Richard Harris Dead at 72
Tom Sutpen
Actor Richard Harris Dies at 72
LONDON –– Irish actor Richard Harris, the roistering star of screen gems
such as "A Man Called Horse" and "This Sporting Life," died Friday night at a
London hospital, his family said. He was 72.
"With great sadness, Damian, Jarid and Jamie Harris announced the death of
their beloved father, Richard Harris," the family said.
"He died peacefully at University College Hospital," where he was been
receiving treatment for Hodgkin's Disease after falling ill earlier this year,
the family said.
Harris also played Dumbledore in "Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone" and
will play that role in the next chapter in the Harry Potter Saga, "Harry Potter
and the Chamber of Secrets."
A tall, sturdy figure with a reputation as a hellraiser and a lived-in face,
and once described as looking like "five miles of bad country road," Harris was
never cut out to join contemporaries as a smooth matinee idol.
The critic Clive Barnes called him one of a new breed of British actors, who
are "rougher, tougher, fiercer, angrier and more passionately articulate than
their well-groomed predecessors ... roaring boys, sometimes with highly colored
private lives and lurid public images."
He caught the eye of critic Kenneth Tynan who once bracketed him with Albert
Finney and Peter O'Toole as one of the three best young actors on the British
stage.
Inspired by the writings of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, 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." Other major roles include "Major Dundee," "Hawaii," "Camelot," "The
Molly Maguires," "A Man Called Horse" and "Cromwell."
Born Oct. 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. Harris 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.
While still a student, he hired the tiny "off-West End" Irving Theatre and
directed his own production of Clifford Odets' "Winter Journey (The Country
Girl)."
The critics approved, but the production used up all his savings, and he was
forced to sleep in a coal cellar for six weeks.
Harris left LAMDA in the summer of 1956 to join the Theatre Workshop, which
helped lead the advance toward realism and experiment in British theater. His
first professional appearance was on July 24, 1956, as Mickser in the
Littlewood production of Brendan Behan's "The Quare Fellow" at the Theatre
Royal, Stratford.
It was a small part, but Lee Strasburg, director of the New York Actors Studio,
said it had the "sharpest impact" of any performance he had seen by an actor in
Britain.
A variety of roles followed: Louis in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge"
and Paulino in Pirandello's "Man, 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 television 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's next commitment took him back to Ireland to shoot "Shake Hands With
the Devil," an ambitious production about the Irish Rebellion, in which he
played the gun-happy rebel Terence O'Brien.
A role followed as the villainous Higgins in "The Wreck of the Mary Deare," a
maritime adventure starring Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston made in Hollywood
by MGM.
In 1959, the actor returned to Ireland to make "A Terrible Beauty" about
sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, in which he played the roistering
bosom-buddy of a disenchanted Irish Republican Army member, played by Robert
Mitchum.
Harris' first lead role in London's West End came later that year when he
opened as Sebastian Dangerfield in J. P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man" at the
Fortune Theatre, a study of the life of a drunken Dublin student
.
Tom Sutpen
"Cinema is Truth, 24 times a second" -- Jean-Luc Godard
"Movies lie 24 times a second" -- Brian DePalma
"Kill Ugly Cinema!" -- Tom Sutpen