'I don't think we have the right to be bored," said Richard Harris, the Irish actor who died on Friday at 72 after battling cancer. Harris, always one of the most engaging figures in the movie business, was sometimes a great actor, often the best actor in a bad movie, and never, ever boring.

Something of a byword for unfulfilled potential, Harris was twice nominated for Oscars -- for his breakthrough role in Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life (1963) as a coal miner who tries to be a professional rugby player and, years later, for his turn as a dour Irish landowner in Jim Sheridan's little-seen The Field (1990).

Harris is probably best known as King Arthur in Camelot, his Top 10 single in 1969, MacArthur Park, his role as an English gunslinger in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven, as Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator and, most recently, as the ancient wizard Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies.

Born in County Limerick, Ireland, the youngest of a mill owner's eight children, he was a talented rugby player in his youth. He turned to reading during a bout with tuberculosis and fell in love with the writings of Konstantin Stanislavsky. He decided to move to England and become a director and entered the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, sleeping in a coal cellar to save costs. Acting acclaim came early: A year after graduation, Kenneth Tynan declared him, along with Albert Finney and Peter O'Toole, one of the three best actors of his generation.

Harris was part of the renaissance in London theatre in the late fifties, along with such actors as O'Toole and Finney, Richard Burton, Tom Courtney and Alan Bates, actors who, as Clive Barnes noted, were a new breed of "rougher, tougher, fiercer, angrier and more passionately articulate than their well-groomed predecessors . . . roaring boys, sometimes with highly coloured private lives and lurid public images."

It didn't take long for the movies to discover him. In 1962, he played a mutinous sailor in the movie remake of Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando, which led to the role that established him as an A-list star in This Sporting Life: Harris's rugged good looks ("like five bad miles of Irish road," he once said) and fiery acting earned him an Oscar nomination and a best-acting prize at Cannes. Subsequently, he replaced Burton, his friend and drinking partner, in the stage production of Camelot, and later starred in the movie.

In the late sixties, after his freak talk-singing hit with Jimmy Webb's MacArthur Park, he fell into the West Coast lifestyle of drugs and free love. In 1970, he made the U.S. movie A Man Called Horse about an Englishman who is acclaimed as a leader by the Sioux Indians. That was probably his last major role, and most of the seventies was a downhill slide, including two A Man Called Horse sequels and dreck such as Orca (1977).

He came to disdain movie acting: "I hate movies," he once said. "They're a waste of time. I could be in a pub having more fun talking to idiots rather than sitting down and watching idiots perform."

In 1981, after a 22-hour plane ride back from Sri Lanka (where he had shot Tarzan the Ape Man with Bo Derek, directed by her husband, John), he decided to quit film acting for good. He was going to write, then a dying Burton called him and asked him to take over his role in the revival of Camelot. Harris also had the foresight to buy the stage rights to the play, which made him extremely rich.

I first interviewed him in 1985, when he was finishing a 4½-year revival tour of Camelot. "Nothing on earth," he said, could make him do movies again. It made him "exceedingly sad" that the older English critics wrote that it was "tragic" that a once-great stage actor had been reduced to "second-rate revivals." He knew that some of what they said was true.

"I had a great sense of waste, that there had been a huge distortion in my life, where I'd just ended up drifting from project to project without any sense of purpose. You must understand I don't have that terrible American habit of self-searching. 'What am I here for? What does it all mean? Why don't I like the cold? Was it because my mother mistreated me?' I accept things pretty much as they come and after doing some stock-taking, I decided to quit acting and do other things."

He wouldn't have done Camelot so long, he said, "but the contractors didn't finish my house in the Bahamas. I didn't have a home to go to."

At that point he had stopped the really heavy drinking (two bottles of vodka a day) on doctor's orders. (He recalled being wheeled into the emergency room and laughing, "I can't die, you fools.") Asked whether his generation -- O'Toole and Burton (who died of drink) -- were consciously self-destructive, he countered: "I think it was the exact opposite. We thought we were indestructible." He earned an estimated $90-million from Camelot, financing a retirement if he wanted. He wrote, invested in an Irish theatre company, and was determined to perform classical theatre onstage again.

