In his forty year career in films, Richard Harris played an astonishing collection of characters ranging from King Arthur to Oliver Cromwell to Gulliver to Albus Dumbledore. He played less renowned but no less gripping characters along the way, but his greatest characterization was probably Richard Harris.

It may come as a surprise to younger viewers who only know him as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series, but Richard Harris, for most of his life, was known off-screen as one of the biggest hell-raisers to come out of the British film industry, along with the likes of Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole. Like O'Toole, Harris was an Irishman, born Richard St. John Harris in Limerick on October 1, 1930, one of eight children. His father, Ivan was a wealthy flour miller who lost everything during the worldwide Great Depression and Harris' mother Mildred eventually had to take in washing to support the family.

A brawler and a trouble-maker from the start, Harris at various times ran away from home and was expelled from school. He did, however, have a talent for playing rugby and was good enough to make a local team. Austin O'Donovan in his book 365 Days Less 3 Days wrote, "I was told a story about the time Richard Harris played rugby for Old Crescent and Garryowen. It seems he spent some time in the Sanatorium in St. Camillus's Hospital and never had a visit from any of his teammates; the only rugby players that came to visit him were Young Munster Players. He never forgot that and as soon as he recovered from his illness he signed up with Young Munster, the rest is history. [...] He made a black and white film where he was playing the part of a rugby player; it was called This Sporting Life [1963]. He was a natural, of course, to play this part, and they say he should have got an Oscar® for the part he played in it. I don't suppose there is a Limerick person that wasn't proud to see him on the big screen in our cinemas in Limerick City. To my knowledge he always got to play the good guy in his films and I don't ever remember him to change his accent. He must have been an inspiration for anyone that performed on the humble stage in the Crescent Hall in O'Connell Street here in Limerick, where he first learned his trade acting. [...] I remember Richard Harris saying in a recent television interview that Russell Crowe asked him to sell the Munster jersey he won in 1948. Richard Harris said it was so precious to him, he wouldn't sell it for a million pounds."

The cause of Harris' two years in St. Camillus' Hospital was tuberculosis, which shortened his rugby career but pointed him towards acting. He once said that he finished his education by reading in the hospital from great authors like James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. "Really, catching TB was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. It was then I decided to become an actor. If I hadn't started to read I would probably be selling insurance now."

When he was 24, Harris won a place at LAMDA – the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art where he stayed for two years until he went to study at Joan Littlewood's Theater Workshop where he claimed to have learned more in one afternoon with Littlewood than his two years at LAMDA. Harris made his stage debut with Littlewood, as Ronald Bergan wrote, in "Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East. At 26, he made a considerable West End impact in The Ginger Man, adapted by JP Donleavy from his novel, turning the incorrigible louse Sebastian Dangerfield, living in a bedsitter and up to his neck in debt, into a loveable scoundrel. His film career began at around the same time, initially as the local Lothario in Alive And Kicking (1959), an Irish comedy, although his true strength was not yet fully called upon, even though he played a villain trying to harpoon Gary Cooper in The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), a doughty corporal in The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) and a leading mutineer in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Then Lindsay Anderson, making his first feature, perceptively cast him in This Sporting Life."

That role changed everything for Harris. He was perfectly cast as the working class rugby player, and his performance won him Academy Award and BAFTA nominations and a Cannes Film Festival win for Best Actor. He followed this up in quick succession with Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965) opposite Charlton Heston, playing an Irish supporter of the Confederate Army who is taken prisoner and forced to hunt down Apaches during the American Civil War; George Roy Hill's Hawaii (1966); and Joshua Logan's Camelot (1967), where he played King Arthur to Vanessa Redgrave's Guenevere when his friend Richard Burton (who had made the role his own on Broadway) turned the film down. Harris did his own singing in the film, which led to him having a surprising Top 10 hit in 1968 with his recording of MacArthur's Park written by composer Jimmy Webb.

