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I think the journey has been a turbulent journey,
straight away.
And I think that somehow or another,
I think the essential thing in life
which we seek for is peace.
Peacefulness.
Hello, I'm Richard Harris.
I'm coming to town and I'm gonna tell you
some lies about myself.
Hello.
This is Richard Harris.
Yes sir.
Underlying that is Richard Harris.
I was the jockey on this sort of wild horse.
Unfortunately, I'm a very excessive person.
You know, I can resist my first drink, but not the second.
Everything I did, I did with an overindulgence of passion,
you know what I mean?
When I drank, I devoured alcohol.
When I did coke, I devoured coke.
When I went on my amorous exploits, I devoured women.
* Someone left the cake out in the rain *
I've had huge success.
I've had huge failures.
In the between that balance,
the truth is neither of them were important.
At least if I died tomorrow, you knew that I was here.
I was here.
I remember the day after he died,
going for a walk in Battersea,
and this hurricane hit out of nowhere,
hit London.
And I just thought, to me,
that was his spirit raging,
because he actually loved life, you know,
he enjoyed the tempest of life.
I just felt like there was some part of him
that wasn't ready to leave yet.
He had a suite here for 28 years or something.
* And when they say he's like his father *
* I'll know the very heart and soul *
Where would I find the ghost?
Where is he haunting?
Hello, this is Richard Harris.
I've been telling some lies about the movies I've been in
and the life I've led.
Hello, this is Richard Harris.
Hello.
Coming to town to spend an evening with you.
I hope you'll come and join me.
He had his Golden Globe for "Camelot" right there.
Last time I was here, the year that he got sick,
it would've been June of 2002.
He had this sort of recurring flu-like symptoms,
which would get really bad.
And so he thought I've got lung cancer and I'm gonna die
and that's it.
He didn't want to know about treatment or anything,
wasn't interested.
And he basically...
This is where mum and Damian came and got him
because there was no answer from the room.
No one had seen him for a long time.
And they came in and he was lying in the bed.
And the sheets were soaking wet.
Mum said it was like he was like an old lion dying.
They wanted to call an ambulance and he wouldn't get in.
He refused.
And then mom sat down on the edge of the bed
and started stroking his hair,
and persuaded him to let them call an ambulance.
I feel as though there's the image of himself
that he spent a long time putting out into the world,
which was, you know, the wild hell raising image
that's sort of overtaken everything else about him.
And then people, it's the first thing anybody ever says.
He was much, much bigger than that.
And the Oscar goes to...
Hello?
Hello!
Hi Dad.
How are you my love?
Fine thank you.
I got your letter yesterday.
I would love it if he had come and woken me up
in the middle of the night and sat and chatted to me.
You know, I would've loved it.
I do feel as though the lights dimmed slightly after he went
and they've never really recovered.
But I would say that I don't feel
that I knew him completely.
And do you ever know your parents completely?
You know?
I suppose that's part of what this is about
for all three of us.
If you tell me I didn't have three sons,
my life would've been a wreck.
I would've had not achieved a bloody thing.
My friendship with my three boys is my life.
They're my life.
It's big.
This is a lockup of my father's belongings,
coming from the homes that he had.
There we go.
There it is.
You got it, D.
Yeah.
You keep away.
Where we going?
Well done, man.
Wow.
That's all his poetry.
You do write good poetry.
Well, I'm delighted about this.
It makes a beautiful Christmas present.
It's called I'm I-
"I, in the Membership of My Days."
One of the reviewers today said that
it's some of the best poetry written today.
And that threw me when I read that.
And I crown thee...
That crown's from "Camelot."
"Camelot."
Yeah.
Thank you.
It fits.
Fits you well.
It's amazing.
It really does.
It really feels good.
Yeah.
I'm not taking this off.
It's mum.
That's mum.
That's mum, look.
She's so beautiful.
I think this is something that a fan sent him.
Like a little puppet of him as Dumbledore.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are.
It is our choices.
With any famous person,
the public has a relationship with that person.
I do remember growing up being irritated.
I wanted him to be my dad
and not this person that other people thought they knew
or you know...
And there was a sort of a...
I don't remember, is it jealousy or...
We were at boarding school from 6 to 18,
so the whole thing was different.
We would see...
The holidays were still up to mum and dad.