Harris's retirement was short-lived. Sheridan (My Left Foot) importuned him to play a small part in his film, The Field. Harris responded, "When I play Macbeth, I don't do Duncan. What's the bigger part?" He got it, and earned his second Oscar nomination.

Subsequently, with his memorable performance as English Bob in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven,Harris was back on a new track, in movies such as Patriot Games and Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. In other small movies later, such as Trojan Eddie and To Walk with Lions, he was often the best thing about the films.

His charm and refreshing candour made him a media darling. Of Michael Caine, he once said, "I wouldn't want to watch most of his movies even on video."

He was never shy about being as well paid as possible. According to trade publications, Harris signed on for, not a salary, but a percentage of the gross of the Harry Potter movies. The commitment was for a seven-picture deal, which he initially resisted until his 11-year-old granddaughter prevailed on him to accept the part.

As he explained, his ego demanded he get as much as possible for a role. "Richard Burton and I had that in common -- complete disdain for money -- though we'd fight for as much as we could possibly get. If the contract said $1-million plus toothpaste and two brushes, we'd make damn sure we got the two brushes -- and then give them away."

I interviewed Harris again during the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 11, 2001, between 9:30 and 10 in the morning, when the news reports about the World Trade Center attack were still full of uncertainty. (The movie he was promoting was never released, and the interview didn't run.) Harris arrived in tennis shoes and a trench coat, a lanky, gaunt grandfather with piercing blue eyes and a snowy mane of hair tied back in a ponytail.

He was clearly hung over from a party the night before ("Lots of food and booze. Usual B.S."), and his voice came out in a growling rattle of glass and gravel. We sat outside in the cold so he could smoke and talked about the news reports. "I think it would be better to die of drink in a room over a pub in Ireland than in a plane with a bunch of strangers," he said.

He was promoting a movie called My Kingdom, and he insisted on a frank evaluation: "Your honest opinion. No flattery." When I acknowledged it wasn't very good, he agreed. "Yeah. That's what I think too. It could have been something but . . ."

He talked about another debacle, The Barber of Siberia, a Russian-English film he shot with director Nikita Mikhalkov. The film was cut from six hours to three, and Harris boycotted the Cannes festival in protest. To see good work disappear bothered him more than anything.

He mentioned Brando, whom he worked with in Mutiny on the Bounty. "I was a young upstart and arrogant and I didn't get along with him at all." Years later, he discovered they were staying at the same hotel, and Harris sought him out. The two men made up.

"He told me he'd watched me in Camelot on television. 'Was that you singing? God, you've got a lovely voice.' " He wanted Harris to sing his favourite song, Danny Boy, but Harris said, " 'Only if you talk about acting,' because I knew he hated talking about acting."

So Harris sang Danny Boy and Brando talked, and, after an hour, Brando asked Harris to sing Danny Boy again, and Harris demanded another hour's exposition on acting, and so they continued through the night.

"He talked a lot about On the Waterfront and how disappointed he was in it and I said, 'What are you talking about? It's one of the greatest performances in film history.' And he said, 'I just grieve for all my work that wasn't used in the film.' And he was right, you know. You do grieve for what doesn't get seen."

Hollywood, he said, "wants you to find your film role and then do it again and again. . . . I did everything I could not to repeat myself from one role to another. . . . Great acting isn't safe. It should be shattering. [Laurence] Olivier's cry in Oedipus -- it was like a scythe through the stomachs of the audience."

His own more modest ambition was to do work "that won't make me feel ashamed. It's not for immortality. I'm not interested in the opinion on my tombstone; won't be around to see it. I'm interested in what happens this minute, and doing whatever makes it feel good to wake up in the morning."

This acting life


Some of Richard Harris's films:
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, to be released Nov. 15
The Count of Monte Cristo, 2002
Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone, 2001
Gladiator, 2000
Cry, the Beloved Country, 1995
Wrestling Ernest
Hemingway, 1993
Unforgiven, 1992
Patriot Games, 1992
The Field, 1990
Camelot (TV), 1982
Tarzan the Ape Man, 1981
Orca, 1977
Juggernaut, 1974
A Man Called Horse, 1970
Cromwell, 1970
Camelot, 1967
This Sporting Life, 1963
Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962
Shake Hands with
the Devil, 1959