HARRIS DEEDS
The screen legend’s sons unearth his legacy.
Whenever Jared Harris was interviewed, he knew the question he’d always get asked irrespective of the project. “You’re constantly asked about [his father Richard Harris] and it never gets past the hellraiser thing ever,” he recalls when Teasers meets him and brothers Jamie and Damian at the Venice Film Festival. “There was so much more to him than that.”
Jamie had started discussions with documentary director Adrian Sibley when his father was still alive, and had begun writing about his life in a planned autobiography. But after Richard Harris’ death in 2002, the siblings and Sibley
(A Taste For Hannibal) were galvanised to tell his story via film. “We grappled with whether we should get somebody to do an authorised biography because he left behind this body of work that needed to be respected,” Jamie explains. But the brothers found that working together in front of the camera to explore their father via interviews with friends, as well as digging through Harris’ personal effects, helped them to discover new facets of their dad.
Whether he was a teen squashracquets champ, a raw actor, a
legendary party animal, a pop star or a renaissance man, Harris was, says Sibley, “truthful to who he was at each stage in his life”. And he was also a trailblazer for the actors who have followed him. “Irish actors have a Celtic forcefulness, whether it’s Colin Farrell, Liam Neeson… I was very keen to show that the daddy of all of that was Richard Harris. He was the first guy that got Oscar nominated. Got the Best Actor. Irish actors had always been seen as small roles. He was the first lead. It was really important for us to acknowledge how important he was to Irish film but also British film.”
With colleagues like Russell Crowe and Jim Sheridan waxing lyrical about the man they knew as either ‘Dickie’, ‘Richard’ or ‘Mr Harris’, plus the actor’s own unvarnished musings from beyond the grave via recorded interviews with journalist Joe Jackson, The Ghost Of Richard Harris may follow the exploits of a global player, but at its heart, it’s a story of family. “I think we all lose our parents and that’s why I felt it was so powerful to have the boys involved,” says Sibley, grieving the loss of his own parent while at the Italian festival. “I think the film is pretty universal in that sense. It goes beyond just being a documentary about Richard Harris. It’s a documentary that we can all share. It’s about fathers and sons.”
‘It was really important for us to acknowledge how important he was to Irish film but also British film’ ADRIAN SIBLEY
THE GHOST OF RICHARD HARRIS RELEASES ON SKY ARTS AND FREEVIEW LATER THIS YEAR.