"If This Sporting Life was the Hamlet of my career, then the Bull McCabe will be my King Lear." Harris was prolific; when he chose his roles carefully, he was sublime, writes Michael Dwyer , Film Correspondent
In an acting career which spanned 45 years and more than 70 film roles, Richard Harris carved out a distinctive image for himself as a larger-than-life character on and off the screen. He would have been the first person to deny any such allegations, being frequently dismissive of the gauche publicity-seeking efforts of fellow actors, and deriding image and celebrity as frivolous and irrelevant conceits that were far from his mind.
Nevertheless, the mere mention of his name inevitably conjures up certain descriptions - colourful, volatile, hell-raising, hard-living, outspoken and cantankerous, just for starters - and that was just in his personal life.
There are two sides to every story and the story that is Richard Harris the actor prompts other word associations - versatile, ambitious, adventurous, intense, charismatic and richly talented.
Harris, who first came to fame in London and spent much of his life there, delighted in recounting the story which captured both sides of his public image: "If I win an award for something I do, the London papers describe me as 'the British actor Richard Harris'. If I am found drunk in a public place, they always refer to me as 'the Irish actor Richard Harris'."
The proudly Irish actor Richard Harris died on Friday night, three weeks after his 72nd birthday. He had been suffering from Hodgkin's disease and he passed away peacefully at University College Hospital in London.
He was one of the finest actors Ireland ever produced. Much of his prolific output was forgettable and worse, a fact he cheerfully admitted in his derisive references to his work. But when he chose well, he was very good indeed. And sometimes he was sublime.
Born in Limerick on October 1st, 1930, he was the fifth of eight children in the family of flour mill owner Ivan Harris and his wife, Mildred. The young Richard was always interested in sports, especially rugby, but had to curtail his sporting life in his late teens when he contracted tuberculosis.
After overcoming it, he went to London wanting to be a director, not an actor. Unable to find a course that would prepare him for directing, he opted to study acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts.
In 1956 he joined Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop and first made his mark as a professional actor playing Mickser in her production of Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. His subsequent London stage work so impressed the eminent critic Kenneth Tynan that he grouped Harris with Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole as one of the three best young actors on the British stage.
Harris made his first screen appearance in 1958 - a bit part in the minor British comedy, Alive and Kicking, followed by supporting roles in two historical melodramas set and shot in Ireland, Shake Hands with the Devil and A Terrible Beauty.
A year later he made his Hollywood debut, down the credits of the naval drama, The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), which starred Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston. More substantial roles followed in the war drama The Long and the Short and the Tall (1961) and as a mutinous sailor in the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, which starred Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.
In 1963, Harris's breakthrough role came in This Sporting Life, one of the key films in the landmark 1960s cycle of British social realist cinema that was dubbed "kitchen-sink drama".
Based on the novel by David Storey and directed by Lindsay Anderson on his feature film debut, this searing, uncompromising drama drew on Harris's skills both as a rugby player and an actor.
He played the starring role, Frank Machin, an inarticulate and violent but vulnerable Yorkshire coalminer who turns professional rugby player and becomes involved with his widowed landlady, played by Rachel Roberts.
Harris's intense, smouldering portrayal drew comparisons with the young Brando and he was deservedly rewarded with the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It also earned him the first of his two Oscar nominations, but the award that time went to Sidney Poitier for Lilies of the Field.
That superb performance turned Harris into a hot property and the offers poured in from Hollywood and Europe. He was signed up for starring roles by two of the great directors of the era - by Michelangelo Antonioni for The Red Desert and by Sam Peckinpah for Major Dundee, which was butchered by the studio.
He starred with Kirk Douglas in an efficient war movie, The Heroes of Telemark and with Doris Day in the mildly diverting Caprice, while turning up in a couple of resounding duds, as Cain in John Huston's yawn-inducing The Bible and opposite Julie Andrews in the leaden James Michener adaptation, Hawaii.
However, he struck gold again in 1967, playing King Arthur in the engaging musical, Camelot, to which he would later acquire the stage rights and earn a fortune from touring it.
The film also revealed Harris's appealing singing voice, which led to his unexpected chart success over the summer of 1968 with the enigmatic epic single, MacArthur Park, a seven-minute masterpiece composed by Jimmy Webb and performed by Harris with passion and perfect phrasing.
