Seeing the arrival of a ship to be featured in the movie, Douglas, who had served for four years in the US Navy, gazed at it scornfully. It didn't end there according to David Weston who had a bit part in the movie. "Are you going to be as big a bastard as they say you are?" came the Irishman's response. "Are you going to be as difficult as they say you are?" asked Douglas. On day one of shooting for the 1965 classic The Heroes of Telemark, Kirk Douglas and Harris squared up to one another.
RICHARD HARRIS FILMS PROFESSIONAL
Even as a young actor he could be challenging to work with - not that it was always his fault.Ĭharlton Heston, with whom Harris co-starred in the 1965 western Major Dundee recalled that he was "very much the professional Irishman, and an occasional pain in the posterior". Richard Harris had been getting away with it for a long time both on-stage and off. "It was the food!" he bellowed as he was wheeled out of the hotel for the last time. Not that he let the apparently excellent service get in the way of a good joke. "I am part of the business but I am apart from it." "I don't go to their clubs, don't go to their hangouts and don't mix at all," he added.
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Not long before his death, 15 years ago on October 25 2002, he told a reporter from the Daily Mirror that he had "no friends in this business". Harris loved acting but quite often did not get along with actors. There is a sweet irony in the thought of a man noted for his bloody-mindedness paying heed to an ultimatum delivered to him by an 11-year-old girl. As an actor, he was very purposeful, very anxious to get it right."Īfter The Field, Harris was offered roles in Unforgiven (1992), Gladiator (2000) and most bizarrely as Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter, a role he initially turned down but then accepted because his 11-year-old granddaughter told him she would never speak to him again if he didn't. He was from Limerick and so am I, so I was fascinated to hear those Limerick sounds in him, even after all those years away. It was almost like God in the Catechism this man on the side of a hill sitting there overseeing everything. "We shot some scenes in some pretty inclement weather," continues Sheehy, "and my big memories of him are of when we might be up on the cliff and he'd be sitting on this single chair waiting for his scene. I think with the white hair and the white beard and the huge coat it was hard to separate him from the Bull.
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"There were so many big scenes, the fair scene or the auction, so you had interaction with him every day and he was larger than life.
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"It was really like he was waiting to play the role all his life," says co-star Joan Sheehy, who played one of the tinker women in the movie. Harris would be nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal and although he lost out to Jeremy Irons, it was the start of a career renaissance. He was a down-to-earth fella and liked the funny side of everything." Rough looking, and he acted like that in the film. "Not very muscular now but a big tall man. "He was a big fella," recalls Padraic Coyne, owner of The Carraig Bar, Leenane. The film was shot in the beautiful but rugged Connemara a suitable location for a star whose face was once described as "five miles of bad Irish country road". Richard Harris was 60 years old when Jim Sheridan asked him to play the role of the intimidating and short-tempered Bull McCabe in The Field.