Ed Harris - Career

Career

Harris's first important film role was in Borderline with Charles Bronson. In Knightriders (1981), he played the king of a motorcycle-riding renaissance-fair troupe in a role modeled after King Arthur.

In 1983, Harris became well known, after playing astronaut John Glenn in The Right Stuff. Twelve years later, a film with a similar theme led to Harris being nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his portrayal of NASA flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13.

Further Oscar nominations arrived in 1999, 2001, and 2003, for The Truman Show, Pollock, and The Hours, respectively. Harris also portrayed a German Army sniper, Major Erwin König, in Enemy at the Gates (2001). He appeared as a vengeful mobster in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (2005) and as a police officer alongside Casey Affleck and Morgan Freeman, in Gone, Baby, Gone (2007), directed by Ben Affleck. Also in 2007, he appeared in National Treasure: Book of Secrets as antagonist Mitch Wilkinson.

Along with theatrical films, he has starred in television adaptations of Riders of the Purple Sage (1996) and Empire Falls (2005).

Harris made his cinema directing debut in 2000, with Pollock, in which he starred as the acclaimed American artist Jackson Pollock. He has also portrayed such diverse real-life characters as William Walker, a 19th Century American who appointed himself president of Nicaragua, in the film Walker, Watergate figure E. Howard Hunt in the Oliver Stone biopic Nixon, composer Ludwig van Beethoven in the film Copying Beethoven, and Senator John McCain in HBO's made-for-television drama Game Change.

Harris has directed a number of theater productions as well as having an active stage acting career. Most notably, he starred in the production of Neil LaBute's one-man play Wrecks at the Public Theater in New York City and later at the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles. For the LA production, he won the LA Drama Critics Circle Award. Wrecks premiered at the Everyman Theater in Cork, Ireland and then in the US at the Public Theater in New York.

Harris and wife Amy Madigan starred together in Ash Adams' indie crime drama Once Fallen, alongside Brian Presley, Sharon Gless, Adams himself, and a large all-star cast. It was released in 2010.