Richard Harris
Richard St John Francis Harris (1 October 1930 – 25 October 2002)[1] 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, and a Grammy Award. In 2020, he was listed at number 3 on The Irish Times's list of Ireland's greatest film actors.[2]
For other people named Richard Harris, see Richard Harris (disambiguation).
Richard Harris
25 October 2002 (aged 72)
Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery, Limerick, Ireland
Actor, singer
1956–2002
-
Elizabeth Rees-Williams(m. 1957; div. 1969)
Annabelle Wallis (great-niece)
Harris received two Academy Award for Best Actor nominations for his performances in This Sporting Life (1963), and The Field (1990). Other notable roles include in The Guns of Navarone (1961), Red Desert (1964), A Man Called Horse (1970), Cromwell (1970), Unforgiven (1992), Gladiator (2000), and The Count of Monte Cristo (2002). 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 (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), 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 for his role in Pirandello's Henry IV.(1991).
Harris received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or Movie nomination for his role in The Snow Goose (1971). 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[edit]
Harris was born on 1 October 1930, at Overdale, 8 Landsdown Villas, Ennis Road, Limerick,[3][4][5] and was the fifth in a family of eight children, (six boys & two girls), to flour merchant Ivan Harris and Mildred (née Harty).[1] 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".[6][7] He was educated by the Jesuits at Crescent College. A talented rugby player, he appeared on several Munster Junior and Senior Cup teams for Crescent, and played for Garryowen.[8] 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 actors and fellow rugby fans Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton.
After recovering from tuberculosis, Harris moved to Great Britain, wanting to become a director. He could not find any suitable training courses, and enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to learn acting. 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.[9] While still a student, he rented the tiny "off-West End" Irving Theatre, and there directed his own production of Clifford Odets's play Winter Journey (The Country Girl).
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.[10]
Career[edit]
1959–1963: Early roles and breakthrough[edit]
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 (1959), supporting James Cagney. The film was shot in Ireland and directed by Michael Anderson who offered Harris a role in his next movie, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), shot in Hollywood.
Harris played another IRA Volunteer in A Terrible Beauty (1960), alongside Robert Mitchum. He had a memorable bit part in the film The Guns of Navarone (1961) 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 (1961), playing a British soldier; Harris clashed with Laurence Harvey and Richard Todd during filming. For his role in the film Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), 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 (1963), 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 (Red Desert, 1964). 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 (1965), directed by Anthony Mann, playing a Norwegian resistance leader. He then went to Hollywood to support Charlton Heston in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965), 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... (1966). More successful at the box office was Hawaii (1966), in which Harris starred alongside Julie Andrews and Max von Sydow.
1967–1971: Rise to prominence[edit]
As a change of pace, he was the romantic lead in a Doris Day spy spoof comedy, Caprice (1967), directed by Frank Tashlin. Harris next performed the role of King Arthur in the film adaptation of the musical play Camelot (1967). Critic Roger Ebert described the casting of Harris and Vanessa Redgrave as "about the best King Arthur and Queen Guenevere I can imagine".[11] 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.[12]
In The Molly Maguires (1970), 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 (1970), with Harris in the title role, an 1825 English aristocrat who is captured by Native Americans, was a major success. He played the title role 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.[13]
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.[14] and was shown in the U.S. as part of the Hallmark Hall of Fame. He made his directorial debut with Bloomfield (1971) and starred in Man in the Wilderness (1971), a revisionist Western based on the Hugh Glass story.
Singing career[edit]
Harris recorded several albums of music, one of which, A Tramp Shining, included the seven-minute hit song "MacArthur Park" (Harris insisted on singing the lyric as "MacArthur's Park").[26] This song was written by Jimmy Webb, and it reached number 2 on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also topped several music sales charts in Europe during the summer of 1968. "MacArthur Park" sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc.[27] A second album, also consisting entirely of music composed by Webb, The Yard Went on Forever, was released in 1969.[28] In the 1973 TV special "Burt Bacharach in Shangri-La", after singing Webb's "Didn't We", Harris tells Bacharach that since he was not a trained singer he approached songs as an actor concerned with words and emotions, acting the song with the sort of honesty the song is trying to convey. Then he proceeds to sing "If I Could Go Back", from the Lost Horizon soundtrack.
Illness and death[edit]
Harris was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in August 2002, reportedly after being hospitalised with pneumonia.[37] He died at University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, London, on 25 October 2002, aged 72.[38] Harris had quipped that "It was the food!" as he was wheeled out of the Savoy Hotel for the last time.[39] Harris spent his final three days in a coma.[40] Harris's body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered in The Bahamas, where he owned a home.[41]
Harris was a lifelong friend of actor Peter O'Toole, and his family reportedly hoped that O'Toole would replace Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). There were, however, concerns about insuring O'Toole for the six remaining films in the series.[42] Harris was ultimately succeeded as Dumbledore by Michael Gambon.[43] Chris Columbus, director of the first two Harry Potter films, had visited Harris during his last days and had promised not to recast Dumbledore, confident of his eventual recovery. In a 2021 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Columbus revealed that Harris was writing an autobiography during his stay at the hospital, but it has not been published since.[44]