You'd see him for two weeks at a time, and then he was gone.
You know, well, you were gone actually,
you went back to school,
and then he was doing what he was doing.
You didn't know what he was doing.
I didn't know what he was doing.
I mean, I'm very aware to this day
that there are other people who had a very strong
and big relationship with him that I don't know
and I wasn't a part of.
Billy Baldwin had a relationship with Dad.
Russell Crowe had a relationship with Dad.
Completely separate.
You know, there's that thing that's in mum's book
about Dickie Harris and Richard Harris.
Yes.
Did you ever know Dickie Harris?
No, never.
Never did.
Dickie Harris, as he was known as Dickie here,
not Richard.
He was well built.
He was over six foot.
He had a big pair of broad shoulders.
And he would swim across the bay,
no problem, on his own, just on a whim.
He was fearless.
He would try anything.
He really would.
Yeah.
Now, the diving boards in his time
were two planks stuck together.
The big thing was to dive off the top one.
Excuse me while I disappear.
* Slowly I wander through scenes of my childhood *
* It brings back fond memories of happy days gone by *
And then I came here to Kilkee,
first time I was eight months old
and every single year for three months
until I left at the age of 22.
Every single year for three months.
And having been brought up here, it was a luxury really.
The main event of the summer season in those days
was the rackets competition on the beach for the Tivoli Cup.
There would be hundreds in for this competition.
And it was like a festival.
Rackets was unique to Kilkee.
Woohoo.
It's always played on the beach
and it's being played there since the very early 1900s.
The one person everybody wanted to beat in the rackets
was Dickie Harris.
And he won the tournament four times, one after the other.
1947 and '48, '49 and '50.
Nobody has ever achieved that in succession.
And I mean, for such a small trophy,
there was such a lot of excitement.
I went through a very introspective period
of my life when I found out the great thing
about the invention.
When did I invent Richard Harris?
You know that great line from Sam Becker?
When, when, when?
Why keep bothering me about your time?
One minute we are born, the next minute we die.
A stride of the grave, a difficult birth,
lingering into the hole.
The grave digger applies the forceps
and we have time to grow old
and the air is full of our promise.
In 1955, we, the Dramsoc from UCD,
we decided to hire a theatre in Kilkee for the summer.
So we played six or seven plays,
which we varied then night after night.
And there's this great big gangly character from Limerick
who suddenly is there and wants to be
part of the whole madness.
And we liked the look of him.
He was odd, interesting.
Swam.
We did an evening in the amphitheatre.
There's a kind of an amphitheatre up by the pools.
And Dickie, he would do scenes from "On The Waterfront",
as Marlon Brando.
I could have been a contender, Charlie.
Oh, I could have been a contender.
And we decided he'd never become an actor, he was hopeless.
Too big.
Too ungainly.
Too full of himself as we call it.
Richard Harris, you come from Limerick, isn't that true?
Yes.
Where did you begin in the theatre?
Do you mean where I got my idea?
Yeah.
Well I got my idea from a group of people.
You were one of them at the time, weren't you?
One of the university students who went to Kilkee,
and did a season in Kilkee.
And I was friendly with you all, I think.
And I got on very well and I thought I might take it up.
The English looked upon the Irish
as working class.
It doesn't matter what status they came from
or what part of society they came from in Ireland,
the British, the English looked upon us
as really sort of peasants.
If they stabbed me that, I wasn't gonna argue with them.
If they wanna think that, let 'em think it.
I was taken to their society and I fucked 'em up.
This is The Troubador.
This is where my mother and father met
for the very first time.
And I really don't think they've changed
one of those coffee pots, any of these banjos,
since the fifties when it was a hangout
for sort of penniless artists.
It's just one of those places
that are just caught in a time warp.
Soon enough after he'd passed,
he just started appearing in dreams.
And so it felt real enough that when I woke up,
I thought he was still alive.
And he was, as I rem...
He was the age and in the state,
frail state, that I remembered him.
But what's been interesting, over the years,
he's got younger,
and now he actually can be younger than I am.
Often, or it could be with that, you know,
you have a dream that's quite sort of frantic and things,
you're getting upset 'cause things are going
really wrong in the dream.
It starts off with, you know, you've lost your phone
and now you don't know who to contact.
