Richard Harris
Richard Harris was born on October 1, 1930 in Limerick, Ireland, to a farming family. He was an excellent rugby player and had a strong passion for literature. Unfortunately, a bout of tuberculosis as a teenager ended his aspirations to a rugby career, but he became fascinated with the theater and skipped a local dance one night to attend a performance of “Henry IV”. He was hooked and went on to learn his craft at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, then spent several years in stage productions. He debuted on screen in Alive and Kicking (1959) and quickly scored regular work in films, including The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), A Terrible Beauty (1960) and a good role as a frustrated Australian bomber pilot in The Guns of Navarone (1961).
However, his breakthrough performance was as the quintessential “angry young man” in the sensational drama This Sporting Life (1963), which scored him an Oscar nomination. He then appeared in the WW II commando tale The Heroes of Telemark (1965) and in the Sam Peckinpah-directed western Major Dundee (1965). He next showed up in Hawaii (1966) and played King Arthur in Camelot (1967), a lackluster adaptation of the famous Broadway play. Better performances followed, among them a role as a reluctant police informer in The Molly Maguires (1970) alongside Sir Sean Connery. Harris took the lead role in the violent western A Man Called Horse (1970), which became something of a cult film and spawned two sequels.
In 1957, he married Elizabeth Rees-Williams, daughter of David Rees-Williams, 1st Baron Ogmore. Their three children are actor Jared Harris, actor Jamie Harris, and director Damian Harris (who has a son named Marlowe, born 2002, with Australian actress Peta Wilson). Harris and Rees-Willams were divorced in 1969, and Elizabeth married another actor, Sir Rex Harrison.
Harris’ second marriage was to American actress Ann Turkel, who was 16 years his junior; that marriage also ended in divorce.
Despite his divorces, he was a member of the Knights of Malta, and was also knighted by Denmark in 1985. He was reportedly good friends with Peter O’Toole. His family reportedly hoped O’Toole would replace Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Harris often told stories about his haunted English Mansion, The Tower House, which was sold later to Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame. According to Harris, the tower was haunted by an eight-year-old boy who had been buried in the tower. The boy often kept Harris awake at night until he one day built a nursery for the boy to play in, which calmed the disturbances to some extent.
Harris died of Hodgkin’s disease on 25 October 2002, aged 72, two and a half weeks before the U.S. premiere of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrers. He was replaced as Dumbledore by fellow Irish-born actor Sir Michael Gambon.
He was a lifelong drinker, but then went teetotal. A memorable incident was an appearance on The Late Late Show where he recounted to host Gay Byrne how he had just polished off two bottles of fine wine in a restaurant and decided that he would then be going on the wagon: “And I looked at my watch and it was… Well isn´t that spooky! It was the same time it is now: 11:20!”
He is attributed with an anecdote in which he was found lying drunk in a street in London. A passing policeman asked him what he was doing, and he replied that the world was spinning. The policeman enquired how lying in the street was going to help, and he said “I’m waiting for my house to go by.”
Whenever he was in London, Harris lived at the Savoy Hotel. According to hotel archivist Susan Scott, when he was being taken from the hotel on a stretcher, shortly before his death, he warned diners, ‘It was the food!
Harris was cremated and his ashes were scattered in The Bahamas, where he had a home.
