Acting in the early years of the Irish Free State was a wandering and fickle profession. In the rural areas, fit-ups were popular. A troop would arrive and set up a tent, stage shows for a few days, then pull out and fit up in the next town. Sometimes they would use the local parish hall instead of carrying a tent. The productions might feature musicians and singers, a magician, maybe a rickety projector and a movie, and a play. ‘Fit-ups’ didn’t visit the cities, but touring companies would take over a local theatre for a few days, bringing some welcome colour to the lives of the inhabitants.
One of the most famous of the actor/managers who toured Ireland from the 1930s to the 1960s was Anew McMaster, a Monaghan native. A powerful Shakespearian actor with an international reputation, in 1925 he decided to set up his own company and tour the country, presenting the classic plays to schools and theatres. He managed the company, directed the shows and starred in them himself. Limerick was often on his itinerary. He would visit the city once or twice a year.
His business model was simple. He kept the stage spartan, and the cast tight, so that he could tour economically. They would stay with local families in boarding houses, and everything was done to keep the costs down. McMaster used to stay in the home of Mick English. Harris recalled the excitement caused by the annual visit of the strolling Shakespearian company, and the famous actor and his family who stayed at the English home near Sarsfield Bridge.
In an interview in 1998 he told Limerick man Joe Leddin:
Anew McMaster used to stay in Mick English’s mother’s house. And Mick, myself and Terry Curtain used to go there night after night. There was a big fire in the kitchen, and Anew McMaster would regale us with stories about Shakespeare, and with stories about the theatre, which began to ignite me, to ignite my imagination.’
We did a production of The Mikado out in the English’s orchard. Mick’s mother got a little wicker basket that had fruit in it, and she threw it on the floor. She put the basket on Mick’s head as a little cap, and a little white dress. Mick, me, Teddy Curtain, and a group of others, performed in front of Anew McMaster, Mary Rose McMaster and Margery McMaster, in the orchard. That was the beginning of my career as an actor.
That was nothing more than fun, and for Teddy Curtain and Mick English, the end of their thespian ambitions. But Dickie enjoyed the limelight. He loved hanging around the professional actors, and lending a hand. He said:
Anew McMaster gave Mick, me and Teddy Curtain two shillings, and we played the crowd in Oedipus Rex. Mick and Teddy and me, along with Patrick Mcgee and the famous Harold Pinter, and all we had to do was say: ‘Oedipus save us, Oedipus save us.’ They were terrible. I was brilliant.
Mick English remembered the influence of McMaster on the young Harris. He recalled being asked to provide bodies as extras for a stage production of A Tale of Two Cities. English provided him with some of his friends, including Harris and Teddy Curtain. Curtain was a classmate of Harris. They were paid half a crown each per performance to do the mob scenes.
‘Subsequently Harris was badly bitten by the acting bug, and spent hours talking about acting in my mother’s kitchen with McMaster. McMaster persuaded him to go to London and join an acting school,’ said English. ‘Anew McMaster was a huge influence on him, telling him the best thing he could do was go to London.’
Harris helped out with a few of the productions, but he didn’t take things too seriously at that stage. He wasn’t the showman in the family. The Harrises were known as good singers, but Richard was not the one with the voice.
Ironically, his two brothers, Noel and Dermot, whose names did not make the Tivoli Cup in Kilkee, were the ones with the reputations for singing. Noel was a star with the local light opera society, the Cecilian’s. The Cecilian Musical Society is a Limerick institution. It was founded in 1919 by the Jesuit order, the priests who educated the Harris family. They staged all the classic musicals and light operas – Gilbert and Sullivan, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls – and put on shows every year, to a very high standard. They were big productions, with large casts. Richard never showed the slightest interest in getting involved – but Noel did and he never had to languish in the chorus. He was the leading man. Noel joked:
They all say the wrong Harris went to Hollywood. I was the one involved in that world as a young man. I was in the Cecilians. I did all the lead parts in their productions. Richard never had a great voice. I had. I was the one God gave a pretty decent voice to, and I had it trained in Limerick for five or six years. I studied under a professor in Limerick on voice production.
I took the lead in all my school operas, and then when I left school I graduated into the Cecilian Musical Society. I was with them for a number of years, until I got married, and work took me to Dublin. Jim had a very good voice as well.
Kevin O’Connor confirmed where the talent lay: ‘The best singer in the family was Noel. I was in several shows with him myself, with the Cecilian Musical Society. Noel was a very handsome guy, and a much better singer than Dickie, but Dick sold records all over the world. Ironic, isn’t it?’
Dermot, who went on to manage Dickie, was also a good singer.
What really turned Richard into an actor was an encounter with a fit-up troop in Kilkee as he recovered from TB and looked for a new direction in his life.
