Sons look back at hellraiser Harris
RICHARD Harris’s three sons — including the actor Jared — have participated in a documentary film about his life, The Ghost Of Richard Harris.
The film includes previously unheard recordings of Richard telling his life story to a biographer. The Irish actor says: ‘When I drank I devoured alcohol, when I did cocaine I devoured cocaine, and when I was in my amorous exploits I devoured women.’
But documentary- maker Adrian Sibley has sought to explore Harris’s life beyond the hell-raising tag, and has produced a thoughtful documentary which shows him as a poet and a successful singer, as well as the drinker and nihilist who Peter O’Toole dubbed ‘The Mixer’ because he so enjoyed an argument.
Sibley told me that Harris’s childhood experience of tuberculosis, which confined him to his room for months, may have defined him — or at the very least sparked his legendary rages.
He said: ‘After TB he created the persona — he decided to be a roaring lad. The trouble with him was that he always shot himself in the foot.
‘Every time he had a great success, whether it was with theatre or with music, he fell out with the people who put him there. Richard could never quite sustain a relationship, whether it was with a woman or with a friend; and the relationship with his children was also difficult.
‘They were sent away to boarding school and saw little of him, and he was capricious when they did. He was as much or more of a father figure to others — including Russell Crowe — as he was to them.’
In the film, Harris’s granddaughter recalls he was simultaneously offered the role of Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings films and Dumbledore in Harry Potter, but chose Potter because if he’d gone for Gandalf it would have meant three years in New Zealand.
Incidentally, Sir Ian McKellen, who took up the LOTR role, was one of those Harris feuded with; and he declined to step into Dumbledore’s boots after he died in 2002. ‘Seeing as one of the last things [Harris] did publicly was say what a dreadful actor I was, it would not have been appropriate for me to take over his part,’ he said delicately.