October 1930–25 October 2002
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’.
Standing proudly in the south-west of Ireland there’s a significant province that reeks of rebellion, tenacity and belligerence. That province is Munster, and within Munster is Limerick, a city that produces paradoxes by the cartload. A rugby city with a large working-class population, there is a celebrated statue that shows two players, arms outstretched, grasping for a ball. One of the players is a docker, the other a doctor. Together they play for the same club, province and (if lucky) country. They work hard, they play hard and they are unconcerned by class. Welcome to the city that gave the world Richard Harris, a city where two classes met and mingled freely.
In fact, Richard Harris’s father started out wealthy – he was a flour mill owner – but home life was shattered when the family business fell on hard times and, almost overnight, the cars, maids and gardeners that had populated his life were gone. Harris reflected, ‘One day was luxury, the next morning my mother was on her knees scrubbing floors.’
Loss figured regularly in the young Harris’s world. A sister’s death from cancer deeply affected him and in many ways informed his worldview: ‘I wanted to embrace it all. I had a terrible desire to let nothing pass me by.’ That desire led to a contrary existence that helped to attract and repel people in equal measure. At home, as one of seven children, he had to make a lot of noise to get heard. At school, the air heavy with testosterone, Harris was first in the queue and back of the class. He set fire to the toilets on one occasion and when a nun rapped his knuckles with a ruler, he grabbed it from her and whacked her back. Small wonder he left early, after failing to complete his leaving certificate. It’s a big wonder they didn’t turf him out.
For Harris, it was all about the rugby, and despite eight broken noses, it was a sport he excelled in, winning medals and cups and nurturing an ambition that he might go all the way and wear the green jersey at Lansdowne Road. This sporting life came to a crushing end in 1953 when he contracted TB and was forced into convalescence for two years. He was lucky to survive because tuberculosis remained a significant cause of death in Ireland, with a considerably higher mortality rate than in England at the time.
What he had lost to academia in school, Harris made up for in his sickbed where he directed all his attention to books. A love of drama and a brief dalliance with amateur dramatics informed his move to London in 1954 where the young Harris had been accepted to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. He had an experience common to many émigrés when he saw a notice in the window of an Earls Court paper shop advertising a room for 30 shillings a week, followed by the message ‘No Irishmen or blacks need apply’. He reacted by pulling his sleeve down over his hand, punching through the glass window, removing the offending notice and keeping it as a souvenir.
In the rarefied environs of London theatre, Harris wasn’t going to be cast headlong into Shakespearean leads but made his debut when he finagled a part in Brendan Behan’s prison drama The Quare Fellow. He had overheard someone talking about the production while out drinking one night and decided to make a phone call about it. On being told the part was for a fifty-year-old, Harris explained: ‘I look f**king fifty. I haven’t had a good meal for four months and I haven’t slept in days. Just take a look at me.’ They did – and he got the role.
More theatre followed, both in London and Dublin, and the film roles began to trickle in. It’s always fun to spot the young Harris among the grizzled tough guys in The Guns of Navarone (1961) and as an angry sailor in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). But his knock-out role came in 1963 when Lindsay Anderson chose him for the lead in This Sporting Life. As part of the gritty, realistic ‘Angry Young Men’ films that were starting to emerge from the UK at the time, this was seen as an early classic. Harnessing his hard-nosed Limerick sporting background, Harris played the part of an angry, emotionally stunted, testosterone-fuelled rugby league player from Yorkshire, with Brandoesque style and an accent that’s more Limerick than Yorkshire. Widely praised for his authenticity, Harris was nominated for an Oscar and won the award for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963. I’ve recently watched it on DVD and it’s mind-boggling how good he is. I strongly urge you to go back and catch it if you haven’t already.
As a result of all this success, Harris was in serious demand and appeared in dozens of movies, but none of these roles matched the performance that in many ways defined the early part of his career. Maybe some of his potential was wasted away by the already legendary hellraising – who can say? Certainly, any accounts of Harris’s life in the 60s and 70s include words like ‘hedonistic’ and ‘debauched’. Always featuring in lurid tabloid headlines, he dressed in a style that garnered attention and lived in a neo-Gothic mansion in London. He worked hard and played hard, indulging his darker side to his heart’s content.
Harris had a particular love of women and they adored the mixture of charm and danger he exuded. ‘I overpower women,’ he once confessed. He showered them with love and sex and spontaneous partying until he exhausted them, and one woman would never keep his interest for long. His appetite for the next girl, whoever she might be, was insatiable and it’s reported that he once flew to New York on Concorde for an afternoon of sex. He picked up and lost two wives along the way, for which he took all the blame: ‘I have made seventy movies in my life and been miscast twice – as a husband.’ Commitment of any kind scared him. It wasn’t his thing.
At one point, his cocaine habit got out of control and a stint in hospital saw a priest rushing to Harris’s bedside, armed with the last rites. The story goes that Harris woke suddenly to hear the priest reciting the holy rosary and announced to the padre: ‘Father, if you are going to hear my confession, prepare to be here for days. By the end of it all, I can guarantee you will very much regret your vow of celibacy.’
At first the film studios accommodated his hellraising, adding extra shooting days to allow for the hangovers and lost weekends, but by the late 70s work was getting thin on the ground. The ‘good’ life finally caught up with Harris in 1981 when doctors told him he had eighteen months to live if he kept going that way. It was a summer evening when, with typical gusto, he marched into a club for a final drink. He cracked open two bottles of Château Margaux 1957 (£600 per bottle), drank them slowly – he later described the experience: ‘I treated them like you’d treat making love to the most gorgeous woman in the world. If you knew you only had one orgasm left, you’d say, “I’m holding it up babe, because I don’t want this to end”’ – and then stopped taking alcohol. For a decade.
The good roles were still few and far between, though. When he had a shot at playing Maigret in a 1988 TV series, the Daily Mirror suggested that his Irish accent made a mockery of the programme, and ironically suggested Harris should go the whole distance: ‘How about Sherlock O’Holmes, Paddy Mason, Hercule Guinness?’ But this kind of ridicule failed to faze Harris who was well used to the stereotyping that suited elements of the British press. He acquired the rights to the stage production of Camelot and took it on a world tour, making a lot of money in the process, and in 1990 he won the London Evening Standard Award for best actor for his role as Henry IV.
But perhaps it was a sweet irony that Richard Harris had to come home to put in what many consider to be his finest acting moment – in The Field as the megalomaniac farmer Bull McCabe, whose lust for land was visible in the actor’s every fibre. Harris was trying on hats for the part when he saw the name of Ray McAnally inside one of them and realized that the great Irish actor had been earmarked for the role before he died. ‘I’m very sorry Ray McAnally died,’ Harris reportedly commented before adding, ‘But I always knew I was destined to play this part.’
Whether it was fate or luck,
