Pop Idol

Damian Harris remembers his father, the late great actor Richard Harris

My father won the Best Actor award at Cannes in 1963. The prize was a pair of gold cuff links, which he tried unsuccessfully to give back on stage. “I’ve got cuff links,” he said, “a fucking drawful. I want one of them” – and by that he meant a gold palm, which for reasons unknown to him everybody received except the Best Actor. He got the cuff links in a red velvet box, and they went into my grandfather’s glass case of honour, beside my boxing and swimming medals, occasionally taken out at Sunday lunches.

The film for which my father won the Best Actor award was This Sporting Life, directed by Lindsay Anderson, adapted from a novel by David Storey. The story of the rise and fall of Frank Machin, a rugby league player in the North of England, appealed greatly to my father. He was a passionate rugby union player and follower, and believed he had been born to play the part, which he attacked with a ferocity that even as a five-year-old I remember with awe.

The creative fights I witnessed between my father and Lindsay at our flat on the Earl’s Court Road were better entertainment than anything on TV, but I couldn’t understand how playing make-believe (which is how my grandmother explained my father made a living) could be so passionate or exciting. But clearly it was and should always be, and so within weeks the nuns sent me home from school for attacking a fellow pupil because he refused, when playing Paul McCartney in our school Beatles band, to hold his tennis racquet like a leftie. I was Ringo and I’d hit him with the cricket stumps that were standing in for my drumsticks. My father had by then gone up North to begin rehearsals, so it was left to my mother to play the heavy, which, due to my father’s increasingly prolonged absences, became the role in which she was to be typecast.

There were only two other roles my father believed he’d been born to play: King Arthur in the film of Camelot, and a second Arthur, adapted by me and the novelist Kitty Aldridge from her novel Pop, which I was going to direct him as but which he didn’t live long enough to play. Instead, we made it as far as the start of preproduction before Hodgkin’s felled him and sent him to hospital, where we would sometimes discuss the script. The story is about a grandfather and granddaughter who are forced together because of the sudden death by suicide of the daughter/mother. My father had an uncommonly strong bond with his granddaughter, my daughter Ella, so I understood his connection to the role, and why he felt born to play it. One night in his hospital room, we were discussing a particular scene and I felt he had misread or misunderstood what it was about. He looked at me darkly, and I was instantly beamed back to that flat in Earl’s Court – except now I was Lindsay and the fireworks were about to begin… But instead he broke into a big grin and laughed, “Oh, this is gonna be real fun.” I’m sure it would have been.

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Tags: Camelot, Damian Harris, Richard Harris, The Sporting Life

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