17

BLOOMFIELD AND BEYOND [1970]

Harris had an adversarial relationship with Limerick, rather like two boxers who have slugged it out in the ring. There is a grudging respect, an outward bonhomie, but behind the joviality there is the knowledge that they have knocked sparks out of each other, and could again.

Harris also had a very tetchy relationship with its local newspaper, the Limerick Leader. In the early days of his career, it was a love-in. When he spotted actress Rita Gam out shopping in Limerick in the mid-1950s, before he had made the break for London, he posed with her for a photograph – then went to the Leader with the picture, which they were happy to publish. They continued to celebrate his success. This is from 1960:

Limerick-born stage and screen actor Richard (Dickie) Harris is at the Grand Central all this week, in Alive and Kicking. Next week he co-stars with Robert Mitchum in A Terrible Beauty, and with Charlton Heston and Gary Cooper in The Wreck of the Mary Deare.

Mr Harris has also scored big successes on television and has been hailed as one of the most promising young actors of this decade.

Three years later Earl Connolly wrote:

The highlight of my recent visit to London was seeing for myself the brilliant performance of Richard Harris in the Diary of a Madman, at the Royal Court Theatre.

The sight of Richard Harris was exciting enough, but on entering the theatre I found to my surprise that I was expected, and that two guest seats had been left for me at the office by the ever thoughtful Dickie Harris.

Harris proved he is now an actor of stature and ability, with a voice which rings loud and clear, rising and falling as the occasion demanded. It was a tour de force in every sense of the word, and the best tributes were paid to him at the end, when he took no less than eight curtain calls.

I hurried backstage after the performance to find several Limerick people in the number one dressing room, including Dick Naughton of the Customs and Excise, and Mr Kennedy of Thomondgate. Richard was very pleased to find that we liked the show, which had run the gauntlet of the critics.

I learned that New York, Paris, Munich, Dublin and other world capitals are waiting eagerly to see his marathon one-man performance. I asked Dickie would it be possible for him to include Limerick. He felt elated at the idea of playing in his native city.

For the next decade Harris did his best to help Limerick. When a campaign was launched for a university for the city he threw himself into it, flying in to attend and address public meetings. The campaign was successful. The National Institute for Higher Education was established in 1972, becoming the University of Limerick in 1989.

But the actor’s relationship with Limerick, and the Limerick Leader, soured considerably in 1970.

‘He wasn’t a nice man to meet,’ said Eugene Phelan, the newspaper’s deputy editor, who had joined the paper a decade or more after those golden days. ‘You couldn’t just walk up to him and say: How’s it going, Richard? He’d tell you where to go. Sometimes you’d catch him in the right mood, and he could be fun. But if he wasn’t on form, then it was best to stay out of his way.’

What caused the change was the reaction to Harris’s directorial debut in 1969/70. At the height of his fame, when he could do no wrong, he decided to broaden his horizons, by directing. Directors often get a bigger slice of the financial pie and make a bigger creative impact on the business than actors, so the move was a shrewd one. Significantly, few of his hellraising colleagues had the courage or ability to make the switch. However, Harris’s foray into directing happened largely by accident.

Harris’s production company, Limbridge, was financing a British/Israeli production called Bloomfield. The actor believed in the project, and poured £300,000 of his own money into it. The story had a sporting theme. Harris’s big breakthrough had come as a rugby player in This Sporting Life, but rugby – despite its popularity in Britain – is a minority sport worldwide. In Bloomfield Harris would play an ageing soccer star, with a script by the highly regarded Wolf Mankowitz and produced by his good friend John Heyman.

Harris played Eitan, a former star of an Israeli soccer team who is facing the end of his career. He still believes that he is essential for the team, but is beginning to face up to the fact that his day is over. He desperately needs a new direction in life, but his girlfriend, played by Romy Schneider, does not understand what he is going through. Then salvation arrives in the form of a runaway boy. Eitan goes on a road trip with the boy.

While Harris dived into the project with characteristic enthusiasm, he was somewhat blind to or unprepared for the implication of his role in the project. Having committed his fee, he was effectively an investor/producer. Thus he had crossed a line and would naturally feel entitled as somewhat of a proprietor to more control of both the storyline and production schedule. By doing this he would be putting the independence and integrity of the director under threat. If this relationship was not defined in advance of production and agreed, there was every likelihood of trouble coming down the track.

Before filming started, along with producer Heyman, he scouted for locations in Israel and went into a programme of physical training for the part, as he had first done in This Sporting Life, although this time around he had a personal trainer and jogging routine. The actor was putting everything into preparation and his commitment was unquestionable. It was also obvious to all involved that he was running the show and on a path to conflict with the director.

Work began well, under experienced Israeli director Uri Zohar. But then Harris arrived in Tel Aviv. He started altering the script and making suggestions on set. Within ten days Zohar walked off. Undaunted, Harris decided he had the experience to take over direction, on the basis that he already had fifteen years’ experience in the business at the highest level. He had done it successfully on stage.

But this was more complicated. Harris admitted that he was learning as he went along - a risky thing in a movie on such a tight budget. And to compound matters, the dialogue was in both English and Hebrew. Harris was fast approaching 40 and was not the physical machine he had been a decade earlier, but playing a washed-up sports star was well within his physical capabilities; a year later he was still fit enough to make the semi-finals of the annual racquets tournament on the beach of his beloved Kilkee, so the years of hard living were not leaving their mark too badly.

In early February 1970, the filming was complete and Harris flew back with Heyman to London to begin the post-production process. There he learned from his brother-in-law Jack Donnelly that his beloved sister Harmay was seriously ill and he immediately moved on to Dublin. Harmay underwent surgery but due to post-operative complications she died. He and his family were devastated. The extent of the actor’s grief would be more adequately expressed in the poems he wrote in her memory, which would be published three years later.

