On a Saturday afternoon in December, just before Christmas, a large department store in Knightsbridge, London, was turned into a pit of glass and smoke. Six people were dead, 86 injured, and shopfronts hung like torn paper. Far away in London, in a hotel room in Los Angeles, a tall man with a notoriously loud reputation was watching the news and crying. For years, he had been a prominent supporter of the cause behind the attack.
Within weeks, Richard Harris declared his innocence of the civilian slaughter, and within months, security guards were escorting his sons in New York because his name had appeared on a terrifying list. None of this was what he had expected when he was a boy in Limerick, or in a tuberculosis ward where he found his calling in books, or in the West End where his voice first rang out like a shattered bottle. How this great actor ended up in such a predicament was a story in itself, and the rest of his life was just as wild. Born on October 1, 1930, in Limerick, Ireland, he was the fifth of eight children of Ivan Harris, a flower merchant, and his wife Mildred.
The family home, a handsome red-brick Victorian house with nine bedrooms, belonged to the comfortable provincial middle class. Limerick in the 1930s was a deeply Catholic city of about forty thousand people, run by clergy, merchants, and publicans. The Harris family was not poor. They had a cook, a piano, and at least one car.
Harris would later be ambivalent about how comfortable his childhood was, partly because a romantic Irish biography sounds better with extra shadows and harsher winters. He was educated by the Jesuits at Crescent College, where he learned the traditional formula of Latin, sin, and sporting violence. He was a poor student, bored by schoolwork, and constantly in trouble for fights and pranks. His real life began on the rugby field.
Growing up large, articulate, and belligerent, he was obsessed with the game. He played for Garryowen, one of the oldest amateur clubs in the country, and reached the Munster Cup teams at junior and senior level. But tuberculosis intervened. In his teenage years, the disease emptied his lungs and confined him to bed for months.
By the time he recovered, his body no longer worked as it had. Years later, he would describe the illness with the paradoxical aphorisms for which he became known. He read voraciously during his long convalescence, and by the time he was well again, he had decided he wanted to direct theatre. At twenty, he sailed to London with no plan, no qualifications, and no money.
He found his way to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, though he was more tolerated than nurtured there, and secretly rented a small space outside the West End to direct his own production of Clifford Odets’s *Winter Journey*. What saved him was Joan Littlewood. Her theatre workshop in Stratford East was the closest thing London had to a real school of life. It was collective, rebellious, and committed to a working-class musical roughness that suited Harris perfectly.
Littlewood treated her actors like dockworkers with reading lists. She made them improvise, run, sing badly, build sets, paint boards, and learn how to enter a room as if the room itself were hostile. Harris learned more from her in eighteen months than he had during his time at LAMDA, and he never forgot the technical lessons. By 1959, Harris was starring in J.
P. Donleavy’s *The Ginger Man* in the West End, and people began to notice that the loud Irishman with the broken smile had a terrifying focus on stage and a voice that moved from whisper to roar without polite graduations. When the Lord Chamberlain’s office tried to censor parts of the play, Harris ignored the cuts and performed it as written, a bold political statement in late-1950s London. In 1957, he married Elizabeth Rees-Williams, an eighteen-year-old from a Welsh society family.
The marriage produced three sons in quick succession: Damian in 1958, Jared in 1961, and Jamie in 1963. The boys grew up to become a director and two actors, with Jared eventually winning a BAFTA for his role in *Chernobyl*. But the marriage was a casualty waiting to happen. Harris drank, fought, and disappeared on weekends, constitutionally unable to treat his work as a salaried profession.
By the early 1960s, Harris was a known actor without being indispensable. He had played a memorable small role as a pilot in *The Guns of Navarone* in 1961, given a punishing physical performance in *Mutiny on the Bounty* in 1962 opposite Marlon Brando, and clashed with Laurence Harvey in *The Long and the Short and the Tall*. He looked like a film star, but he had not yet been given a role that allowed him to seize that status. That came in 1963.
Lindsay Anderson, the most austere and ferocious of the new British directors, was casting his first feature film, an adaptation of David Storey’s novel *This Sporting Life*, about a Yorkshire miner who fights his way into professional rugby league and falls into a relationship with the widow who rents him a room. Anderson and Harris should not have agreed. Both were stubborn, intellectually arrogant, and quick to take offence. Anderson, a closeted homosexual, became sexually obsessed with Harris in a way that complicated every directorial note he had to give.
They fought publicly and at length throughout the shoot. But on screen, that friction became part of the character. Frank Machin remains one of the greatest male performances in British cinema, a mass of inarticulate power that the camera slowly turns into tragedy. Harris understood the character down to the broken teeth, the hunched shoulders, and the humiliation of love unable to express itself.
