Richard Harris
Richard St John Francis Harris was an Irish actor and singer. Having studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, he rose to prominence as an icon of the British New Wave. He received numerous accolades including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor, a Grammy Award, and a Golden Globe. In 2020 he was listed at number 3 on The Irish Timess list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Harris received two Academy Award for Best Actor nominations for his performances in This Sporting Life, and The Field. Other notable roles include in The Guns of Navarone, Red Desert, A Man Called Horse, Cromwell, Unforgiven, Gladiator, and The Count of Monte Cristo. He gained cross-generational acclaim for his role as Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the latter of which was his final film role.
He portrayed King Arthur in the 1967 film Camelot based on the Lerner and Loewe musical of the same name. For his performance, he received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. He reprised the role in the 1981 Broadway musical revival. He received a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor nomination for his role in Pirandello's Henry IV.
Harris received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie nomination for his role in The Snow Goose. Harris had a number-one singing hit in Australia, Jamaica and Canada, and a top-ten hit in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States with his 1968 recording of Jimmy Webb's song "MacArthur Park". He received a Grammy Award for Best Male Pop Vocal Performance nomination for the song.
Early life and education
Harris was born on 1 October 1930 at Overdale, 8 Landsdown Villas, Ennis Road, Limerick, and was the fifth in a family of eight children born to Ivan Harris, a flour merchant, and his wife, Mildred. Overdale was "a tall, elegant, early 19th-century redbrick" house with nine bedrooms, in a wealthy part of Limerick, the houses "built at the turn of the 20th century for Limerick's burgeoning middle class... people who could afford properly grand drawing rooms, a bedroom each for the children and one for the pot, plus space for a few servants". He was educated by the Jesuits at Crescent College. A talented rugby union player, he appeared on several Munster Junior and Senior Cup teams for Crescent, and played for Garryowen. Harris's athletic career was cut short when he caught tuberculosis in his teens. He remained an ardent fan of the Munster Rugby and Young Munster teams until his death, attending many of their matches, and there are numerous stories of japes at rugby matches with the actors and fellow rugby fans Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton.After recovering from tuberculosis, Harris moved to England, wanting to become a director. He could not find any suitable training courses, and enrolled to learn acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He had failed an audition at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and had been rejected by the Central School of Speech and Drama, because they felt he was too old at 24. While still a student, he rented the tiny "off-West End" Irving Theatre, and there directed his production of Clifford Odets's play Winter Journey .
After completing his studies at the academy, he joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop. He began getting roles in West End theatre productions, starting with The Quare Fellow in 1956, a transfer from the Theatre Workshop. He spent nearly a decade in obscurity, learning his profession on stages throughout the UK.
Career
1959–1963: Early roles and breakthrough
Harris made his film debut in 1959 in the film Alive and Kicking, and played the lead role in The Ginger Man in the West End in 1959. In his second film, he had a small role as an IRA Volunteer in Shake Hands with the Devil, supporting James Cagney. The film was shot in Ireland and directed by Michael Anderson who offered Harris a role in his next film, The Wreck of the Mary Deare, shot in Hollywood.Harris played another IRA Volunteer in A Terrible Beauty, alongside Robert Mitchum. He had a memorable bit part in the film The Guns of Navarone as a Royal Australian Air Force pilot who reports that blowing up the "bloody guns" of the island of Navarone is impossible by an air raid. He had a larger part in The Long and the Short and the Tall, playing a British soldier; Harris clashed with Laurence Harvey and Richard Todd during filming. For his role in the film Mutiny on the Bounty, despite being virtually unknown to film audiences, Harris reportedly insisted on third billing, behind Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando, an actor he greatly admired. However, Harris fell out with Brando over the latter's behaviour during the film's production.
Harris's first starring role was in the film This Sporting Life, as a bitter young coal miner, Frank Machin, who becomes an acclaimed rugby league football player. It was based on the novel by David Storey and directed by Lindsay Anderson. For his role, Harris won Best Actor in 1963 at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination. Harris followed this with a leading role in the Italian film, Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso. This won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Harris received an offer to support Kirk Douglas in a British war film, The Heroes of Telemark, directed by Anthony Mann, playing a Norwegian resistance leader. He then went to Hollywood to support Charlton Heston in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee, as an Irish immigrant who became a Confederate cavalryman during the American Civil War. He played Cain in John Huston's film The Bible: In the Beginning.... More successful at the box office was Hawaii, in which Harris starred alongside Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow.
