Richard Harris(1930–2002)

Richard St John Francis Harris was born at Overdale, the family house in the Ennis Road district of Limerick, on the first of October 1930, fifth of the eight surviving children of Ivan Harris, a Limerick flour-and-grain merchant of the Harris milling family of Limerick, and Mildred Harty. He was raised at Overdale and at the family flour-mill on William Street, was schooled at the Crescent College (the Jesuit school in Limerick) and at the Sacred Heart College in Limerick, and played rugby for Garryowen RFC and for the Munster Schools rugby team. He contracted tuberculosis at nineteen, spent two years in convalescence at the South Yorkshire Sanatorium in Sheffield (the experience that took him out of the family flour-business and into the long reading of literature that became the foundation of his acting career), and on his recovery in 1951 took the place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), where he trained for the next two years.

He made his stage debut at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1956 in his twenty-fifth year and his film debut in Alive and Kicking (1958). His first major film role was in Joseph Losey's The Wind Cannot Read (1958), and through 1959 and 1960 he worked at small character roles in J. Lee Thompson's Tiger Bay (1959), Robert Aldrich's The Last Sunset (1961) and the British Royal Navy submarine drama The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961). His breakthrough role was as the Yorkshire rugby-league professional Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963), the central single film of the British New Wave, for which he won the Best Actor award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

He took the leading male role as King Arthur in Joshua Logan's film adaptation of Camelot (1967) opposite Vanessa Redgrave's Guinevere, and through the late 1960s and early 1970s sat at the centre of a Hollywood career as the leading romantic-and-action lead of his generation: A Man Called Horse (1970, in the western Sioux-captive role he reprised in two sequels), The Molly Maguires (1970), the western Major Dundee (1965) under Sam Peckinpah, the suspense-thriller Juggernaut (1974), and the disaster film The Cassandra Crossing (1976). His 1968 recording of Jimmy Webb's seven-minute composition MacArthur Park, released as a 7-inch single, reached number two on the United States Billboard Hot 100 and sold five million copies worldwide; he was the first popular-music vocalist to take a non-traditional pop arrangement to the top of the American singles chart. He recorded across 1968 and 1971 four further studio albums with the Webb arrangements.

He returned to the front rank of acting work with Jim Sheridan's adaptation of John B. Keane's The Field (1990) in his sixtieth year, playing the Kerry tenant farmer Bull McCabe, for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the second time and was awarded the Best Actor at the BAFTAs. He took the role of English Bob in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992, the Best Picture Academy Award winner of 1993), Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), and the role of Albus Dumbledore in Chris Columbus's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), the films that introduced him to a third global audience in the last years of his life. He died at the University College Hospital in London on the twenty-fifth of October 2002 in his seventy-second year of Hodgkin's lymphoma. His sons Damian, Jared and Jamie Harris continue the acting family. The Harris name in modern English-language cinema carries the weight of the Limerick-born actor's three Hollywood generations.