Oscar Profile #399: Richard Harris

Born October 1, 1930 to a farming family in Limerick, Ireland, Richard Harris was bound for a career in rugby when a teenage bout with tuberculosis steered him in the direction of the theatre instead.

After honing his craft at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Harris appeared in several stage and TV productions before making his screen debut in 1959’s Shake Hands with the Devil, followed by the same year’s Alive and Kicking and The Wreck of the Mary Deare. That same year he married actress Elizabeth Rees with whom he would have three children. With supporting roles in 1961’s The Guns of Navarone and 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty under his belt, he played his first lead role in 1963’s This Sporting Life for which he received an Oscar nomination opposite Rachel Roberts who was then married to Rex Harrison. Roberts was also nominated as was Harrison for Cleopatra.

The actor returned to supporting roles, albeit high profile ones, in 1965’s Major Dundee and The Heroes of Telemark and 1966’s The Bible and Hawaii, finally achieving major stardom in 1967’s Camelot for which he received a Golden Globe as Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. The following year he released his first album, A Tramp Shining which featured the megahit “MacArthur Park”. In 1969 he and Elizabeth Reees divorced. Two years later she became the fourth Mrs. Rex Harrison.

Harris’s early career peaked in 1970 with the back-to-back successes of The Molly Maguires, A Man Called Horse and Cromwell. In 1974 he married second wife Ann Turkel. The two would divorce in 1982. His biggest successes on screen during this period were 1976’s The Return of a Man Called Horse and Robin and Marian in which he played Richard the Lionheart to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood and Audrey Hepburn’s Maid Marian. A London and Broadway stage revival of Camelot in the early 1980s brought him back to prominence. It was made into a successful TV movie in 1982.

The actor’s career languished in the remainder of the 1980s, but his fierce portrayal of an Irish farmer in Jim Sheridan’s 1990 film, The Field brought him renewed acclaim and a second Oscar nomination. He continued to turn in acclaimed performances throughout the decade in such films as Patriot Games, Unforgiven, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, Cry, the Beloved Country and Smilla’s Sense of Snow. In 2000, he played the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator.

Against his better judgment, he took the part of Dumbledore at the urging of his 11-year-old granddaughter in the Harry Potter franchise, but only appeared in the first two films, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets before succumbing to Hodgins’ lymphoma on October 25, 2002 at the age of 72. He was replaced in the series by fellow Irishman Michael Gambon.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963), directed by Lindsay Anderson

Harris won Best Actor at Cannes followed by Oscar and BAFTA nominations for his first starring role as an angry rugby player in this acclaimed drama from the kitchen sink school of the British New Wave. Rachel Roberts won her second BAFTA award as well as her first and only Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Harris’s widowed landlady. Roberts’ husband, Rex Harrison, was also among the year’s Oscar nominees for Cleopatra. In 1971, Harrison would ask 4th wife Roberts for a divorce to marry Harris’s ex-wife, Elizabeth, two years after that couple’s divorce.

CAMELOT (1967), directed by Joshua Logan

Harris was selected for the role of King Arthur after Richard Burton refused to reprise his Tony award-winning role in Lerner & Loewe’s musical. Unlike Vanessa Redgrave, who couldn’t overcome comparisons to Andrews, Harris had no such problem, his rich baritone led to a side career as a popular singer beginning the following year with the album A Tramp Shining and its seven-minute hit song, “MacArthur Park”. His portrayal of Arthur earned him a Golden Globe. He would reprise it in a London and Broadway revival of the musical in the early 1980s and again for TV.

CROMWELL (1970), directed by Ken Hughes

Harris reached the pinnacle of his success with three 1970 films, as a detective in 1886 in the Martin Ritt’s The Molly Maguires co-starring Sean Connery and Samantha Eggar; as an English aristocrat who becomes part of a Native American tribe in 1825 in Elliot Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse co-starring Judith Anderson and as Oliver Cromwell, the 1sstLord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland from 1653-1658. It’s his story, but the film is stolen by Alec Guinness’s sympathetic portrayal of King Charles I, the film’s de facto villain.

CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1995), directed by Darrell Roodt

Harris had one of the best latter-day roles of his career even if his role is secondary to that of James Earl Jones as the black minister searching for family members in the squalor of mid-20th Century South Africa, a role previously played on screen by Canada Lee in the 1951 film version and Brock Peters in the 1974 musical version, Lost in the Stars. Harris is the father of a young missionary who is accidentally killed in a failed robbery by Jones’s son who is caught and hanged for the crime. The extended scene between Jones and Harris is what great acting is all about.

GLADIATOR (2000), directed by Ridley Scott

Harris excelled in two late career performances in films that won Oscars for Best Picture, Clint Eastwood’s 1992 western, Unforgiven and this return to the sand and sandal epics that reigned supreme from early 1950s through the mid-1960s. The actor excels as Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the film’s early scenes but is gone too soon as he is murdered and succeeded by his son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). He was equally impressive as Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizarding school at Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter films, the second of which was released just weeks after his death.