He was, of course, a rugby player himself. He played the field scenes with the economy of a real player. He had also been a sick man, bedridden for a full year in his adolescence, and he brought to Machin’s loneliness the quality of someone who had lain alone counting cracks in the ceiling. The film won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963.
Harris was nominated for an Oscar, as was Rachel Roberts, who played the widow. Overnight, he was on the shortlist for every major film being cast in Europe and America. For the rest of the decade, he behaved like a man trying to spend an unexpected fortune before someone could take it back. He starred in Antonioni’s *Red Desert* opposite Monica Vitti in 1964, played an alcoholic American sailor in Sam Peckinpah’s *Major Dundee*, and survived John Huston’s *The Bible: In the Beginning* in 1966 through sheer instinctive force.
Joshua Logan cast him as King Arthur in the film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical *Camelot*. Logan did not want him. Richard Burton, who had created the role on stage and was a close friend of Harris, turned it down, as did Peter O’Toole. Harris tracked Logan down.
For four months, he wrote letters, sent telegrams, left notes, made phone calls, and offered to pay for his own screen test. When Logan returned to the Dorchester Hotel one morning after a jog, Harris was waiting in the lobby. The role of King Arthur, the legend that would haunt him for the rest of his life, was something he had to break into a director’s hotel to get. *Camelot* was released in 1967 and was not the studio lifeline Warner had hoped for.
The film was long, the singing uneven, and reviews criticised the direction as static. But Harris’s Arthur, with his baffled, compassionate, sceptical performance, was what held the film together. He won a Golden Globe for it. He also discovered during production that he could sing in his own conversational style, blending speech and song, and this discovery led to the strangest detour of his career.
A young songwriter from Oklahoma named Jimmy Webb was looking for someone to sing a piece of orchestral pop music he had written for The Association, who had turned it down. The song ran over seven minutes, was divided into movements, and was built around a metaphor of a melting candy bar in a Los Angeles park. *MacArthur Park* was recorded in late 1967. Released the following spring, it reached number two on the American Billboard chart, number four in Britain, and number one in many regions around the world.
It was nominated for a Grammy and remains one of the strangest hit songs of the late 1960s: a nearly eight-minute torrent of strings and drums over which a forty-year-old Irish actor intoned lyrics about leaving a cake out in the rain. Harris had become, almost by accident, a pop star. He celebrated by enlarging his lifestyle. He bought a house in Bel Air.
He drank almost continuously. He hosted what one observer described as the noisiest open house in Los Angeles. By the dawn of the 1970s, his first marriage was over; he and Elizabeth divorced in 1969. In 1974, he married American actress Ann Turkel, fourteen years his junior.
The marriage was tabloid fodder and a personal disaster for both of them. There was also, during this period, a relationship that nearly stopped the machine of British politics, religion, media, and tradition entirely: an affair with Princess Margaret. The relationship was intermittent, beginning in the 1960s and briefly resuming in the early 1980s. A London society source later told a newspaper that Harris was a philanderer of the first order, nicknamed “Bunker” by his friends.
But none of his other affairs had the geopolitical implications of his relationship with Princess Margaret at the height of the Troubles. The bill for all this came due in 1978. Harris was spending about twenty thousand dollars a week on cocaine. His teenage son Jamie walked into his father’s bedroom in Los Angeles one afternoon and found a scene he later described as something out of *Scarface*.
His father had dropped a pound of cocaine on the carpet. Later that year, Harris collapsed from an overdose and nearly died. Paramedics were called, and his life was saved. He gave up drugs, according to all accounts, permanently, but he did not give up drinking.
His film choices during the late 1970s looked like the work of a man openly chasing money. *The Wild Geese* in 1978 succeeded on its own terms, a noisy mercenary film where Harris’s accumulated charisma did the heavy lifting alongside Richard Burton and Roger Moore. But *Ravagers* and *Tarzan the Ape Man* with Bo Derek marked the low point. He told Roger Ebert candidly, decades later, that most of his films were rubbish.
He declared bankruptcy twice. Then he stopped drinking. By 1981, he no longer drank spirits. By the mid-1980s, he was isolating for long periods on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, swimming in the morning, reading, eating fish, and writing poetry in notebooks that were only properly read after his death.
His professional refuge during this period was, fittingly, Arthur. He returned to *Camelot* on Broadway in 1980, and when Burton’s health declined in 1981, Harris took over the role. He bought the theatrical rights outright. For most of the next decade, *Camelot* was his main work and primary source of income.
