The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (181 page)

What with a talent for football, he graduated college slowly, and it was 1975 before he settled for theater, an abiding pursuit: he won an Obie for creating the lead role in Sam Shepard’s
Fool for Love
(83), and he played with his wife, Amy Madigan, in Murray Mednick’s
Scar
(85).

His other films are as follows: as a doctor in
Coma
(78, Michael Crichton);
Borderline
(80, Jerrold Freedman);
Knightriders
(81, George A. Romero);
Creepshow
(82, Romero);
Under Fire
(83, Roger Spottiswoode);
Swing Shift
(84, Jonathan Demme);
Places in the Heart
(84, Robert Benton); the reporter in
A Flash of Green
(84, Victor Nuñez);
Alamo Bay
(85, Louis Malle);
Code Name: Emerald
(85, Jonathan Sanger); husband to Jessica Lange’s Patsy Cline in
Sweet Dreams
(85, Karel Reisz); the soldier of fortune in
Walker
(88, Alex Cox); the policeman in
To Kill a Priest
(88, Agnieszka Holland);
Jackknife
(89, David Jones); in his biggest role, the husband in
The Abyss
(89, James Cameron);
State of Grace
(90, Phil Joanou), where he outplays Sean Penn and Gary Oldman;
Paris Trout
(91, Stephen Gyllenhaal);
China Moon
(92, John Bailey), as the cop who gets framed;
Glengarry Glen Ross
(92, James Foley);
Needful Things
(93, Fraser Heston); with Melanie Griffith in
Milk Money
(94, Richard Benjamin); as a delirious madman in
Just Cause
(95, Arne Glimcher); the rogue general in
The Rock
(96, Michael Bay); on TV, with Madigan, in
Riders of the Purple Sage
(96, Charles Haid);
Eye for an Eye
(96, John Schlesinger);
Absolute Power
(97, Clint Eastwood); caught between Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in
Stepmom
(98, Chris Columbus); never better than as Christof, the director, in
The Truman Show
(98, Peter Weir); a priest in
The Third Miracle
(99, Holland).

In 2000, he played the lead in and directed
Pollock
, a heartfelt personal venture, with more feeling than depth, but a good picture. As an actor, he kept going with
Waking the Dead
(00, Keith Gordon);
The Prime Gig
(00, Gregory Mosher); a German marksman in
Enemy at the Gates
(01, Jean-Jacques Annaud);
Buffalo Soldiers
(01, Gregor Jordan); a rather seamy security man in
A Beautiful Mind
(01, Howard).

He got another Oscar nomination, while being the weakest link, in
The Hours
(02, Stephen Daldry);
Masked and Anonymous
(03, Larry Charles); very frightening in
The Human Stain
(03, Robert Benton);
Radio
(03, Michael Tollin);
Empire Falls
(05, Fred Schepisi);
Winter Passing
(05, Adam Rapp); defaced and intimate in
A History of Violence
(05, David Cronenberg);
Two Tickets to Paradise
(06, D.B. Sweeney); actually playing the composer in
Copying Beethoven
(07, Holland);
Cleaner
(07, Renny Harlin);
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
(07, John Turteltaub);
Touching Home
(08, Logan and Noah Miller); directing
The Appaloosa
(08);
One Fallen
(09, Ash Adams);
The Way Back
(10, Weir).

