "Night Gallery", in the last months of his life, were some of his best work in years. 