1967–1971: Rise to prominence
As a change of pace, he was the romantic lead in a Doris Day spy spoof comedy, Caprice, directed by Frank Tashlin. Harris next performed the role of King Arthur in the film adaptation of the musical play Camelot. Critic Roger Ebert described the casting of Harris and Vanessa Redgrave as "about the best King Arthur and Queen Guenevere I can imagine". Harris revived the role on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre from 15 November 1981 to 2 January 1982, and broadcast on HBO a year later. Starring Meg Bussert as Guenevere, Richard Muenz as Lancelot and Thor Fields as Tom of Warwick. Harris, who had starred in the film, and Muenz also took the show on tour nationwide.In The Molly Maguires, he played James McParland, the detective who infiltrates the title organisation, headed by Sean Connery. It was a box-office flop. However A Man Called Horse, with Harris in the title role, an 1825 English aristocrat who is captured by Native Americans, was a major success. He portrayed Oliver Cromwell in the film Cromwell in 1970 opposite Alec Guinness as King Charles I of England. That year British exhibitors voted him the 9th-most popular star at the UK box office.
In 1971 Harris starred in a BBC TV film adaptation The Snow Goose, from a screenplay by Paul Gallico. It won a Golden Globe for Best Movie made for TV and was nominated for both a BAFTA and an Emmy. and was shown in the United States as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. He made his directorial debut with Bloomfield and starred in Man in the Wilderness, a revisionist Western based on the Hugh Glass story.
1973–1981: Established actor
Harris starred in a Western for Samuel Fuller, Riata, which stopped production several weeks into filming. The project was re-assembled with a new director and cast, except for Harris, who returned: The Deadly Trackers. In 1973 Harris published a book of poetry, I, In the Membership of My Days, which was later reissued in part in an audio LP format, augmented by self-penned songs such as "I Don't Know".Harris starred in two thrillers: 99 and 44/100% Dead, for John Frankenheimer, and Juggernaut, for Richard Lester. In Echoes of a Summer he played the father of a young girl with a terminal illness. He had a cameo as Richard the Lionheart in Robin and Marian, for Lester, then was in The Return of a Man Called Horse. Harris led the all-star cast in the train disaster film The Cassandra Crossing. He played Gulliver in the part-animated Gulliver's Travels and was reunited with Michael Anderson in Orca, battling a killer whale.
He appeared in another action film, Golden Rendezvous, based on a novel by Alistair Maclean, shot in South Africa. Harris was sued by the film's producer for his drinking; Harris counter-sued for defamation and the matter was settled out of court. Golden Rendezvous was a flop but The Wild Geese, where Harris played one of several mercenaries, was a big success outside America. Ravagers was more action, set in a post-apocalyptic world. Game for Vultures was set in Rhodesia and shot in South Africa.
In Hollywood he appeared in The Last Word, then supported Bo Derek in Tarzan, the Ape Man. He made a film in Canada, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid, a drama about impotence. He followed it with another Canadian film, Highpoint, a movie so bad it was not released for several years.
1980–1988: Continued success
For a while in the 1980s, Harris went into semi-retirement on Paradise Island, in the Bahamas, where he kicked his drinking habit and embraced a healthier lifestyle. It had a beneficial effect. Harris's career was revived by his success on stage in Camelot, and powerful performance in the West End run of Luigi Pirandello's Henry IV.He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1990, when he was surprised by Michael Aspel during the curtain call of the Pirandello's play Henry IV at the Wyndham's Theatre in London. Over several years in the late 1980s, Harris worked with Irish author Michael Feeney Callan on his biography, which was published by Sidgwick & Jackson in 1990. His film work during this period included: Triumphs of a Man Called Horse, Martin's Day, Strike Commando 2, King of the Wind and Mack the Knife plus the TV film version of Maigret, opposite Barbara Shelley. This indicated declining popularity which Harris told his biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, he was "utterly reconciled to".