“The thing is, all those guys, they all took their careers very seriously,” Harris said. To some extent, his father fed that image, he added, “to the detriment of his reputation as an actor.”
“Because now it’s ‘hell-raiser Richard Harris,’” he said. “Always that first.”
Sometimes the children of celebrities bristle at any mention of their family connections; but bring up Richard Harris, and his son’s face brightens. (And make the mistake of referring to Richard Harris, a proud Irishman, as being part of the great tradition of English theater, and you can expect a playful rebuke: “Not English! Them’s fightin’ words.”)
Harris takes pride in his connection to that theatrical legacy — not only that of his father but also that of Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and the rest.
“I grew up admiring them as sort of distant mentors that you look up to, trying to figure out how they did it,” he said. “But I was also very attracted to the American tradition, watching Montgomery Clift and James Dean and Brando, Hackman and Hoffman and Pacino and De Niro. Always looking for how they do it. How does Robert Duvall do that?”
It took a lot of convincing to get Harris’s parents to come see him act when he was at Duke. “To be honest, none of them really had any expectations, hopes or confidence really that I would do anything other than stink the stage up,” he said. His father finally gave in and came down to see him, post-graduation, in the play “Entertaining Mr. Sloane.”
“I remember so clearly hearing the first laugh I got from him in the audience, in the first five minutes,” Harris said. “He was really surprised and thrilled.”