His marriage had ended a short time before and now his sister had passed away. It was not that he was not affected by both events, but as was his wont he got on with life. Regarding his former marriage he would not discuss anything about Elizabeth or her relationship with Rex Harrison - the only clue was in a newspaper interview in which he said that he was all for making love, as in satisfying bodily appetite, but was all against falling in love as it was far too time-consuming.

There was perhaps a trace of misogyny running through his attitude to women, claiming that they played games while making love and their trouble was that they needed men to an emotional degree that men could not provide. There was more than a smidgeon of post-marital bitterness here. For the moment, however, Bloomfield and the gruelling editing process, normally the territory of the director, occupied his main attention. He sought the advice of his old friend Lindsay Anderson for the post-production process, which in a film is dominated by the editing of both visual and sound, the laying of the music and the dubbing of dialogue.

There was a lot of pressure on Harris as a small budget means less time and he must have been keenly aware of the attention that his directorial debut would draw. He had put his money where his mouth was, but would this vocal and opinionated man have any talent when it came to producing a work of art or worth, as opposed to being merely a participant? He was particularly exposed as he had not been the director from the start of the project and the departure of Zohar could be interpreted as the worst aspect of a vanity project.

All this was underlined by the gigantic waves of publicity that had accompanied the recent releases of Cromwell and A Man Called Horse. Harris finally finished his labours in the tunnel of the editing room, while all over London his image was carried on cinema posters. His original ambition when moving to London had been to train as a director, so many must have asked the question, was that ambition justified and had Harris added another string to his massive bow of talent?

The film, released in 1970, moved with funereal slowness, and lacked the emotional punch that such sentimental tales need in order to be a hit. It was a commercial failure when it opened in the UK and Ireland, and was renamed The Hero for its US release in 1971. The rename, and a re-edit, was not enough to make it successful, and it sank into obscurity.

A review in Time Out magazine gives an idea of how it was received:

Harris, directing himself (an embarrassing debut in that department) as an ageing Israeli soccer star, has a row with his plump sculptress girlfriend (Schneider). ‘Give eet up!’ she begs. ‘You don’t understand. They need me’ he says, miming exasperation. There’s even a clock ticking in the background. All this plus potted music and long shots of architecture and desertscapes.

Bloomfield never approaches even the energy level of those hilariously dated commercials which send you scurrying to the ice-cream girl as a hero-worshipping kid hovers and Harris is offered a car to throw the game. Hanging up by your nipples may be masochism, but this is suicide.

Harsh words. It is against this backdrop that Harris fell out with the Limerick Leader – and with much of Limerick society - for a while.

He had decided to stage the world premiere of Bloomfield in the Savoy in Limerick, as a fundraiser for charity. It would be a black-tie event, and a significant milestone for the city. Hollywood was coming to Ireland.

The event, on 6 November 1970, was hosted by the Limerick Lions Club, in association with Limbridge Productions. The funds raised would go to the Limerick Handicapped Children Fund, and the Christian Leadership Movement. The event was sponsored by Halpin’s Tea, who had a number of free tickets to distribute.

Harris must have known that his enterprise was doubtful at best; it was a sentimental story, filmed in two languages. But he had faith in the forbearance of his audience, and believed they would give him the rousing reception he yearned for. And he had an ace up his sleeve; the musical score was composed by two Limerick men, Bill Whelan (who went on to compose the music for Riverdance) and Niall Connery.

The build-up was intense. There were acres of coverage in the local papers, including the Leader: ‘The world premiere of a feature film in Limerick is a history making event, but the fringe attractions planned for Bloomfield on 6 November promise to rival in brilliance the film itself.’

The paper went on: ‘Richard Harris, with characteristic showmanship, has gathered quite a galaxy of stars for Bloomfield’s premiere in the Savoy; a specially chartered plane will fly in some sixty top names in the entertainment business, and they should make Limerick a centre of world attention on premiere night.’

The celebs included Dusty Springfield, Lulu and the Bee Gees. Honor Blackman was there with her husband Maurice Kaufmann, and rising talent Leonard Whiting, who starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, also flew in. They all toured the west of Ireland with Harris, hanging out at Dromoland Castle and visiting Kilkee. Harris also had a special guest - bubbly blonde Linda Hayden. Then just 17, she was beginning to make a name for herself in the risqué sex comedies that the British film industry churned out in the 1970s. She had three films under her belt, and had bared all for her art at the tender age of 15. Linda Hayden was Harris’s mistress, but it was a brief affair.

As the premiere approached, the army decided that the Band of the Southern Command was going to play the patrons into the cinema. It was a grand affair. Pharmacist Dermot Foley, the chairman of the Lions Club, was one of the key figures instrumental in planning the event. He was the same man who had photographed Harris with actress Rita Gam on O’Connell Street fifteen years previously.

Harris arrived a week before the premiere, and enjoyed all the hospitality that Limerick had to offer. He took over Dromoland Castle, one of the finest luxury hotels in the country, set in extensive grounds about 10 miles north of Limerick, where he often stayed when he returned home. During the build-up to the big night he took some of his showbiz buddies to Bunratty Castle. The Norman castle is Ireland’s top tourist attraction, with nightly medieval banquets. Harris stood grinning as Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees was crowned King of the Castle, and Lulu, his wife, Queen, in a mock ceremony at the banquet.

Manuel Di Lucia recalls the events of the day: ‘My wife and I were invited. We were invited up to Dromoland, and booked in with all these stars. We went into the Savoy by coach, tuxedos on the lot of us, big fashion gowns on the women.’

Huge crowds gathered outside to cheer on those lucky enough to have got their hands on a treasured ticket. One person who had tried to get a ticket was Helen Buckley, proprietor of the Limerick Leader. Ms Buckley was a socialite who edited the fashion and social pages of the newspaper, and was a bit of a party animal. She was the sort of woman who should have appealed to Dickie; like Ava Gardener, one of his flames, Helen Buckley could drink him and smoke him under the table. But the two did not hit it off. Harris was incensed that someone could ask for free tickets for a charity event and he refused to give Ms Buckley the tickets.