Harris spent the summer of 1954 in his spiritual home by the sea. But instead of swimming, playing racquets and chasing women, he walked the streets and brooded. He also had a pint or three in the local hostelries every evening. During the holidays, a university drama group arrived in the village to put on a show. Drama has always been popular in West Clare – the Doonbeg Festival, which takes place only a few miles from Kilkee, is one of the most popular stops on the amateur drama circuit. There would be full houses for the show.
The group was led by Lelia Doolin, a young Cork woman. She was a few years younger than Richard, but was already seen as an academic high-flyer. She had studied French and German at University College Dublin, then won a scholarship to study at the Brecht Theatre in Germany. After that she went to University College Galway (UCG) to study for her masters. She went on to work for RTÉ, the Irish national television station, as a producer and presenter. She was also artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, and a film producer.
In 1954 she was the auditor of the DramSoc, the UCG drama society. Along with actress Kate Binchy, and Michael Garvey who went on to be a producer with RTÉ, she set up one of the last of the fit-up companies. Called ‘The Guild’, they took the company to Kilkee, where they set themselves up in the local hall. Throughout the summer they staged a number of productions. As the place was full of holidaymakers from Limerick crying out for entertainment, the venture was a big success.
The company took two houses for the summer. One was in the East End, and the boys stayed there; the other was in the West End, and that is where the girls stayed. The girls got the better side of town. They shared all the chores evenly. One minute you could be doing the lights, the next minute boiling the potatoes for the communal dinner.
‘Dickie’s interest in acting started in Kilkee that year,’ confirmed Noel:
We were staying in a house overlooking New Found Out in the West End. There were two semi-detached houses, the very last houses on the West End as you go towards the Pollock Holes. They were shaped like a castle. We had one of those houses, and the second house was taken by the college players.
A girl called Lelia Doolin was down in Kilkee doing the summer season. Dick got involved with them. He used to help them with the scenery at different times. He got into the whole atmosphere of acting because of Lelia Doolin.
Dick introduced himself to the group, and asked could he help out backstage. The group was glad of the extra pair of hands. Harris was glad of the diversion.
‘He can thank her and her group, that they gave him the taste for acting. He rarely slept in our house that summer. He used to sleep in their house with them. He totally threw himself into it, and this is where he developed his sheer love for acting,’ said Noel.
A number of years later, while Harris was performing a one-man show on the West End (of London, not Kilkee), Lelia Doolin was doing an arts documentary, Broadsheet, for RTÉ. It was 1963, and Harris was getting good reviews for Diary of a Madman, a show he had produced himself based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol. Doolin’s documentary was on the Irish invasion of the British stage, and young Harris, along with fellow hellraiser Peter O’Toole, was among the future stars she interviewed. He appeared in a traditional knitted Aran sweater, rather than the more conventional jacket and tie of her other interviewees. On the billboard behind him, his own name appeared above the name of the play – and every bit as big. The ego had landed.
‘When Richard was starting to make his name in London, producing his show in the West End, Lelia interviewed him on television. He was a very young man starting out, but she interviewed him because of this love affair or friendship that developed between them in Kilkee,’ said Noel.
In fairness there is no evidence that there ever was a love affair between the pair. But there certainly was an affair that summer, and it turned into a lifelong obsession: by the time summer was over, Richard was in love with the stage. When he returned to Limerick he joined the College Players, a local amateur dramatic group. The group had been established in 1926 and held weekly workshops for enthusiastic learners. He claimed that he joined the group on a whim. He said he was walking past a hall and saw their sign, saying ‘You can be an actor’, and thought, why not?
The truth is that the seeds of an acting obsession had been sown in his early dealings with Anew McMaster, and watered during his summer in Kilkee. So when he noticed the sign, he was ready for it.
He enthusiastically joined in the weekly workshops, learning the basics of his trade. It was quickly apparent that he was a born show-off, with a great deal of stage presence, but no discipline. He knew it all, and wasn’t interested in direction. It had to come instinctively, an expression of his soul.
One man who was heavily involved in the group, Kevin Dineen, said that there were no signs of great acting ability. It was all presence and showmanship. Dineen said that Harris at that point had all the makings of a good variety artist – perhaps a magician or a comedian. Harris was not long with the College Players, and never established himself as an actor. Unlike Noel, he did not get the leads. He struggled to make the crowd scenes.
‘He was never on stage in Limerick,’ said Noel. ‘There is no record whatsoever of him ever having appeared in a play in Limerick.’
There was a rumour that he had a minor part in a production of an obscure European play that the group staged. The play was Easter, by August Strindberg, a Swedish playwright from the turn of the century. Easter was a symbolic religious drama, and heavy-going, but the College Players did not shy away from hard work. Harris took one of the minor roles, just a few lines.