In 1970 he portrayed Oliver Cromwell in the eponymous Cromwell. The Variety review of the film said that "Harris plays the idealistic, dedicated Cromwell with cold eyes, tortured, rasping voice and an inflexible spirit. He is the man who regarded Jehovah as his main ally and was determined at all costs to rescue the England he loved from the corruption of a weak, greedy court and to set up a Parliament that would be truly democratic, speaking for the people and not be the puppets of the King." The Moscow International Film Festival Awarded Harris their Best Actor Award. Perhaps more important to Harris was one fan's reaction to his next film A Man Called Horse (1970), which he wrote about in the forward to Mark Collins' book Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World "I remember the first time I met [Muhammad Ali]. I was in New York and he was training for the [George] Foreman fight. His two favourite movies were Man in the Wilderness (1971) and A Man Called Horse and through a mutual friend he requested I come up to Deer Lake, his camp, and bring the two films so he could show his sparring partners and his crew up there. So I did. I think you must ask yourself why these are his favourite films, because this gives you a real insight into the man: A Man Called Horse was the first American movie to dignify the American Indian, the first to dignify a minority group in America and show them in this beautiful light; and Man in the Wilderness was about survival and dignity, a man who was up against the elements, up against his time. [...] I think Ali was the most sincere person you could meet in your life. You can name any actor you like and I'll say "Insincere. Don't turn your back on them." I've no time for actors, I don't mix with them, I don't go to the award shows, I don't go to their clubs. All my mates are guys from the streets. Genuine, decent, sincere people. Ali is that – he's got nothing to do with the people that are in my business."

Harris on several occasions expressed his disgust with 'show business' and the pretentiousness of other actors. "I just don't think that actors have any legitimate place in history. I think we're a crowd of buffoons who get paid far too much money and run around pretending to represent the ordinary man. But we never meet the ordinary man; we're full of bodyguards and private jets and stretch limousines. We never see anything." Not surprisingly he once remarked, "I have no friends in this business."

Harris lived most of his life as though it might end at any moment. Like Burton and O'Toole, he was a hard-drinking, women-chasing brawler who frequently made headlines with his escapades, which he took pains to note, "If I win an award for something I do, the London papers describe me as "the British actor, Richard Harris." If I am found drunk in a public place, they always refer to me as "the Irish actor, Richard Harris." Again, like O'Toole, Harris would get sober in the 1980s and resurrect a career that by the end of the 1970s and early 80s had him appearing in films such as Orca (1977) and even Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981).

. In 1990 Richard Harris earned his second Academy Award® nomination for Best Actor in The Field in which he played an Irish farmer who tries to dissuade a rich American from buying the land his family has tended for generations. He followed up that remarkable performance with another – English Bob in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992). By 2000 he was still in high demand, appearing in Gladiator and the next year played what is arguably his most popular role, that of the wise but secretive wizard Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) which he claimed to have accepted because a young niece told him she would never speak to him again if he didn't.

By 2002 after completing the second Potter film, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) Harris' health had begun to fail. Entering the hospital with a chest infection, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma and underwent chemotherapy. As Richard Severo wrote in his New York Times obituary of Harris, "when his doctors told him, he said it was quite remarkable that he had lived long enough to develop the disease and still be working, given the nature of the life he had led." When Harris passed away on Friday October 25, 2002, he was looking forward to starting work on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). His family asked the producers to cast Harris' friend Peter O'Toole to replace him, but the role went to Michael Gambon, a choice that has proven to be controversial with fans. Perhaps the fault lies in Gambon's performance, but it would be closer to the truth to admit that Harris was quite simply irreplaceable.

by Lorraine LoBianco

Sources
Twentieth Century Actor Training by Alison Hodge
Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable by Sean McMahon
Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World by Mark Collins
Richard Harris, Versatile and Volatile Star, 72, Dies The New York Times, October 26, 2002 by Richard Severo
365 Days Less 3 Days by Austin O'Donovan
Richard Harris , The Guardian, October 28, 2002 by Ronald Bergan