The spat, minor though it was, preyed on his mind. He was worried about how the film would be received. Things began to go wrong before the film was even loaded. Television personality Bunny Carr was master of ceremonies, and the event overran badly. There were 1,500 people in attendance, including the mayor, two government ministers and the cream of the showbiz world. As they were preparing to begin the screening it was already an hour late. Then Detective J.J. Masterson received a phone call. There was a bomb in the cinema!

The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a few years old by that stage, and bomb scares were becoming a feature of Irish life. Most were hoaxes, but all had to be checked out. Bunny Carr calmly asked people to quit their seats for ten minutes and go to the foyer. He did not mention the word ‘bomb’, but everyone knew – except the visiting celebrities. A hasty search confirmed that the call had been a hoax, then everyone was allowed back in.

Carr remarked: ‘I was told that things would go with a bang in Limerick, but I did not think it would be so close!’

Harris himself commented wryly: ‘Two in one week is a bit much, as we had also to get out of our plane in London for an hour while a bomb scare held us up.’

The film was initially well received, but mainly because everyone wanted it to be a great success. Every appearance by Dickie was greeted with wild whoops and cheers. But as the film went on it was noticeable that the cheering grew more muted. The local lad come good was being applauded, not his artistic work. By the end it was obvious that the crowd were not enthused. But it didn’t stop them celebrating. The event raised £3,500 for the charities, a large sum for those days. And the Irish love a party.

After the screening the festivities raged on until well into the early hours, with a lavish reception, followed by dancing to the sounds of a big band. Then the principals went back to Dromoland Castle for the post-mortem.

Di Lucia recalls:

The film was a dodo. It dive-bombed. Harris even admitted it himself. He was asking us afterwards in the bar in Dromoland what we thought of the film. ‘It was shite, wasn’t it?’ he said. I said: ‘If you say it Richard, it was. You’ll have to rejig it.’

Harris said he’d go back to the cutting room with it. It never saw the light of day after that.

The film flopped in the UK, then opened in America, and flopped again. The failure threw Harris into a depression. He was used to success, but his first directorial effort had bombed. Forgetting the huge amount of positive publicity and uncritical support he had been given, he blamed the people of Limerick – and their paper – for turning against him, ranting that he would never again appear in Ireland and condemning the ‘mind-set of Limerick’.

Harris was being unjust. The Limerick Leader recorded: ‘Last Friday will long be remembered as a night of triumph for Richard Harris.’ But it went on:

The film itself was generally well received, though many claimed that Harris has often been seen to better effect in such films as Camelot, Cromwell and This Sporting Life.

But it was Richard’s big night and the crowd rose to him magnificently. His every move inside the theatre had the crowd cheering, and how he lapped it all up. The native son had come home to be treated like a hero in his home city. Crowds had mobbed him outside the theatre as he tried to enter, and once inside he was given a standing ovation. Again at the end of the film he was greeted with a standing ovation and he gained more applause as he lifted his two boy stars onto his shoulders by way of tribute for their display.

But perception is more important than reality sometimes. Richard Harris felt he had been slighted by his native city. It would be a number of years before the damage was undone.

In a broader sense the artistic failure also hit him because it dashed any aspiration he harboured of climbing on to the creative level of actor-director, which others such as Laurence Olivier had reached. There is no doubt that he had the ability to direct, as he would show to great effect many years later in a stage production of Pirandello’s Henry IV. But two things defeated him in this instance: the weakness of the material and his headlong rush into everything he took on.

His plan had been to emulate Olivier by directing and starring in a film of Hamlet; with himself as the moody Dane, Mia Farrow as his Ophelia, George C. Scott as Claudius, and Peter Ustinov as Polonius. He had scouted location in The Burren in County Clare with his cameraman Geoffrey Unsworth, who had shot Cromwell and Olivier’s Othello, and also had Kubrick’s 2001 – A Space Odyssey on his CV.

But now, Harris withdrew, into himself. He also made a disastrous career move by turning down an offer from the great Alfred Hitchcock to star in Frenzy, his penultimate film, to be shot in London. Harris was offered the role of a former RAF officer who is falsely accused of a series of gruesome murders in Covent Garden by ‘the Necktie Killer’. He passed, and the little known Jon Finch, who had just completed Polanski’s film of Macbeth, got the role.

Perhaps the intense disappointment of artistic failure, combined with that of his marriage, was in some way responsible for hurtling him on a journey in the 1970s that was largely, as he said himself, a rush from one crap movie to another. The previous decade had been largely a triumph of artistic accomplishment, which had unfortunately ended with the destruction of his marriage. Now he could and did concentrate on self-destruction, consciously or not, which on an incremental basis included a daily dose of over two bottles of vodka. That was bad enough, but he later experimented with cocaine and this came close to killing him. That was all on top of a work schedule that itself was capable of producing detrimental effects on his health.

As a result of a cocaine overdose, Harris ended up in the A&E department of the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where he was put on a life support machine and the doctors were so worried about his condition that his family were told that there was little hope for survival. But the planned obituary notices had to be left aside for another time after Harris made a miraculous recovery.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that there would be another time like this one, even though the actor was not to indulge in drugs again. Just as with the episode during the filming of Cromwell, the actor had not just suffered a fright but was given a strong warning - whatever he might have thought of his physical power, this was another instance to prove that he was not indestructible. Or was it the opposite - ‘If I can survive this I can survive anything’? The human mind has an infinite capacity for self-delusion and denial. Richard Harris was a very lucky man but, yet again, it would take him a number of years and more frights to take positive and lasting action.

An innate aspect of the man and the actor was an ability to bounce back from any crisis, both personal and artistic. It was something deeply ingrained in his character. In the moment and in retrospect he viewed failure as part of the human condition, the trick was to face it and move on. ‘You are living today and you must be part of that, even if that part includes failure,’ he said. He was equally philosophical about whatever the future offered:

I have to contemplate the day when no one is going to ask me to act in a movie. I might last like Tracy or Cooper. I don’t think about tomorrow because I am not interested in ten years’ time. If you do you become that age. You can worry yourself into an older frame of mind.

