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| Hell-raiser: Limerick-born Richard Harris lived a tempestuous life but is remembered as one of the finest Irish actors ever. Photo courtesy Belfast Telegraph |
Richard Harris, hellraiser, raconteur, rugby fanatic and actor of genius, has died aged 72 of Hodgkin's disease, a form of cancer
The man who once said "life should be lived to the last drop and then some" had begun a new and uncharacteristically sedate phase of his chequered career as the grandfatherly Professor Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts College of Witchcraft in the Harry Potter films. The second of the series, The Chamber of Secrets, opens next month.
A few weeks ago, as he lay ill with pneumonia at University College hospital in London, he insisted he would be well enough to shoot the third, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Only hours before Harris died director Chris Columbus joked: "He threatened to kill me if I recast him - I can't even repeat what he said to me."
But this was one comeback too many for the Limerick-born legend. His sons Damien, Jared and Jamie last night announced that he had passed on peacefully.
In his wildest days in the 1970s, Harris would go out for a packet of cigarettes and not come back for a fortnight. "I have made 72 movies in my life and been miscast twice - as a husband," he said.
But it will be for the mixture of violence and vulnerability he was able to convey in such classics as This Sporting Life, which won him best actor at Cannes in 1963, Cromwell, and A Man Called Horse that film lovers will want to remember him.
Had the actor died in the 80s he would have gone down as one of great wasted screen talents. But a late-career revival, kicked off with his searing performance in Jim Sheridan's The Field, won him an Oscar nomination and the respect and admiration of critics and audiences alike.
An acclaimed turn followed in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, and the face he once likened to "five miles of bad country road" shone again in Smilla's Sense of Snow and most memorably in The Barber of Siberia, finishing with a noble cameo as Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator, the swansong of his old carousing partner Oliver Reed.
Harris was the best thing about many bad films and he cheerfully admitted to the Guardian last year that he acted in "some bloody awful films - but who's counting, it was fun".
With his mane of white hair, he said he was relishing being seen as a septuagenarian role model by the lad generation, but was sticking to a strict daily regimen of one pint of Guinness before bedtime.
First published at The Guardian, October 26, 2002
