Richard Harris - Personal Life and Death

Personal Life and Death

In 1957, he married Elizabeth Rees-Williams, the daughter of David Rees-Williams, 1st Baron Ogmore. Their three children are the actor Jared Harris who played Lane Pryce on AMC's Mad Men and who was once married to Emilia Fox, the actor Jamie Harris, and the director Damian Harris, once married to Annabel Brooks and now partner of Peta Wilson. Harris and Rees-Williams divorced in 1969, after which Elizabeth married Sir Rex Harrison. His maternal niece is actress Annabelle Wallis.

Harris's second marriage was to the American actress Ann Turkel. This marriage also ended in a divorce.

Despite his divorces, Harris was a member of the Roman Catholic Knights of Malta, and was also dubbed a knight by the Queen of Denmark in 1985.

Harris paid £75,000 for William Burges' Tower House in Holland Park in 1968, after discovering that the American entertainer Liberace had bought the house but not yet put down a deposit. Harris employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd. to carry out extensive restoration work on the interior.

Harris was a vocal supporter of the IRA from the early 1970s until they carried out the Harrods bombing in 1983, after which he disavowed them.

Harris was a longtime alcoholic until he became a teetotaler in 1981, although he did resume drinking Guinness a decade later. He gave up drugs after almost dying from a cocaine overdose in 1978. A memorable incident concerning his massive alcohol consumption 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!"

Harris is also 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 inquired as to how lying in the street was going to help, and he said, "I'm waiting for my house to go by." In a 1994 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, Harris said he had his driver's licence permanently suspended for knocking over a double-decker bus in Dublin, Ireland.

Harris was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in August 2002, reportedly after being hospitalised with pneumonia. He died on 25 October 2002, aged 72, two and a half weeks before the American premiere of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harris was a lifelong friend of actor Peter O'Toole, and his family reportedly hoped that O'Toole would replace Harris as Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. There were, however, worries of insuring O'Toole for the six remaining films in the series, and he was ultimately replaced as Dumbledore by the Irish-born actor Sir Michael Gambon.

For years, whenever he was in London, Harris resided at the Savoy Hotel. According to the hotel archivist Susan Scott, as Harris was being taken from the hotel on a stretcher, shortly before his death, he warned the diners, "It was the food!"

Harris's remains were cremated, and his ashes were scattered in The Bahamas, where he had owned a home.