In December 1983, Harris briefly stopped being a working actor and became a political figure. Since about 1973, he had been an outspoken sympathiser of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a position he announced loudly in interviews, talk shows, and bars. On the afternoon of December 17, 1983, a blue Austin car parked outside the exclusive Harrods department store in Knightsbridge exploded on a time fuse. Six people were killed and 86 injured.
The IRA’s Army Council later claimed the unit responsible had acted without authorisation and expressed regret for the civilian deaths. Harris was in California when he saw the news. His reaction was brief. He could only mutter the word “appalling.
” In January 1984, he gave interviews in which he drew a line. He said he still believed in a united Ireland, but he could not condone what he called the transfer of the battle to the private sector. The Provos did not take this shift well. His son Jared told the *Sunday World* decades later that his father’s name appeared on an IRA assassination list after his public retreat, and that armed guards escorted him to school in New York.
Recovery from addiction in the early 1980s did not immediately translate into better films. During 1985 and 1986, he made a series of small, forgettable movies, and to the press he looked like a survivor with nowhere to go now that he was back on dry land. Then in June 1989, Irish director Jim Sheridan, who had just finished *My Left Foot* with Daniel Day-Lewis, was turning John B. Keane’s play *The Field* into a film.
He was looking for a lead. The protagonist is an old Kerry farmer named Bull McCabe who has rented a field for years, worked it by hand until he made it fertile, and intends to buy it when it comes up for auction. An American stranger arrives and bids higher. The play and film become a slow-moving tragedy about land, blood, and rejection.
Sheridan offered the role to Harris, who was approaching sixty and had not come near a great role in twenty years. Harris accepted. The Field was released in 1990 and was perhaps his most serious work since *This Sporting Life*. He was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor in 1991, his second nomination, twenty-seven years after his first.
He lost to Jeremy Irons, but he had done what no one expected. He had rewritten the ending of his own obituary. Clint Eastwood, who had been watching the comeback, hired Harris in 1992 to play English Bob in *Unforgiven*. It is a small but magnificent role.
The film won the Oscar for Best Picture and treated Harris as a peer of Gene Hackman and Eastwood himself. He was promoted, finally, to the ranks of nobility. In 1999, Ridley Scott was casting an epic about a Spanish general named Maximus who is betrayed by the heir to the throne and becomes a gladiator slave. Scott needed Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher emperor whose death in the opening scenes sets the tragedy in motion.
Harris shot his scenes in the Moroccan winter by torchlight opposite Russell Crowe, then largely unknown. The performance is short but pivotal, giving Marcus Aurelius an autumnal weariness and moral grief that makes the entire machinery of the film believable. *Gladiator* was released in 2000, won Best Picture, and made Crowe a star. Harris and Crowe became close; Damian Harris later recalled that Crowe left the set of *Master and Commander* to attend his father’s funeral.
Then came the role no one expected. Chris Columbus, director of *Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone*, was looking for someone to play Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts. Harris turned the role down. He turned it down again, and a third refusal was nearly final.
Harris had no particular interest in the Harry Potter books and no patience for studio franchise-building. Then his eleven-year-old granddaughter Ella called him. According to Harris’s later account to the BBC, she said: “If you don’t play Dumbledore, I will never speak to you again. ” He accepted the role the next day.
He filmed the first Harry Potter film through the summer of 2001 and the second, *Chamber of Secrets*, during the spring and early summer of 2002. By August 2002, he was hospitalised with what was initially described as pneumonia. The diagnosis was Hodgkin’s disease. He had lymphoma, and at seventy-one, his body had absorbed nearly half a century of rugby, drink, cocaine, excess, brawls, sleepless nights, transatlantic flights, and unresolved sorrows.
He left the Savoy Hotel for the last time on a stretcher. The story repeated in every obituary is that he raised his head as he was carried through the lobby and shouted at the gathered staff and diners. The cause was the food. Harris died on October 25, 2002, at University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, three days after falling into a coma.
He was 72 years old. His former wife Elizabeth Rees-Williams, from whom he had been divorced since 1969 but who remained one of his closest friends, was at his bedside, as were his three sons. He had asked that his ashes be scattered at his home in the Bahamas, the place where he had pulled himself out of his worst alcoholism twenty years earlier. Some friends suspected it was a final joke at the expense of the British tax authorities.
His old biographer Michael Feeney Callan later said there were rumours the ashes were quietly returned to Limerick, and that the whole “Bahamian” story was a diversion. It is not unlikely that Harris would have approved of either ending. There is a real life out there, he told Ebert at one point, lighting a cigarette. All this work, all this is just nonsense and fantasy.
He left it the way he lived, with one last bad joke tossed over his shoulder at the staff.