He would, however, never lack ambition or energy in spite of lifestyle interventions. The breadth of his creative aspirations was as wide as ever. He held the opinion, often expressed, that acting was simply not enough.

He persisted with the long-held ambition to do a film version of Hamlet and was not going to be dragged down by the obstacles to making it actually happen. The time for projects in the film business, as he well knew, has to be when the circumstances are right; luck - as in the bounce of the ball in sport - always plays its part. In the interim he got on with his role as a jobbing actor, which he did with Sandy Howard and writer Jack De Witt in Man in the Wilderness, which was completed in 1971.

It was a reprise of the creative relationship responsible for A Man Called Horse, the story set in the Canadian north-west in 1820 in which a trapper, played by Harris, is mauled by a grizzly bear and learns to survive, and sets out for revenge against the assailant.

Meanwhile, in his Tower House abode in Kensington, west London in the autumn of 1971 he was embarking on a return to his singing career, this time with some of his own songs in a musical collaboration with Derryman Phil Coulter, who had garnered international recognition with his song ‘Puppet on a String’, which was performed by Sandie Shaw and won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967. He had also come close a year later with ‘Congratulations’, sung by Cliff Richard.

Coulter was an utter professional but also a sensitive artist whose song ‘The Town I Love So Well’, first beautifully interpreted by Luke Kelly of The Dubliners, would enter the canon of great Irish traditional music. The popular appeal of his hit songs in the Tin Pan Alley of music belied his real talent; in another realm he was the Irish equivalent of Jimmy Webb, he had the facility with his music and lyrical ability to tear at the heart of the listener.

Coulter was a perfect collaborator with Harris and according to Coulter the two men established an immediate rapport. Harris’s material was a personal journey of love lost and the impact of the breakdown of his marriage on his children, most affectingly captured in ‘All the Broken Children’ and ‘My Boy’. The lyrics of the songs, like his poetry, expressed the deeper, emotional and sensitive nature of Harris, quite at odds with his public image and persona of the hard man.

The song, which would be recorded by Elvis Presley, could bring tears to the eye and was a hit when Harris performed it in October that year on Top of the Pops. He worked incredibly hard with Coulter on the songs in Tower House in Kensington, all the more so because he had no training in the art of music. He more than made up for this by his intrinsic talent and choice of collaborator. He voiced his feelings in an interview on the subject at the time:

Singing doesn’t come second with me after acting. If I wake up in the morning and have a great idea for a film, it takes at least six months to get the thing off the ground. By that time I am likely to get bored. Now if it is an idea for a song I call up a songwriter or a producer, get into the studio and a week later we’ve got the finished product.

As well as the album, he planned a concert tour with Coulter with a thirty-piece orchestra, incorporating clips from his films and TV recordings. They rehearsed for months but Harris was nervous about the prospect of appearing in such a show in front of a live audience. Straight theatre and film are distinctly different to musical performance. Harris was worried that his talent might not stretch that far.

‘I just don’t want to sing a few songs and call that an evening’s entertainment. I think audiences deserve something a bit different. If they even want me to talk, I’ll only be too happy to oblige,’ he said. This betrayed a sense that he was not sure exactly what he was undertaking and that he could not be sure of its success. As the start of the concert tour in January 1972 closed in, his doubts increased:

I’m scared bloody stiff. They’ll literally have to push me up the steps to get on. But it is something that I want to do. If you really want to communicate with a live audience you can’t do it on Broadway and certainly not on Shaftesbury Avenue. The people with heads, the thinking people have gone from the theatre and they are going to concerts now.

The underlying problem that must have affected him was that he had mastered the art of film acting and that had been proved and recognised, as had his huge success with A Tramp Shining and most particularly ‘MacArthur Park’, but he could not be all artists to all audiences. However all-encompassing his creative urges, he could not possibly match Sinatra or suddenly invent a musical formula that would surpass the traditional and long-established forms. He would be too easily viewed as a dilettante as opposed to a master - and this proved to be the case. Inevitably the tour had a poor response. Not that Harris would have given a damn one way or another, he could well afford the slings of the critics, and financially he was not dependent on its success. The well-appointed music critic Robin Denselow was particularly scathing:

Is it conceit or sheer self-deception? Why should a first-rate actor parade himself like a shambling tenth-rate Sinatra? True he has handled a musical successfully and gone on to record a series of albums but when it comes to a full solo concert, there is no hiding behind a name or studio techniques. He tried to play it straight and just couldn’t do it: the lights dimmed to a flickering clip from Camelot, up went the screen to reveal an orchestra, and Harris wandered on, dinner jacketed and hand in pocket and launched straight into a batch of sentimental standards.

The consensus of opinion was that the show would have been better placed in a cabaret setting - and that was possibly true. He tried it out in New Orleans, where he achieved some success and had a great time in the Maison Bourbon, where he stayed up until the early hours of the morning listening to jazz. He gave a number of interviews at the venue to journalists and displayed no disappointment on the result of his latest musical venture. He presented himself as a nomadic and nocturnal animal, 42 years of age, full of energy and aspirations and intending to continue living his life in the way he had until that moment.

He moved on to New York, where he made a concert debut at the Philharmonic Hall in the Lincoln Centre, where he was much appreciated by the audience. There was nothing stopping Harris on his journey and he seemed immune to both any perceived achievement or the lack of it attributed to his professional pursuits:

I’ve done so many things in my life and accumulated so many experiences that it won’t make any difference to me. I’ll go on as long as I am capable of going on. Although I’m 42 I feel marvellous, full of vigour. I plan to continue my life as it is, regardless of criticism and regardless of accolades.