Richard Harris
(1930–2002), b. Limerick, Ireland
Educated in Ireland and at LAMDA, Harris made his stage debut in 1956 in
The Quare Fellow
and subsequently worked for Joan Littlewood. He has made occasional returns to the theater—in
The Ginger Man
and a version of Gogol’s
Diary of a Madman
—but he now works largely in the cinema or in the insecure world of “all-round personalities,” giggling his way through intemperate TV interviews as stooges provoke him into disorderliness. His debut was in
Alive and Kicking
(58, Cyril Frankel), but he first attracted attention in Irish parts:
Shake Hands With the Devil
(59, Michael Anderson),
The Wreck of the Mary Deare
(59, Anderson), and Tay Garnett’s
A Terrible Beauty
(60). He came to stardom with three studies in loudmouthed boorishness:
The Long and the Short and the Tall
(61, Leslie Norman); in Milestone’s
Mutiny on the Bounty
(62); as the rugby player with a mind of leather in Lindsay Anderson’s
This Sporting Life
(63). Despite seeming more lost than Monica Vitti in Antonioni’s
The Red Desert
(64) and doing all an Irish Confederate ham could to slow down Peckinpah’s
Major Dundee
(65), Harris became a star of international films:
The Heroes of Telemark
(65, Anthony Mann);
The Bible
(66, John Huston); and
Hawaii
(66, George Roy Hill). He was perhaps the least likely leading man for Frank Tashlin in
Caprice
(67); he discovered that he could sing in
Camelot
(67, Joshua Logan); and was used moderately well in
The Molly Maguires
(69, Martin Ritt). But he is most at home in terrible films:
A Man Called Horse
(69, Elliot Silverstein),
Cromwell
(70, Ken Hughes), and
Man in the Wilderness
(71, Richard C. Sarafian). He gobbled up the role of the cripple in a tearstained TV version of Paul Gallico’s
The Snow Goose
(75, Patrick Garland); acted in and directed
Bloomfield
(71), an Israeli film about a footballer; appeared in the brutal
The Deadly Trackers
(73, Barry Shear), after he had quarreled with the original director, Samuel Fuller;
Juggernaut
(74, Richard Lester); and
99 44/100% Dead
(74, John Frankenheimer). He was in
Echoes of a Summer
(75, Don Taylor); King Richard in
Robin and Marian
(76, Lester);
The Return of a Man Called Horse
(76, Irvin Kershner);
Gulliver’s Travels
(76, Peter Hunt);
The Cassandra Crossing
(76, George Pan Cosmatos);
Orca … Killer Whale
(77, Michael Anderson);
Golden Rendezvous
(77, Ashley Lazarus); and
The Wild Geese
(78, Andrew V. McLaglen).

His credits became increasingly bizarre:
Ravagers
(79, Richard Compton);
Game for Vultures
(79, James Fargo), set in Rhodesia, and costarring Joan Collins;
Your Ticket Is No Longer Valid
(79, George Kaczender);
Highpoint
(80, Peter Carter); as the explorer in the Bo Derek–laden
Tarzan, The Ape Man
(81, John Derek);
Triumph of a Man Called Horse
(83, John Hough);
Martin’s Day
(84, Alan Gibson); as an inescapably Irish
Maigret
(88, Paul Lynch) for TV;
Mack the Knife
(89, Menahem Golan);
King of the Wind
(90, Peter Duffell); nominated for best actor in
The Field
(90, Jim Sheridan); unexpectedly lovely as the fraudulent gunslinger English Bob in
Unforgiven
(92, Clint Eastwood);
Patriot Games
(92, Phillip Noyce);
Silent Tongue
(92, Sam Shepard);
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway
(93, Randa Haines); on TV as
Abraham
(94, Joseph Sargent).

The charming point about turning seventy for Harris was that he became a public figure with his Albus Dumbledore in
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
(01, Chris Columbus). Thus, all his Celtic rogues, epic seers, and Anthony Quinn leanings were swept up in one grand old ham:
Cry, the Beloved Country
(95, Darrel Roodt);
The Great Kandinsky
(95, Terry Winsor);
Savage Hearts
(95, Mark Ezra);
Trojan Eddie
(96, Gillies MacKinnon);
Smilla’s Sense of Snow
(97, Bille August);
The Hunchback
(97, Peter Medak);
This Is the Sea
(98, Mary McGuckian);
The Barber of Siberia
(98, Nikita Mikhalkov); as George Adamson in
To Walk with Lions
(99, Carl Schultz);
Grizzly Falls
(99, Stewart Raffill); as Marcus Aurelius in
Gladiator
(00, Ridley Scott);
The Royal Way
(00, Andrei Konchalovsky);
The Pearl
(01, Alfredo Zacharias); as a kind of Lear in
My Kingdom
(01, Don Boyd).

Rex Harrison
(Reginald Carey Harrison) (1908–90), b. Huyton, England
Harrison had never escaped lightweight inadequacy in films before he played Caesar in
Cleopatra
(63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The fact that he found it easy to be detached from that decorous extravagance, and his no more testing transfer of Henry Higgins from stage to screen in
My Fair Lady
(64, George Cukor), made him an international star. The point was hammered home by his shameless self-enjoyment in
Doctor Dolittle
(67, Richard Fleischer). Age had made him a little warmer and heavier in personality, but he was still able to look like an inane, high-pitched Aguecheek:
The Yellow Rolls-Royce
(64, Anthony Asquith);
The Agony and the Ecstasy
(65, Carol Reed);
The Honey Pot
(67, Mankiewicz); and
Staircase
(69, Stanley Donen).