According to Noel he did not begin smoking until he began hanging out with actors. And he began to drink more heavily as well. He maintained his rugby friendships, and continued to drink in the rugby pubs, but he also dropped in for a pint to the more arty pubs in town, such as The White House. He also began to develop more bohemian friendships.
One of the people he hung out with was a young poet with a growing reputation. Desmond O’Grady was destined to become one of the more important – though little-known – figures in Irish literature. He was born in Limerick in 1935, so he was a few years younger than Harris. He was in his late teens when they began to move in the same circles, but they quickly became firm friends.
Is there any significance to the fact that many of Harris’s close friendships in those days were with people a little younger than himself? His rugby buddy Mick English was three years younger than him; Des O’Grady almost five. In Kilkee he became a close friend with Manuel Di Lucia, a friendship that lasted his lifetime. There was a large age gap there too.
Actors love to be the centre of attention. It is one of the big draws of the profession, and by all accounts Harris was typical of the trade. Being the fifth of a large family he was always vying for attention. His exploits on the rugby field could also be read in that way: playing the macho sporting hero. His pranks at school, his smart comments in the cinema, his handstands on the strand wall at Kilkee: all were cries for attention, different ways of saying ‘Look at me!’ Actors need their acolytes. When they become stars, the acolytes follow naturally. But Harris was no star then. So perhaps that is why he gravitated towards younger men, men who would look up to him.
Des O’Grady was a teen with an intense love of literature, and a burning ambition to leave Limerick for more cosmopolitan shores. These were two things he had in common with Harris. It was enough to form the basis of a solid friendship.
O’Grady did achieve his ambition to leave Limerick. A few months before Harris took the plunge and went to London, O’Grady scraped together the fare to Paris. He taught in the ‘City of Light’ and also began to write seriously. It was the start of a peripatetic career that took him to Rome, the Middle East, America and, finally, to the American University in Cairo and the University of Alexandria, Egypt. He gained his MA and PhD at Harvard, specialising in Celtic languages and comparative literature, and published nineteen volumes of his own poetry, as well as eleven volumes of translated poetry from different cultures.
Funnily enough, he also tried his hand at acting, appearing in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney said of him: ‘Desmond O’Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art.’
O’Grady has now retired to Ireland, but is in poor health.
Mixing with O’Grady brought Harris into contact with others in the rather limited Bohemian subculture of Limerick. One of those was a young artist, Jack Donovan. Again, he was four years younger than Harris. Born in 1934, he loved painting, but unlike his two friends, he had no ambition to fly the coop. He was quite happy to remain in Limerick. In 1951, at the age of 17, he had entered the Limerick School of Art and Design, in the centre of town. He eventually became part of the staff of the college, and between 1962 and 1978 he was head of the college. He is one of the most influential artists the city has produced, being responsible for training several painters and sculptors who went on to gain international reputations. He is still in Limerick, living in Croom, a small village just south of the city, and he is still producing art. Although he did not consider himself an intimate friend of Harris, he remembers well the years they moved in the same circles:
I knew him mainly through Des O’Grady, the poet. He was a good friend of Des, but I wouldn’t have been bosom buddies with him. I was a student at the time, only 19 or 20. I was living out in Rathkeale and coming in to the art college. But we had a few good sessions together.
Harris and O’Grady and myself, and a small group of us, we drank together several times. We all drank in the White House. We were always a bit wild. It is hard to know how heavily he was drinking at that stage. I wouldn’t say he was too heavy a drinker, as far as I could see. He certainly wasn’t alcoholic. Most people that age, and particularly in the kind of Limerick we had then, we all drank maybe too much.
He definitely stood out from the crowd. He was taller than the rest of us, and he had broad shoulders, a typical rugby player. He was handsome, I suppose. He was an intelligent man. We were all sceptics at that time, unbelievers. I think, outside of the interest in the arts, that was the attraction. He was definitely a freethinker. Was he a ladies man? He probably was – we all were, after a few pints!
Harris was just one more face in the crowd, but Donovan said that he found the actor an enjoyable companion. But O’Grady was the pin that held them together, and once O’Grady was gone, they drifted apart. They did not remain in contact as adults:
I remember that occasion, when O’Grady went to Paris. That was before Dickie left for London. We saw O’Grady off on the train, then we had four or five pints together in Charlie St Georges, which was across the road from the railway station. I liked him. He was interested in painting, he was interested in poetry, and in rugby. Rugby was big with him.
Donovan knew that Harris wanted to be an actor, but that he was finding it a struggle. He had been rejected for all the leading roles by the College Players, and he took that hard, blaming one of the more experienced members for the snub.
‘I remember him with Kitty Brady,’ said Donovan. ‘She used to do drama, and she won something at the big All Ireland Amateur Drama festival in Athlone. On one occasion Dickie told me that he was interviewed for the College Players, and he didn’t make the cut. I think he blamed Kitty for that.’