The rest of the decade would confirm his strange and peripatetic existence, including many films of not much value, a book of poetry of the opposite, many interviews in which he would lead the journalists a merry dance and a new marriage. He made pretty outrageous statements about women, which no doubt were deliberately made to inspire sensation as opposed to firmly held personal belief:

Girls just don’t get the hang of doing things for pleasure. It is as if they have all been brought up in a puritan climate, where everything is necessarily sin, so they have to assure themselves that they are wanted for their inner selves. Who wants to eat the apple for the core all the time?

Pure bravado from a man with a proven sensitive soul and there is little likelihood that he believed one word of it; there was no one better to wind up the media interest in him, which was intense and would increase when he apparently ate his own words. Not even Richard Harris, with his fabulous energy, creativity and high film profile, was immune from the passing of the years and the mid-life crisis.

His crisis might well have been said to have happened some years earlier, but he must have longed for some anchor in the midst of the turbulent seas of his career, with its upswings followed by downswings. There is an inevitable sense of loneliness for the troubadour moving from film to film, town to town, bar to bar.

He had long pursued the idea of a film of Hamlet and must have understood the role of the Player King, which he could easily identify with. In the 1948 film, the central role of Hamlet had been played by Laurence Olivier, aged 41, far too old for the young man that Shakespeare portrayed. Harris was also subject to the obvious temptation of the leading man falling for the leading lady, more so as a result of the encroaching years.

That is exactly what happened. Back in Hollywood he was starring in the absurdly titled 99 and 44/100% Dead, a so-called spoof of 1940s gangster movies. The director, John Frankenheimer, would later call it the worst movie he ever made. A beautiful young actress, Ann Turkel, almost twenty years Harris’s junior, was playing the female lead after Jacqueline Bisset had turned it down. At the time she was engaged to David Niven Jnr, but soon came under the spell of the famous Harris charisma.

It should not be easily forgotten that the Irish actor, quite apart from his wit, humour and knowledge of all things artistic, was an incredibly handsome man. The extremities of his hectic, creative undertakings and dissipated life had made no impact on his physique or looks. There are some men who are just built like that, either from genetic favour or luck. He was one of them.

Turkel was smitten by him and he by her. For entirely different reasons, as it would later emerge. However, unless he found some new formula for personal stability and professional wandering it would be hard to see how a permanent relationship would work. There would have to be a number of compromises introduced by Harris (which is unlikely by leopards and humans of a certain age). His new amour summed it up in part:

This was my total opposite - a guy from Ireland, a hellraiser and a brawler. He was also much older than me. We fell in love before we had ever gone to bed together. If I believed all the wild stories about him I wouldn’t be going out with Richard. There is no need to tame him; he is more a lamb than a lion.

There was a certain truth in the young actress’s assessment. Harris was acutely aware when he entered the relationship of the appalling behaviour that had led to the breakdown of his marriage. He was up front to Ann about his close connection to Elizabeth and his abiding love for his children, which she accepted as an honourable act that carried no threat to her.

She was also transparent to the public about his previous relationships, which she said meant something to her: ‘I hear all about those women who are supposed to have passed through his life. They were one-night affairs which had no meaning.’ It was clear to friends of the actor that Ann Turkel was no pushover. She appeared to be confident and determined. For Harris, he made the mistake in their relationship, as he would later admit, of over-compensating for his previous failure.

At the beginning there was no hint of marriage, but that was the route the couple took and in early 1974 the engagement was announced, the date being fixed for April. He brought her to London and to Ireland to introduce her to his friends. He also decided to sell Tower House in Kensington, a transaction that brought a handsome profit of £200,000 and, on the advice of Kevin McClory, allied with some tax advantage, he purchased a large house on Paradise Island in the Bahamas with no fewer than ten bedrooms.

It had been the abode of American millionaire Huntington Hartford, who also owned the entire island. It was to be the idyllic home for the engaged couple. Harris was now living the dream existence so beloved of the high-end magazine world, a far cry from his roots in Limerick and somewhat alien to his brash and down-to-earth personality. It remained to be seen whether this would suit his apparent desire to settle down.

After some unexplained delay and rumours of arguments, the couple were married in Beverly Hills in June and departed to the Bahamas for the honeymoon. It might have been more appropriate at this juncture of seeming happiness to keep his personal life a private matter, but Harris had no problem, as ever, in talking about it to the media. The obvious danger did not seem to impact on him. Public pronouncement on the private life of high-profile people when things are going well has the inevitable consequence of unwarranted attention when things go wrong.

When invited to comment on the reason for marriage he said: ‘Ann is a well-brought-up girl, whatever that means. She is also very nice and talented. I’ve made no bones that I’m bad news for any girl.’ He went on to say that he had told her father as much and he had just laughed. At the same time, his ex-wife was experiencing difficulties with her marriage to Rex Harrison.

Even though the films Harris made in the 1970s were viewed as a low point in his career, as always he got on with the job. It was never the responsibility of the actor to judge how a film might turn out in the end. There were too many variables at play between the concept of the script and the journey to the screen. In a notoriously uncertain industry like the film industry, if the actor is on a high and in demand then the chances have to be embraced. The greatest actors in the business have made bad choices, terrible movies and commercial failures - as have directors.

Longevity was an unusual thing in film, as it was in sport. The 1970s was the decade of disaster movies and a rather good British attempt at matching the Americans in the genre was Juggernaut. In the pre-production phase, two directors, Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor, had been shown the door and the baton was handed to the England-based American Richard Lester, who had come to prominence with two films starring The Beatles, Help (1965) and A Hard Day’s Night (1964), and the successful The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds (1973).

Lester started by rewriting the entire script for Juggernaut, with writer Alan Plater. He also added to the existing top line-up of cast: Harris, Omar Sharif and David Hemmings, with a very strong ensemble including Ian Holm, Shirley Knight, Roy Kinnear, Freddie Jones and Irish actor Cyril Cusack, who had first acted with Harris in Shake Hands with the Devil, fifteen years previously.

