It had been a decade since Harris had been involved in any film of note. He had been given the script of a film entitled The Field, written and to be directed by Jim Sheridan, who was fresh from his double Oscar success with My Left Foot (1989). Coming from a theatre background, Sheridan had posted the script to Harris at his Paradise Island home and had offered a small cameo role as the priest.
The script was based on the play of the same title by the hugely popular John B. Keane, whose rural dramas - many set in his native Kerry - were highly in demand, first on the amateur circles and then in the larger professional houses in Dublin. Keane, who ran the family pub in the small town of Listowel, was a writer of great skill yet was modest and down to earth. He was in every sense a rural poet, and the universal themes of his plays were set in a world a million miles away from mainstream Dublin theatre.
Jim Sheridan was from a working-class inner-city area in Dublin and had cut his theatrical teeth in Dramsoc, the university theatre society at University College Dublin. Afterwards he ran the Project Arts Theatre, which under his stewardship caused plenty of controversy and was marked out by consistently mouthwatering productions. One of the great successes was The Risen People, a play set in the poverty-stricken tenements of Dublin in 1913 and featuring the great hero of the working classes, the famous trade unionist Jim Larkin.
To say that Sheridan would not easily grasp the essence and spirit of the rural metier of Keane’s work was obvious to theatre and film professionals when the planned production was announced. The story concerned the legacy of land hunger and ownership that had bedevilled Irish history through the iniquities of colonial experience under the British and remained in the wake of independence. In rural communities in particular the land was a man’s wealth and only means of survival.
The central character had rented his field but worked it as if it was his own. He had spent many years of hard labour cultivating the small plot of land and transforming it from barren rock into a fertile piece of land. He considers the land, rightly or wrongly, his own and dreams of buying it.
The field is then put up for auction and Bull McCabe makes sure, by means of intimidation, that none of the local community will emerge as a purchaser. An emigrant from England appears to buy it with his own plans to develop the land.
The murder of the prospective buyer of the land is the consequence, which is followed by a cover-up by the local community. Handled properly, with the original creative intentions intact, it could have had the universal resonance that Jim Sheridan had achieved so tellingly in My Left Foot, and that French director Claude Berri had achieved four years earlier with Marcel Pagnol’s novel Jean de Florette, with a not dissimilar rural theme and starring Yves Montand and Gérard Depardieu.
While there were the usual film compromises made to the playwright’s work such as the portrayal of the victim as an American (Tom Berenger), Harris would have identified with the subject hugely. Not merely from his republican sympathies but also from the memories of the dismantling of his father’s business by the British Rank conglomerate. There was more than a subconscious parallel. His father had, as a result, become a renter as opposed to an owner.
Quite apart from Harris’s determination to re-establish his film career, he would have had the same passion and identification with the role that he had adopted in The Ginger Man, This Sporting Life and Camelot. That sense of identification and thus passionate commitment had always driven his best performances. The part of Bull McCabe was one that he could literally live, to the exclusion of everything else in his life and abandon any degree of proportion.
Ray McAnally, a fine Irish actor, had been cast in the main part but he died suddenly from a heart attack. As Sheridan put it: ‘He created the role in 1965 and he believed in it passionately as a major film. He was in My Left Foot but in The Field he would be the star.’
Harris knew instinctively from the cameo role he had been originally offered as the priest that he had a great chance of stepping into the shoes of Bull McCabe. Within the bounds of decency he let his feelings be known with a call to the producer Noel Pearson. The producer found out quickly enough that the main financier, Granada Television, did not want Harris as they felt he was old hat. At one stage someone said that Harris had not been heard of for so long that they thought he was dead. The signs were not good. There was talk of Brando or Connery, the sort of absurd notions that film people get in the heat of the moment. But Harris was by far the better candidate and Pearson knew it. After lengthy discussions with Granada they agreed to the recasting with John Hurt and Tom Berenger as the under-leads. Harris was utterly revitalised and set about his usual preparation, reading as much material about the background as he could lay his hands on and taking longs walks to get fit. The shoot was to take place in the beautiful landscape of Connemara as opposed to the setting of the play in Kerry.
The film shoot began in October in the village of Leenane. Harris arrived a few days late, sporting a beard that would have been more appropriate for the part of King Lear than Bull McCabe. The director got a shock but just got on with the job. It was clear in a visual sense that Harris had made up his mind on the approach he was going to take to the role.
It was a classic part but the issue would be how the actor interpreted the role. Bull McCabe got his sobriquet for good reason. The bull in the field is always a dangerous animal. In human form the physicality is not necessarily so obvious.
The sense of danger in the film could be effectively employed with subtlety, but it was not this route that Harris took, it was a far more overwhelming bombastic approach. He annoyed some members of the crew with his forthright views, which they felt were undermining the director, but that was Harris and always had been. For his part he seized the opportunity and poured every last ounce of sweat into the work. He was well aware that if this performance made the impression he hoped for - and anticipated - he would be back on the celluloid trail with a bang.
The fee of £100,000, paltry by his standards, did not matter. He was back and in an Irish film. His appetite for the medium had returned. The production wrapped in December 1989 and he moved on to a return to the London stage in Pirandello’s Henry IV. In the middle of 1990 there was a call for a small reshoot of the completed film. It was released in the autumn but did not do well at the box office and failed to breach the US market.
But there was talk of awards for Harris’s performance and he was delighted, despite the poor showing in cinemas. And so it came to pass, with nominations for Best Actor at the BAFTAs and the Oscars. However, he lost out to Jeremy Irons for Reversal of Fortune. Sheridan would go on to get seven Academy Award nominations for the stunning In the Name of the Father (1993). Richard Harris was back on the film scene in a big way, and although he was in the autumn of his career, it would just get better and better. And better.
After the critical and commercial success in the West End of Henry IV in 1990, the actor felt that not only was he back on the true road of his original ambition, but he was personally and professionally in a good place:
You do a piece of work that you like and think, perhaps arrogantly, that after everything you have been through you can still do your job. You can still deliver the goods and you are actually pretty good at what you do. Now I am deadly serious. I turn down all the crap, whatever money they are throwing around. I am enjoying myself more than I ever did.