It reached number two on the US charts and number four in Britain and led to him recording the beautiful, underrated album, A Tramp Shining, on which all the songs were written by Webb and an equally underestimated second album in The Yard Went On Forever.
Harris got some flak in Ireland - mostly in Limerick - for taking the title role in the historical drama Cromwell in 1970.
In that year, Harris and Sean Connery were both on fine form in The Molly Maguires, set among Irish-American coalminers in 1870s Pennsylvania and Harris scored a major box-office hit with A Man Called Horse, as an English explorer undergoing ghastly tortures at the hands of the Sioux. It spawned two awful, opportunistic sequels in 1976 and 1983.
After getting an Emmy nomination for the charming TV film of Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, Harris turned director in 1971 with Bloomfield, which dealt with a footballer in Israel. However, for every notable movie he made in the 1970s - Juggernaut, Robin and Marian, The Wild Geese - there were stinkers such as The Deadly Trackers, 99 and 44/100% Dead (co-starring his second wife, Ann Turkel), Orca: Killer Whale and The Golden Rendezvous.
Even worse was to follow in 1981 - the entirely risible Tarzan, the Ape Man, in which Harris hammed his way through the thankless role of Bo Derek's father.
He had reached an age and a point where, like many actors before and after him - Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, Sean Connery and Michael Caine, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino - he was attracted more by the pay cheque than the script and he vanished into a wasteland of utterly undistinguished movies.
Artistic salvation came in the form of a call from home, when producer Noel Pearson and director Jim Sheridan offered him the plum role of the Bull McCabe in their film of John B. Keane's rural drama, The Field. It was Harris's first time in 30 years to make a film in Ireland and he hungrily seized upon the role's dramatic opportunities, creating a turbulent, raging Bull in a towering performance of depth and breadth.
Harris aptly commented at the time: "If This Sporting Life was the Hamlet of my career, then the Bull McCabe will be my King Lear." The role gave him his second best actor nomination.
In Hollywood in the days before the ceremony, he proved as combative and difficult an interviewee as ever - although just as entertaining - not least because he believed his comeback role was not getting the promotion it needed and deserved.
On awards night, the Oscar went to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune and Harris joined the long list of distinguished actors never to win an Academy Award.
There were other rewards, though, as The Field dramatically revitalised Harris's film career and the next and final decade of his life as an actor offered him the meatiest roles since the 1960s.
He was on sturdy form as the ageing gunslinger, English Bob, teaming up with fellow veterans Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman in the outstanding western, Unforgiven (1992). He returned to Ireland again to etch a vivid, complex portrayal of a troubled Traveller patriarch in Trojan Eddie (1996).
Harris was commanding as Marcus Aurelius in the Oscar-winning Gladiator (2000) and as the Abbe Ferra in the recently released The Count of Monte Cristo, which was mostly filmed in Ireland.
He publicly expressed his surprise at reaching the largest audience of his long career in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in which his charm shone through as the wise and benign wizard, Prof Albus Dumbledore.
That film became the second biggest hit in cinema history after Titanic and there is already a wave of anticipation building around its sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It is set for release on November 15th and is certain to be marked with poignancy as the swansong of Harris's film career.
For Irish audiences, there is the more substantial treat that is the imminent release of Don Boyd's loose transposition of King Lear to present-day Liverpool in My Kingdom, which features Harris's last leading role and a truly vintage performance. He is riveting in his judiciously understated portrayal of Sandeman, a powerful, Irish-born gangster with warped codes of honour and loyalty. He gets caught up in a spiral of duplicity and retribution as his three daughters turn against him.
"Good parts like Sandeman don't come along very often so when they do you must grab them and keep a tight hold," Harris said while the film was in production. "Like every movie I make, once I start filming I never put the script down. I eat with it, sleep with it, take it to the toilet and study it continuously to see how we might improve it."
His rich and complex portrayal of Sandeman has earned Harris a best actor nomination at the British Independent Film Awards ceremony to be held in London next Wednesday night.
Should he win, as he ought to, perhaps the British media might show some respect this time and begin reports with the words: "The Irish actor Richard Harris"