Donald Hugh Harron, OC OOnt (September 19, 1924 – January 17, 2015) was a Canadian comedian, actor, director, journalist, author, playwright, and composer.

Harron is best remembered by American audiences as a member of the cast of the long-running country music series Hee Haw, on which he played his signature character of Charlie Farquharson.

[1][2] As a teenager, Harron spent time working as a farm hand in rural Ontario; experience he later credited for the development of his Charlie Farquharson character.

[3] He graduated from Vaughan Road Collegiate Institute in 1942 and briefly attended the University of Toronto before enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943.

[3] He spent two years in London, England, travelling there variously performing in a West End production of A Streetcar Named Desire and also working for the BBC as a comedy writer, acting in a radio series, playing the part of a clown in the film The Red Shoes (1948), and writing scripts for Gracie Fields.

[1] Returning to North America in the 1950s, Harron was featured in the inaugural season of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario as the male lead in All's Well That Ends Well and a minor part in Richard III[3] and on Broadway[1] and was one of the writers on the first English-language dramatic series broadcast in Canada, Sunshine Sketches, which aired from 1952 to 1953 on CBC Television.

Harron later adapted the production for the stage in 1965 as Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, which continues to be performed annually during the Charlottetown Festival.

As well, the character received international attention as part of the cast of the U.S. country music television show, Hee Haw during its 23-year run;[3] on that series, which ran from 1969 to 1992, Harron portrayed a rural anchorman for station KORN, and concluded the final story of each newscast with a cutthroat gesture.

Dressed in an overly well-worn sweater along with a frayed cap, and sporting a grizzled "two-day beard", Farquharson is a decidedly rural Ontario farmer from the real-life town of Parry Sound.

Uneducated, but not without a boisterous "school of hard knocks" sensibility, Charlie would loudly deliver his opinion about matters local and worldwide, using many malapropisms in the process which often resulted in both double meanings and increased satire about the events.

In addition to his television appearances as Charlie, through the 1970s and 80s Harron provided humorous syndicated commentaries to various Canadian radio stations in the Farquharson persona.

He also continued to write books, most recently (2008) publishing a retrospective work on the history of the Anne of Green Gables musical to tie in with the 100th anniversary of the original novel.