But part of the problem may have been that Harris simply wasn’t good enough at that stage. ‘Full of bluster with no great technique – that would probably sum him up when I knew him,’ said Donovan.
Harris might have been taking knocks in his new world, but he was an unbounded optimist and did not let them affect him. He had an inner confidence, and a faith in himself. He belonged in front of the lights, and was never a shrinking violet.
One day, as he was walking down O’Connell Street, he spotted a familiar figure near Roches Stores, a big city-centre department store. He did a double take, confirming that he had indeed spotted Rita Gam, the Hollywood starlet. Why she was in Limerick that May afternoon is not known. But Harris would have known her anywhere. Half French, half Romanian, and fully American, she had sultry dark looks and a great body. She was three years older than him, and had already starred in a number of movies. Her most recent was The Thief, where she was paired with Ray Milland. It was an unusual film noir, a black-and-white cold-war spy thriller distinguished for the fact that there was no dialogue in the movie. Some loved the gimmick, while others thought it made for a dull and slow-moving evening. Harris was well aware of the controversy. The Thief had played in the Savoy cinema only weeks before.
Never a shrinking violet, Harris approached the beautiful stranger and chatted with her briefly. A friend of his, photographer Dermot Foley, was passing by and Harris got him to take a picture. More than fifty years later Gam still looks beautiful. Harris looks awkward, slightly smug and a little star-struck. He almost looks shy.
The photograph was published in the local Limerick Leader a few days later. Gam, who was the chief bridesmaid at the wedding of Grace Kelly to Prince Ranier the following year, went back to her glamorous lifestyle. Little did she know that within a few years she would be another notch on the Harris bedpost.
Many factors were pushing Harris towards the stage. His encounter with Lelia Doolin and her fit-up crew, his annual fun with Anew McMaster, his stumbling efforts to get into the cast of the College Players: all were pushing him in one direction. He still had an obsession with rugby, and his desires on that front were still alive, but he was changing. Now he was drinking more heavily, he had begun smoking, he wasn’t lifting weights or taking care of his body the way he had before the touch of TB. He knew his life was coming towards a crisis, and he felt strongly that the crisis would be resolved only by leaving home and searching out new horizons.
Around that time, a few of his rugby buddies suggested he travel to Dublin with them for an international match. He didn’t need much persuasion. The plan was simple. They would travel up the night before and then hit the pubs to build up some Dutch courage. Then they would hit the dance halls and show the Dublin girls how Limerick men party. Harris, a self-proclaimed ‘horny bastard’, was in his element.
It was not an easy journey to Dublin. None of them had a car, so they were hitchhiking. A bunch of guys together is trouble, so they struggled to get a lift. Finally a succession of trucks and lorries got them to the outskirts of the capital, then a car stopped and brought them the final few miles. The friends then proceeded to put their plan into operation. They hit the bars.
There were four friends together, and they were in very high spirits. As they roved down one of the streets, something caught Dickie’s eye. He walked over and read the poster. It was for a production of Henry IV, but not by his beloved Shakespeare. This was a more modern work, by Italian writer (and Nobel prize-winner) Luigi Pirandello. It was a study of madness, with both comic and tragic overtones. It was heavy-going, and only a real theatre lover would have been enticed to part with the ticket price.
‘You go to the dance,’ Harris told his shocked friends. ‘I’m going to this play.’
That night was when the final pieces fell into place, and the epiphany was complete. His destiny was decided.
Henry IV remained important to him; in 1990 he produced and starred in a very troubled, but successful, run of the play on London’s West End.
Harris remembered what Anew McMaster had said to him on his last visit to the city. If he wanted to become a successful actor – and he could – he would have to go to London to do it. That was where opportunity lay. At Harris’s age (already 24) he could not let the grass grow under him. He would have to get to one of the drama schools and do a crash course to bring his technique up to standard.
Harris had been sending to London for information, but he knew that he just had to take the plunge. He sat his parents down and explained to them what he wanted to do with his life.
Legend has it that his mother was tearful, but his father was delighted to see the back of him, growling, ‘For God’s sake, let him go.’
A lovely story, but like many that Harris was to tell over the next five decades, it was pure fiction. His father was surprised, but supportive. His parents were always supportive of Dickie, and the rest of their children. Noel said:
He got on very well with my father and mother. There was never a row in our family. I can remember it distinctly when he approached my father and said to him: ‘I am going to become a professional actor.’ And I can remember my father, by Jesus, he couldn’t believe it.
Was he upset? Not at all. But he was totally surprised that it happened. He never saw Richard having a desire or a love of acting. I mean, he was never on a stage in Limerick.
Despite this, the family gave their blessing. Richard gathered his meagre savings and took the train for Dublin, from where he would take the boat to his destiny.