Harris was playing the lead, Lieutenant Commander Anthony Fallon, a bomb-disposal expert who with his team is parachuted on to the cruise liner Brittanic in the middle of the Atlantic in rough weather and heavy seas. A number of explosive-packed barrels have been placed on the ship by a shadowy figure who goes by the name of Juggernaut and who threatens to allow the barrels to explode and sink the ship if he is not given $1 million ransom. Back in England, a police team headed by Supt. John McLeod (Anthony Hopkins) is given the task of tracking down Juggernaut. His job is given increased tension by the fact that his wife and children are on the ship. A real cruise ship was hired for the sea shoot, the SS Hamburg, which had recently been sold by German owners to a Russian company and renamed the SS Maxim Gorky.

Lester was not only a good director but highly efficient and fast, a method that suited the cast, crew and over 200 extras assembled on the ship. When the sea scenes were complete, the production team moved to Twickenham Studios to shoot the interior scenes there and in other locations in England. The result was a gritty, realistic suspense thriller with stand-out scenes such as the parachute landing on the ship and one where Fallon is being directed by the villain (now captured on land) as to which wire to cut to defuse a barrel bomb.

He tells Fallon to cut the blue wire but the expert, in the midst of sweat-inducing tension, suspects he is being led into a trap, which will spell death for all. He chooses the red wire. Then, following his example, his team defuse the other bombs. Harris was in top form in the part and received excellent reviews. Though he would not rate his performance in his own top ten, it confirmed the breadth of his acting range and how he effortlessly crossed from one film genre to another.

Lester said that he enjoyed working with him and shared his opinion of the boredom of location work. Harris got on with the job, which suited the director. It was not in Lester’s opinion the best part Harris played: ‘I don’t think you can say that. Richard did, after all, play some other splendid roles, so one cannot be categorical. I enjoyed working with him. He caused me no worry at all.’ There would be more splendid roles to come for Harris, but not in that decade. Richard Lester would go on to greater things in the movie business, most notably the Superman series in the 1980s.

Harris made pronouncements around the time to try in some way to diminish the effects of ghastly films he had chosen to act in such as Gulliver’s Travels (1977) and Robin and Marian (1976). One such pronouncement was: ‘I can tell you what the next Steve McQueen movie will be and exactly how he’s going to play it - the same way he’s been playing it for fifteen years. In the motion picture business you cannot have tremendous artistic ambition. And that’s why I couldn’t care less anymore.’

There was another reason. His brother Dermot had been the long-time manager of their production company, Limbridge, and despite Harris’s big success in acting, singing and poetry writing, the financial health of the company was poor and there was need for both the sale of assets and more careful investment. This resulted in the sale of the London home and the tax-efficient move to the Bahamas. Most of the time during this period he was working for the cheques, which were the major influence on his acceptance of the roles.

He also signed a production deal with producer Sandy Howard, which had an attractive profit-sharing clause and among the planned movies was a sequel to A Man Called Horse. Shot in 1976, again in Mexico, like most sequels it failed to impress but did manage to make a profit in the US. There were good reviews but the consensus of opinion was that the violence was off-putting for the Middle American audience.

Also in 1976, Harris missed an opportunity that would have been a milestone in his acting career. The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, marooned in Germany after fleeing the Swedish authorities for alleged tax evasion, was about to film The Serpent’s Egg for producer Dino de Laurentiis; the story of an unemployed circus acrobat trying to survive in Berlin during the turbulent days of 1923 as the early signs of Nazism ferment. The broody Bergman, who liked to probe the human psyche with a scalpel, wanted Harris to star opposite his muse Liv Ullmann and Goldfinger villain Gert Froebe. But Harris was laid low by a debilitating illness that sapped his energy for months, and was obliged to pass. The role went to David Carradine.

Over the following eighteen months, Harris starred in no less than three turkeys: Golden Rendezvous (1977), Orca, The Killer Whale (1977) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976), in which his wife had a part. He always knew instinctively whether the film would work during the production period and he would do his best to avoid watching the finished product. He never saw The Cassandra Crossing: an added reason to avoid it was that during the shoot his wife, who was pregnant, began to suffer dreadful pain. He insisted on putting her on a plane from Rome to New York but she miscarried during the flight. The couple were devastated. Harris dreamed of having a daughter and it made him bitter and angry.

At the same time, Harris’s drinking habits, at 47 years of age, began to affect his body. His condition was not helped by a developing cocaine habit. He collapsed a number of times but seemed to bounce back and the doctors could not find any immediate explanation for the incidents. He then began to go into coma-like states, similar to but not as dramatic as those experienced by diabetics.

The doctors recommended that he stay off alcohol. He did, but still took cocaine and smoked weed. During one coma episode Ann took him to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, where he had been taken previously for a drug overdose. His body appeared to be in working order, but the genesis of the problem would have to be solved. He flushed away his drug stash at home. He had been frightened by the last lapse into unconsciousness and was determined to kick his habit.

His brother Dermot was a big drinker and smoker, and his wife, Cassandra, was a casualty of his habit. There was, no doubt, a sibling rivalry in the area of drink but Richard was now worried by the effects of his lifestyle. Blood tests in a New York clinic found that he was suffering from hyperglycaemia. No alcohol and a rigid diet avoiding fats and sugars was recommended. But, of course, there is a psychological barrier to be breached in relation to alcohol, in Richard’s case his unshaken belief in his own indestructibility. It would take two more years for Richard Harris to adopt the regimen recommended by the doctors, and that would only come about when he was told that if he did not adhere to it, he would die.

His marriage was also in trouble. Harris would make many excuses for this in later years:

When you marry a girl so much younger, you lose your identity in trying to be what they want you to be and trying to keep up with them. It is very novel to begin with, but gradually it gets tiring. I soon found out that I was modifying my behaviour, tastes and outlook just for her. I began to neglect a lot of things because of Ann, particularly my career.

He told Joe Jackson:

Ann Turkel married King Arthur. I discovered a cuttings book she’d had since she was 14. She’d been in love with that celluloid image of me from Camelot. She’s seen the movie twenty-eight times. So she married Arthur. She then woke up one morning and thought this isn’t Arthur at all and punishes you for not living up to her expectations.