You've got nobody to call, now you have no money,
you go I'm stuck and I dunno what to do.
And you feel completely abandoned.
And then he'll be there, and you know,
he'll talk it through or take me into some other space,
some other part of the dream.
And then I wake up.
My father, he was a drama student at the...
There's a drama school up the road called LAMDA.
And then after about six months,
he felt he knew as much as anybody else.
So he was gonna put on his own play in the West End.
And he held auditions here.
Probably right there where he met my mother
for the first time and they went down those steps
and he was doing auditions in the basement.
Well, I'd always wanted to be an actress
from the first moment I can remember being conscious.
There I met Richard and I-
And was it...
No, he didn't look at me.
I mean, he couldn't have ignored me more.
He was very sort of into himself.
He was a extraordinary personality
and I was terrified of him.
Anyway, I got the part.
And you became friends.
Eventually I got Richard as a husband.
I don't know which was the most frightening.
O'Toole, Burton, Finney,
all these chaps and me, okay.
The thing about that period was that there was
a tremendous revolution in the theatre.
The old establishment, the old upper middle class
was being kicked up the arse.
Why don't you go out and do some catching or something?
A great, great angry revolution took place,
as much against society as against the theatre.
Let me tell you something.
They come in here, the punters...
I know what the theatre should be doing,
what it's always done when it was flourishing.
Give people their identity as a people.
I always say to the actors,
"Go to the streets and the parks and the cafes and the pubs
and watch people and don't...
Let's have art for art.
That art from life."
As soon as Joan Littlewood got a hold of Dickie,
he was going to go on and work there
for anything she had in mind at that time.
And of course he also was noted by critics
and by filmmakers and by people writing.
I ruffled up some middle class drawing rooms
and caused a bit of commotion here and there.
I mean, my stage work with "Diary of a Madman,"
"The Ginger Man," "Man, Beast and Virtue."
They were all high class stuff.
Wow, it's country life.
Did you know dad then, in 1954?
No.
So that was about the time when you guys met
at The Troubador.
Mm-hmm.
You were a deb as well as a young actress.
And then this, "Penniless, I proposed to a peers daughter."
This would be he proposed to you and he had no money at all.
I don't think your parents took it too well.
My mother let out a scream.
And my father tried to take our attention
away from the scream.
You guys did a lot of press together.
"Film tough guy in a punch up."
It was his image.
He thought that was being a man.
Or maybe he just had a very bad temper.
I'd prefer to go with that one.
Okay.
Hotheaded.
"This Sporting Life."
This was sort of the beginning of the whole thing,
wasn't it, really?
He started off, the bar was set really high
because the film, it did well for dad.
He got an Oscar nomination
and he won the Cannes film festival.
It's quite devastating film.
And it changed his life, all of our lives.
"This Sporting Life", that was my break.
I mean that was my big break to get that picture.
Oh, I just thought it was
a beautiful piece of work.
What's his name, Wayne?
Machin.
Frank Machin.
I thought the performance was extraordinary.
It was real.
Do you want a thumping, love?
Aye.
And Lindsay Anderson was a tremendous director.
Lindsay was a very gentle man.
Oxford University, a very intelligent, intellectual man.
But what he had was he had this most amazing
understanding of violence.
What I would call almost psychological violence,
volcanic passion.
Some people have life made for.
That's right, Mrs. Hammond,
and some people make it for themselves.
It's about time you took that tonne of rock
off your shoulders.
And don't wake me in the morning.
I might be dead.
Richard was uniquely powerful.
His acting had a physicality.
You know, he would scare the life outta you.
What do you have to be to be a successful actor?
You have to be masochistic,
sadistic,
very strange.
You have to be able to inflict pain on yourself.
You have to walk out and saying,
"I'm gonna go into this relationship
and I'm gonna be very hurt, I hope.
From it I'm gonna get something out of it I can use.
I'm gonna build up a treasury of emotions here
that I can use."
And sadistic.
You gotta step over maybe the closest of people to get that.
Yeah, I mean, what comes to mind when he says that
is his relationship with Lindsay Anderson.
It's really detailed in Lindsay's diaries,
how cruel my father was.
Initially Lindsay travelled to Tahiti
to see if Dad would do "Sporting Life."
