Richard Harris dies
October 26, 2002 — 10.00am
Irish actor Richard Harris, the roisterous star of such diverse films as This Sporting Life, A Man Called Horse, and Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, has died at a London hospital.
"With great sadness, Damian, Jared and Jamie Harris announced the death of their beloved father, Richard Harris," the family said. "He died peacefully at University College Hospital," where he had been receiving treatment for Hodgkin's Disease after falling ill earlier this year.
Harris was undergoing chemotherapy not long after finishing the role that has endeared him to an entirely new generation of filmgoers, Professor Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.
In an interview last year with The Associated Press, Harris said that it was his young granddaughter, Ella, who persuaded him to do the Harry Potter films. "She called me and said, 'If you don't do it, papa, I'll never speak to you again,' and I thought, `I can't afford that. I have to do it.'"
The Harry Potter franchise brought right up to the present the appeal of the tall, sturdy figure with a reputation as a hellraiser.
"We've lost a wonderful actor and a man with a great deal of courage," said Clint Eastwood, who starred with Harris in the 1992 Academy Award winning film Unforgiven.
"Richard was wonderful to work with - a slightly mad Irishman and a truly gifted performer. His presence on the set during the filming of Unforgiven always gave all of us a much needed lift during the many hours of difficult work on that film," Eastwood said.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said he was deeply saddened by the death of "one of Ireland's most outstanding artists".
Once described as looking like "five miles of bad country road", Harris was never cut out to join contemporaries as a smooth matinee idol.
Despite that, he was often bracketed with Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole among a new breed of rough, tough Anglo-Irish actors.
The fifth of eight children, the young Harris set his heart on directing, but acting soon claimed him, and he enjoyed his first stage success with Joan Littlewood's pioneering Theatre Workshop.
He won the Best Actor award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival for This Sporting Life, the same film for which he received his first Oscar nomination. Other major roles included Major Dundee, Hawaii, Camelot, The Molly Maguires, A Man Called Horse and Cromwell.
Born on October 1, 1930, in Limerick, southern Ireland, Harris suffered a bout of tuberculosis in adolescence, which friends say fostered the brooding, introspective quality of his acting. He moved to London to study, but when he couldn't find a suitable directing course he joined an acting course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 1956.
Harris made his professional stage debut on July 24, 1956, in the Joan Littlewood production of Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow" at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East.
It was a small part, but Lee Strasberg, director of the New York Actors Studio, said it had the "sharpest impact" of any performance he had seen by an actor in Britain.
Roles followed in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge and Pirandello's "an, Beast and Virtue. Harris also toured Russia and Eastern Europe with a Theatre Workshop production of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
To earn extra income, Harris turned to television, and his performance in a 1958 TV play called The Iron Harp led to a contract with Associated British Picture Corp.
His first film part was a cameo in a comedy called Alive And Kicking, about three elderly women who escape from a home for seniors.
Harris' first lead role in London's West End came at the Fortune Theatre in 1959 in J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, a study of the life of a drunken Dublin student.
After more TV work, both in England and the United States, Harris appeared as the sadistic Corporal Johnstone in The Long and the Short and the Tall, a film based on the much-admired play by Willis Hall, a study of man's inhumanity to man during World War II.
He was well received as a mutinous sailor in Columbia's remake of Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando.
But it was his role as the violent, inarticulate Yorkshire miner in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life that established him as an actor of the first rank, reminding critics over the years of Brando.
Typically, Harris turned his back on the plaudits to produce a financially unrewarding but artistically acclaimed presentation of The Diary Of A Madman, which he and Anderson adapted from Gogol's short story about a Russian clerk's decline into insanity.
But after a series of bombs -- Orca, The Ravagers, Game For Vultures, Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid -- Harris' career hit the skids.
"I made a decision that half was made for me by the motion picture business," he recalled. "Around 1980, I decided that was it, that my career was really finished. I was doing a series of movies that I wasn't happy doing. The standard of the movies was very low. Because of what I was offered, I was unhappy."
He decided to quit films entirely, instead touring for three years in the stage musical Camelot, reprising the role of King Arthur that he had played in the 1967 film.
More recently, he returned to the West End in Pirandello's difficult Henry IV, earning the raves he had hoped for. "I decided to finish my career on a high note," he said at the time, and, indeed, a subsequent stage production of King Lear - intended to continue his theatrical winning streak - never happened.
His movie work, however, did continue.
As the thundering Irish peasant Bull McCabe in The Field, he was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor in 1990. Within the last decade, he has appeared in two winners of the best-picture Oscar - Unforgiven and, two years ago, Gladiator, playing the war-weary Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
As Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, he joked about being expected to do seven films.
Possessed of a sharp temper, Harris was no stranger to arguments and was known to cancel interviews and miss appearances if he felt indisposed. He once spoke of having his nose broken nine times.
After decades of heavy boozing, Harris gave up drinking in 1982 - typically, after drinking two last bottles of expensive wine at one sitting.
He is survived by his three sons from his first marriage to Elizabeth Rees-Williams. Jamie and Jared are actors and Damian is a director.
Printer friendly version Email to a friend