Of course, it takes two to tango and this viewpoint is just a little too self-serving. Richard Harris was not a man who would live too easily with compromise and he hated their Beverly Hills life, which he thought utterly false. Although he had houses in several parts of the world, by this point he felt most at home away from the Hollywood set, either on Paradise Island or in Kilkee, Ireland. The cult of youth in Beverly Hills would have annoyed him, a thing that Ann might justifiably not have been bothered by, being young herself. One way or another, blame in the break-up of a relationship is a waste of time. He moved out of the Beverly Hills home into a hotel.

It was disastrous for him because, whatever his faults, he would suffer emotionally from another failure of marriage - and this would not help his health problem. Predictably he turned to the bottle and, worse still, the bad trajectory of his film career continued its downward spiral; the quality of scripts he was being offered also went downhill. Even the titles of the movies he was in at the time told the story: The Ravagers, High Point, Game for Vultures, The Last Word.

For these and many reasons, as 1980 approached Richard Harris would have some sense of relief from the passing of the 1970s - what could be described as his Lost Decade in artistic, personal and health terms. The notable exception was his book of poetry, I, In the Membership of My Days, published in 1973, which sold very respectably but more importantly provided a lasting testament to his creative power and the breadth and depth of the sensitive side of his nature

Published by Michael Joseph in 1973, the collection provided a surprise for people who thought they knew Richard Harris by his much chronicled public persona. The collection had the following dedication:

It was dedicated to:

Harriet-Mary who is still in my heart and Flanny who is still in my head.

Requiem Aeternum dona eis, Domine,

Et Lux perpetua Luceat eis.

Harris says of the collection:

I am known as someone who drinks too much, womanises too much, raises too much hell. But this book shows how I have fooled them. I have always played a double game, one in public and the other in private. This is the private me, the real Richard Harris.

This volume of poetry represented the continuous work from his childhood in Ireland to the year of its publication. The poems describe a young boy growing into manhood, racked by the sadness of death, touched by the wonder of love, strongly aware of the sorrow and joy in the world around him. They reflect the lyricism and richness of the author’s native Ireland; they are angry, loving, lusty and joyous.

The poems by and large are beautifully pitched sentiments of times past, they aimed to capture the sense of the child in the simple appreciation of the family environment marked by elation and a certain sadness. There are two poems in which the parents are seen on the telephone which are gut-wrenching in the expression of the child not being able to help the mother and father in the midst of their grief.

The poems certainly display, as the actor himself rightly points out, his other side, the artistic sensitive nature that his public persona was able to hide or deliberately concealed. Here is contained ample evidence of the two sides of the man and the artist, the divided self that is contained in all humans, whether admitted or not. Humans are not of one dimension, whether this is expressed or not. This is particularly true, perhaps, for those who espouse artistry or creativity as their occupation.

No more than the mask is the exclusive possession of the actor, the mask can provide a very convenient and comforting cloak to ward off the sting of reality. Richard Harris would have to face the length and depth of his escapism and escapades over the decade during which, professionally and personally, he was facing a form of oblivion not allowed by his lifestyle preferences. By dint of pure luck he had managed to avoid the clutches of the Grim Reaper, but not by so far that the trumpet of change was not ringing in his ears and in his heart.

The tide of fortune would change in his favour but as much by his own efforts as any favour bestowed by the perfidious veiled lady of chance. The first and most significant step was his decision in 1981 - when confronted by the reality of his mortality - to give up drink. He remembered the time and the place: 11 August 1981 at 11.20 p.m. in the Jockey Club in Washington:

I had the discipline to stop. Just like that. I had been collapsing in the street and on the stage. I passed out at dinner one night and a doctor friend warned me that it wasn’t the booze. I had been in a coma: the alcohol was shooting up too much insulin in the system.

So I sat in the Jockey Club with a friend and said, ‘This is my last drink.’ I took the wine list and there were two bottles of Chateau Margaux at $325 a bottle. I drank them both and that was that.

The second step was to virtually abandon the world of film to return to the stage in the shape of King Arthur in Camelot. But for this stage show, Harris might have disappeared from sight for all time, as it was in the 1980s that he was sinking slowly and painfully into a celluloid marsh. The start was playing Bo Derek’s father in Tarzan the Apeman, an excruciating experience for the actor and audience alike. He was becoming totally disillusioned by the film business, but if he was playing in ‘such crap’ - as he described it - he had only himself to blame.

During a movie shoot in Sri Lanka, Harris kept a diary, marking off the days until the completion of the shoot, like a boy watching and willing the school clock to the end of class. He then got a call from Los Angeles when he got back to London, offering him the part of King Arthur in a touring production of Camelot. His old friend Burton, who was playing the part, had had enough.

The tour had started in June 1980 and garnered rave notices in New York. It had moved on a criss-cross tour of the country but after a long and exhausting schedule of travel and performance, when the show hit Los Angeles Burton signalled his intention of quitting. Harris accepted the unenviable task of taking Burton’s place, but drove a hard bargain, insisting on £25,000 a week and a percentage of the box office takings.

Harris not only stepped into the shoes of one of the great actors, but in his usual fashion he totally immersed himself in the part and grasped the opportunity. The opening night in April 1981 was a sell-out and the reviews hugely rewarded his effort. The critic for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner wrote: ‘Harris has pulled off an astonishing feat in stepping into Burton’s shoes and delivering a performance that looks like it had months of thought and preparation poured into it.’ The demand for tickets was huge and in one week the show took in $500,000. Harris’s decision to take a cut of the box office takings was looking to be a very lucrative move, and his grasp of and love of the part of the knight king ensured that there would be a long run. He was 51 years of age and the gruelling effects of constant performance would lead to him being physically depleted, and even hospitalised on one occasion with severe chest pain. He admitted to being totally exhausted but kept going.

