Richard Harris - Career

Career

Harris made his film debut in 1958 in the film Alive and Kicking, and played the lead role in The Ginger Man in the West End in 1959. He hated filming The Wreck of the Mary Deare so much that he refused to return to Hollywood for several years, turning down the role of Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire. He had a memorable bit part in the movie The Guns of Navarone as a Royal Australian Air Force pilot who reports that blowing up the "bloody guns" of the island of Navarone is impossible by an air raid.

For his role in the film Mutiny on the Bounty, despite being virtually unknown to film audiences, Harris reportedly insisted on third billing, behind Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando. He famously did not get along at all with Brando during filming.

Harris' first starring role was in the movie This Sporting Life in 1963, as a bitter young coal miner, Frank Machin, who becomes an acclaimed rugby league football player. For his role, Harris won Best Actor in 1963 at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination. Harris followed this with a leading role in the Italian film, Michelangelo Antonioni's Il deserto rosso (1964), and he also won notice for his role in Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee (1965), as an Irish immigrant who became a Confederate cavalryman during the Civil War.

In 1966, Harris played Cain in John Huston's film The Bible: In the Beginning. Harris next performed the role of King Arthur in the film adaptation of the musical play Camelot. He continued to appear on stage in this role for years, including a successful Broadway run in 1981–82. In 1970 Harris also starred as an 1825 English aristocrat who is captured by Indians. He lives with them and begins to understand/accept their lifestyles, in the unforgettable and powerful motion picture "A Man Called Horse". That year British exhibitors voted him the 9th most popular star at the UK box office.

Harris recorded several albums of music, one of which, (A Tramp Shining), included the seven-minute hit song "MacArthur Park" (Harris insisted on singing the lyric as "MacArthur's Park"). This song had been written by Jimmy Webb, and it reached #2 on the American Billboard Hot 100 chart. It also topped several music sales charts in Europe during the summer of 1968. "MacArthur Park" sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. A second album, with music mostly composed by Webb, The Yard Went on Forever, was published in 1969.

Some memorable movie performances followed this, among them a role as a reluctant police informant in the coal-mining tale The Molly Maguires (1970), starring with Sean Connery. Harris starred in Cromwell, a 1970 film based on the life of Oliver Cromwell who led the Parliamentary forces during the English Civil War and, as Lord Protector, ruled Great Britain and Ireland in the 1650s. Harris starred in the Man in the Wilderness in 1971, Juggernaut in 1974 (a British suspense movie about the hijacking of an ocean liner), in 1976 in The Cassandra Crossing, along with the actresses Sophia Loren and Ava Gardner, and in a B-movie, Orca, in 1977. Harris achieved a form of cult status for his role as the mercenary tactician Rafer Janders in the movie The Wild Geese (1978).

In 1973, Harris published a widely-acclaimed book of poetry, I, In The Membership Of My Days, which was later re-published as an audio recording of his reading his own poems. In 1989, Harris played the beggar king J.J. Peachum in Mack the Knife, the third screen adaptation of The Threepenny Opera.

By the end of the 1980s, Harris had gone for an extended time without a significant movie role. He was familiar with the stage plays of fellow Irishman John B. Keane, and had heard that one of them, The Field, was being adapted for film by director Jim Sheridan. Sheridan was working with actor Ray McAnally on the adaptation, intending to feature McAnally in the lead role of Bull McCabe. When McAnally died suddenly during initial preparations, Harris began a concerted campaign to be cast as McCabe. The campaign succeeded, and the movie version of The Field was released in 1990. For his performance, Harris earned his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor but lost to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. In 1992, Harris had a supporting role in the film Patriot Games, as an Irish-American radical.

In November 1987, Harris began a brief tenure as a visiting professor at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Harris had previously visited Scranton in October 1986 to perform Camelot with his younger brother, Dermot Harris, who died of a heart attack that same year. He soon established friendships with members of the University's faculty, notably Scranton President J.A. Panuska. Harris agreed to return to the University of Scranton as a visiting professor in 1987 to raise funds for a scholarship for Irish students, which he established and named in honour of his brother. Harris was welcomed to the city with a limo escorted by five police motorcycles and proclamation from the mayor. He cast the actors for the University of Scranton's production of Julius Caesar in November. He then returned to the university in January and February 1988 for the production.