Entertainer Keith Harris, 67, dies after ongoing battle with cancer
TRIBUTES have been paid to Keith Harris, variety star and ventriloquist who has died aged 67. He had been suffering from cancer.
Harris will be most remembered for his act with puppet Orville, a partnership that was to delight and depress him in equal measure.
The luminous green duck creation was to help send Harris’s career skyward. At his professional peak between 1982 and 1990, Harris had his own BBC 1 Saturday night programme The Keith Harris Show.
He topped the pop charts in 1982 when his single I Wish I Could Fly sold over 400,000 copies and he appeared on five Royal and Children’s Royal Variety Performances.
But the entertainer, who as a six-year-old appeared on his ventriloquist father’s knee as the dummy, at times hated the Orville association.
“I never really wanted to be known as Keith Harris and Orville,” he admitted. “I was Keith Harris ‘the entertainer’ and Orville was just part of what I did. I wanted to say ‘Look, I sing, I dance, I do impressions, I do everything.’”
His manager of 20 years, Robert C Kelly, said Harris, whom he described as a “thoroughly decent man”, was first diagnosed with cancer in 2013 and became ill again in January.
He said: “He was a man who loved life, and was in turn loved by so many.
“Keith was not only a technically great ventriloquist, he was also a gifted mimic and an extraordinarily funny man, both onstage and off. Perhaps even rarer than that in showbiz, he was a thoroughly decent person, a great friend and a wonderful father and husband.”