A frequent visitor to the show was Ann Turkel; the couple had remained friendly after the split. He insisted that both were pursuing their own independence, and a coming divorce would prove it. She said, however, that they still loved each other, which was entirely possible, but the fact was that they could not live together.

She stayed with him at the Savoy Hotel before the London opening. He was in effusive form and giving the media hounds loads of very quotable material. Such as:

My burning desire is to be a monk … Women prefer women’s company … I’ve had enough women in my life to know that lurking under that Helena Rubenstein exterior is a very vicious animal … absolutely ruthless … I’ve tired of being loved by women. It’s the most dangerous trap you can get into … I’ve humiliated people - lost my temper - I’ve hurt people - actors, directors, all sorts of people.

Camelot came a cropper in London for it seemed that the English audience did not have the same affection and empathy for the musical that the Americans did. The reviewers only confirmed the general attitude in rather overstated and vicious attacks. Milton Schulman in the Evening Standard summed it up: ‘Back in 1964 I assessed the musical Camelot as wholesome, pretty and empty. Seeing it again at the Apollo Victoria I felt I had been caught in a time warp, It is still wholesome, pretty and empty.’ The Daily Express critic spent most of the review telling the reader that Harris was too old for the part. It was a gratuitous piece of nonsense, as Schulman’s was an effort in smart-alec phraseology.

There was an added suggestion that some statement Harris had made about the IRA had contributed to its demise. For whatever reason, the audience stayed away and after eight weeks the show closed.

Harris, naturally enough, was bitterly disappointed that the great success in America had not been replicated in England, the provenance of the whole legend at the centre of the story of King Arthur. His relationship with Camelot was far from over. Back in his bolt-hole on Paradise Island he hatched another plan to bring the musical back to life. And it would make him a fortune. In 1983 he bought the stage rights to the musical and spent the next four years under his own direction touring America incessantly. In that period the show grossed over $92 million.

The actor who in 1955 had left his native Limerick with little prospects was now a multi-millionaire and could have retired, aged 57, and written poetry for the rest of his years. But the great triumph was tinged with tragedy.

His brother Dermot had been his long-time manager in charge of his business affairs and a close friend. In previous years they used to rent a house in Stroud in the Cotswolds and bring both their families there. When Harris bought the rights to Camelot, Dermot had been installed as producer. They had a great personal and professional relationship. Dermot was also a hard drinker, but had no inclination to stop as long as it did not interfere with business, which it most assuredly did not. He shared the rogue-like character of his brother as Harris recalled: ‘Dermot was such a rogue. You can take me and magnify me ten times, that was my brother. He’d say to me. “You go and do that picture so I can live in the style to which I’ve become accustomed.”’

The show was playing in Chicago in 1986. Dermot as usual was living the hectic life of the producer and the drinker. One night before the show opened he said to his brother that he was not feeling very well and that he was going to lie down. By the time the curtain came down and Richard Harris had taken his bows, his beloved Dermot was dead. Harris says:

The great mystery was solved when I saw him on a slab in the hospital, his face purple from a massive heart attack. And that’s what it’s all about isn’t it? Here and gone. Why do we mess it up? We want too much and we’re not pleased with what we have.

After the funeral, the Camelot juggernaut rolled on, stuffing the cash coffers. But the tour eventually reduced Harris to a gaunt shadow of his former self. He was not feeling well and doctors insisted on rest. In 1987 the curtain finally fell on Camelot, the lead actor having physically hit the wall.

In time, he would return to film with new vigour and the same mixture of indifferent choices and brilliant performances - though now with the luxury of financial stability. With the autumn and winter of his life and career approaching, Richard Harris would probably surprise himself and once again confound all the worst expectations of his critics. The 1990s would be both a swansong and a decade of selective triumph for an extraordinary man with a talent to match.

In America, as F. Scott Fitzgerald pointed out, there are no second acts. Harris was the exception that proved the rule: his career was capable of and would play out a third act in the classic theatrical convention. Ironically, before the curtain came, his career was neatly summed up by Ann Turkel, who held her ex-husband in high esteem:

I can’t think of any other actor who has starred in movies, starred on Broadway in musicals, won awards, collected Emmys and gold discs and directed plays and movies. He has had careers in almost every field of activity in the arts - except painting. I remember when we went to Richard Burton’s memorial service in Hollywood, people were saying how versatile he had been. But really, nobody has done as much as Richard, and he hasn’t been given the credit.

He had got plenty of offers during his sabbatical from the screen but clearly was not in the mood: ‘I turned down most of the offers because there are too many artless savages out there who simply want to rent your face and then ruin what you do.’ The sentiment is true of the business as the financiers decide the shape of the film even though cinema history is riddled with proof that their interference makes matters worse. But interference or not, the directors and writers are also capable of producing celluloid muck.

Harris also shared some of the blame:

I went through a time when I didn’t care what films I did - I just hired them my body and my voice. Work had taken a secondary place in my life. I picked easy scripts that I could walk through and not have to deliver or really perform. It was easy money.

Harris was adept at giving the quote that suited the time and his mood. This, of course, was true but the record showed that when he believed in a project every molecule in his body was attached to it.

His first venture on the small screen was in a two-hour TV special in which he was cast as the famous French detective Maigret. When the 85-year-old Georges Simenon heard of the casting he remarked: ‘I would have never thought of him in a million years. My favourite was Jean Gabin in France who made seven films, but now you say it, I can see him.’ The problem would be to erase the memory of the original English Maigret, Rupert Davies, who received universal acclaim in the part.

Filmed on location in Paris, it was not a success when screened: the critics were fairly savage, the audience lacking and indifferent. Plans for a follow-up were shelved.

It was television, toe in the water stuff and no big deal: there comes a time in life when disappointment loses its edge. Nevertheless, Harris was just revving up. There would follow a mix of art-house and blockbuster films, a brief interlude in an at-first troubled production of Pirandello’s Henry IV in the West End, and some stunning performances matching those of his earlier career. It was the final period of his acting career, if a film could have been entitled The Indian Summer of Richard Harris.