Harrison went on the stage in 1924, and he always divided his time between theatre and movies. On the stage he played in
French Without Tears, The Cocktail Party, Bell, Book and Candle
, and
Platonov
as well as
My Fair Lady
. His first film was
The Great Game
(30, Jack Raymond), and he was in
Leave It to Blanche
(34, Harold Young);
All at Sea
(35, Anthony Kimmins);
Men Are Not Gods
(36, Walter Reisch);
Storm in a Teacup
(37, Victor Saville);
St. Martin’s Lane
(38, Tim Whelan);
The Citadel
(38, King Vidor);
Over the Moon
(39, Thornton Freeland);
Ten Days in Paris
(39, Whelan);
Night Train to Munich
(40, Carol Reed); and
Major Barbara
(40, Gabriel Pascal). After naval service, he made
I Live in Grosvenor Square
(45, Herbert Wilcox),
Blithe Spirit
(45, David Lean), and
The Rake’s Progress
(45, Sidney Gilliat).

Then he went to Hollywood to play opposite Irene Dunne in
Anna and the King of Siam
(46, John Cromwell). He stayed on for a ragbag of films:
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(47, Mankiewicz);
The Foxes of Harrow
(47, John M. Stahl); as the scheming conductor in
Unfaithfully Yours
(48, Preston Sturges)—one of the few films that made use of his grating charm; and
Escape
(48, Mankiewicz). In the 1950s he made whatever movies came along:
The Four Poster
(52, Irving Reis);
Main Street to Broadway
(53, Tay Garnett); as Saladin in
King Richard and the Crusaders
(54, David Butler);
The Constant Husband
(55, Gilliat);
The Reluctant Debutante
(58, Vincente Minnelli); rather good as the villain in
Midnight Lace
(60, David Miller); and
The Happy Thieves
(62, George Marshall).

In his last years, he appeared in
Crossed Swords
(77, Fleischer); in India, trying to steal a great ruby in
Shalimar
(78, Krishna Shah);
Ashanti
(79, Fleischer);
The Fifth Musketeer
(79, Ken Annakin);
Time to Die
(83, Matt Cimber); and
Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna
(86, Marvin J. Chomsky).

Harrison was married six times, four times to actresses: Lilli Palmer, Kay Kendall, Rachel Roberts, and Elizabeth Harris.

William S. Hart
(1870–1946), b. Newburgh, New York
Hart is one of those Americans who stepped from the actual West into the cinematic version of it. As a young man—in the late 1880s—he had worked on a cattle drive, and he subsequently opened a riding school. But from 1890 to 1910 he was a stage actor, achieving a notable success in the Broadway production of
Ben Hur
.

He would never have turned to movies but for a friendship with Thomas Ince. From a series of two-reel films, Hart became the first cowboy hero. He was already middle-aged, with an austere, horselike countenance and a fixed moral preoccupation. It is interesting that he often played an outlaw, reformed by the love of a good woman. From its beginnings, the Western was concerned to tranquilize the energies of the frontiersman. And, like Gary Cooper in later years, Hart was able to convey the burden of youthful wildness that lay on the shoulders of a pillar of society. He was also archaically chivalrous to women, and his solemn good manners did not always escape the impression of being downright elderly.

Hart is especially interesting because he wrote and directed many of his own films. Even with Ince and Triangle he had considerable independence, though
The Aryan
(16, Reginald Barker) and
Hell’s Hinges
(16, Ince) were not credited to him. For the next two years, he directed most of his own films:
The Silent Man
(17);
The Narrow Trail
(17);
Blue Blazes Rawden
(18);
The Border Wireless
(18);
Wolves of the Rail
(18); and
Shark Monroe
(18). But from 1919, Ince’s director, Lambert Hillyer, handled the Hart output:
Breed of Men
(19);
The Money Corral
(19);
Square Deal Sanderson
(19);
Wagon Tracks
(19);
Sand!
(19);
The Cradle of Courage
(20);
The Toll Gate
(20);
O’Malley of the Mounted
(21);
Three Word Brand
(21);
The Whistle
(21);
White Oak
(21); and
Travelin’ On
(22). In 1923, Hart went to Famous Players for
Wild Bill Hickok
(Clifford S. Smith) and
Singer Jim McKee
(24, Smith). He retired in 1925 after
Tumbleweeds
, which he codirected with King Baggot.