Actor Richard Harris Dies at 72
13 minutes ago
By SUE LEEMAN, Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) – Irish actor Richard Harris (news), the roistering star of screen gems such as “A Man Called Horse” and “This Sporting Life” and, later, the wise old Professor Dumbledore in two Harry Potter (news – web sites) movies, died Friday night at a London hospital. He was 72.
“With great sadness, Damian, Jared and Jamie Harris announced the death of their beloved father, Richard Harris,” his family said.
“He died peacefully at University College Hospital,” where he was receiving treatment for Hodgkin’s Disease after falling ill earlier this year.
A tall, sturdy figure with a reputation as a hellraiser and a lived-in face that he 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 (news) and Peter O’Toole (news) as one of the three best young actors on the British stage.
Later in life, Harris found a new generation of fans as Dumbledore. He played the white-bearded wizard in last year’s “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone,” and returns in the role in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” which opens Nov. 15.
Harris was nominated twice for best-actor Academy Awards (news – web sites), for his role as violent, inarticulate Yorkshire miner Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 “This Sporting Life,” and then as the thundering Irish peasant Bull McCabe in director Jim Sheridan’s little-seen 1990 film, “The Field.”
Harris also was nominated for an Emmy for 1971’s “The Snow Goose.”
Within the last decade, Harris also appeared in two winners of the best-picture Oscar â€â€? “Unforgiven” in 1992 and 2000’s “Gladiator,” in which he played the war-weary Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
Inspired by the writings of the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavsky, the young Harris initially had 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 also won the Best Actor award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival (news – web sites) 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. He 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 his savings and he was forced to sleep in a coal cellar for six weeks.
In 1956, Harris joined the Theatre Workshop, which helped lead the advance toward realism and experiment in British theater. His first professional appearance was in 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.”
To earn extra income, he turned to television, and his first film part was a cameo in a comedy called “Alive and Kicking.”
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,” a study of the life of a drunken Dublin student. After more TV work in England and the United States, Harris received good notices for his “sturdy” performance as a mutinous sailor in the 1962 remake of “Mutiny on the Bounty” with Marlon Brando (news), although the film itself drew generally unfavorable reviews.
“This Sporting Life” â€â€? his first film lead â€â€? took London and New York by storm and established him as an actor of the first rank.
New York Post critic Archer Winsten called it “a great, indelibly memorable performance,” and William Peper in the New York World-Telegram wrote that Harris “reminds one fleetingly of Marlon Brando. He also has his own kind of raging power and startling sensitivity.”
Typically, Harris turned his back on the plaudits to produce a financially unrewarding but artistically acclaimed presentation of “The Diary of a Madman,” which he and Lindsay Anderson adapted from Gogol’s short story about a Russian clerk’s decline into insanity.
Barnes described Harris’ performance as the clerk, Aksenti Ivanovitch, as a “tour de force” that “struck me as one of the greatest things I have ever seen in the theater.”
After a series of bombs â€â€? “Orca,” “The Ravagers,” “Game for Vultures,” “Your Ticket is No Longer Valid” â€â€? Harris’ career then hit the skids.
“I made a decision that half was made for me by the motion picture business,” he recalled. “Around 1980, I decided that was it, that my career was really finished. I was doing a series of movies that I wasn’t happy doing. The standard of the movies was very low. Because of what I was offered, I was unhappy.”
He decided to quit films entirely. For three years he toured in “Camelot,” then from 1986 to 1989, he was content to do nothing. He decided to “finish my career on a high note” and embarked on Pirandellos’s difficult “Henry IV,” winning plaudits all round.
Possessed of a sharp temper, Harris was no stranger to arguments and was known to cancel interviews and miss appearances if he felt indisposed.
After decades of heavy boozing, he gave up drinking in 1982 � typically, after drinking two last bottles of expensive wine at one sitting.
He is survived by his three sons from his first marriage to Elizabeth Rees-Williams.