He was doing "Mutiny on the Bounty"
and they were both very excited about the idea
of making this film and they were collaborators.
And then when filming began, my father changed,
partly because Lindsay fell in love with my father,
literally.
And so, my father used that against him.
And he really was controlling and humiliated Lindsay,
which Lindsay put up with 'cause he was in love with him,
and that he also was getting what he wanted,
therefore, let it continue.
"Sporting Life" just was the breakthrough film
for Richard.
Not in terms of its commercial success,
but in terms of establishing Richard
as one of the sort of really great
contemporary actors of that period.
I think Richard, in the plotted history of English cinema,
holds a very important place.
There's still that very deep theatrical tradition.
But then Richard,
who's come from it, who's from within that,
is looking to sort of break that.
He's looking to give himself the same passageway
to truth as a Brando.
There's no sort of archness about it,
and seemingly no performance,
because it just seemed to be so real.
But of course, that's the trick.
We're not proper people now because of you.
Because you show up every Saturday
in front of thousands of them,
because you're just a great ape in the football field.
Because you want me to be like them!
You are in a crawl about just like the rest.
Well just have a look at the rest.
Take a right good look at 'em!
Take a right good look at the bloody people around here!
There isn't a bleeding man amongst him.
You're flat on your back from the go, crawling about you.
Because they haven't got the guts, do you understand that?
They haven't got the guts to stand up
and to walk about like me.
I mean, he could be a terrifying figure.
He was just...
He didn't pretend.
It was terrifying.
And we had this scene together in "Trojan Eddie",
and it's where he's telling the story
about how he was fighting with someone.
As he started to play the scene,
and he really took on the power of it,
I realised that he was talking about me.
He was going to kill me.
Do you see those rings?
Do ya?
They're my father's rings.
I broke a fella's jaw with that fist one night...
And another night, another night, I broke a feller's nose.
Right.
I mean, there was a level of anger that he had
that never completely went away.
I remember actually, I did actually ask him this question.
It's funny, this reminded me.
We'd had a huge, huge row one Christmas.
And I asked him, "Why are you so angry?
What are you so angry about?"
And he said, "I don't know, I've always been angry.
I don't know."
I absolutely believe that the world is bad.
I believe from the very first moment of conception
to the moment we die, that life is absolutely riddled,
cloaked in tragedy.
It almost is something that should never have happened.
I think it was a great mistake.
This miracle of life is absolutely,
I hate to say that it's kind of rubbish.
Richard Harris has been running all his life,
and of course that grows increasingly complex.
When I look around me today, nothing works.
We don't want anything to work.
And it's never changed.
What's happening a hundred years ago was just as mad.
And we don't like each other.
We don't respect each other.
We talk about compassion, there is none.
That's what it is, it's a fucking joke.
It's a juggling of hats.
It's a pulling a rabbit out of a hat
and losing it in your pocket.
With all the hundreds and thousands of years
of Christianity and the preaching of gospels
and the bringing of the word of God and kindness
and humanity to the world,
it hasn't worked because there are more people than ever
destitute and lost.
And what happens?
In comes the vulture.
In comes the hawk that flew over the landscape,
observing it.
And he looked down for the bodies and he plucked,
for his own benefit.
Horrible.
It's horrible.
I wish I could preach my gospel to the world.
I wish I could say to them, we know it's a disaster,
but make the most of it.
Laugh, dance and sing.
Those who wanna come with you, come dance with me.
Those who don't, fair enough, don't dance on them.
If we take it seriously, it is a very, very bad joke.
I'd like to be able to tell people that.
Here is one of England's most respected and honoured stars,
Mr. Richard Harris.
The nominees are...
You know, somebody says, it isn't how good you are,
it's how long you've lasted.
I've lasted a long time and I've lasted a long time
and also never played the game.
I never went to Hollywood, lived in Hollywood.
When I did live in Hollywood for a time,
I never mixed with the major motion picture stars.
I never went to the houses of producers
or the heads of studios though I was invited many times.
Every single time I either win an award
or I present an award,
they always say, you know, like,
"British actor wins another major award."
And every time I get into a fight, "Irish actor in brawl."
I refuse to play their game.
Well, he went to Hollywood and he did play the game.
Richard changed course.
I think he, in some ways, lost interest
in those small, personal,
maybe more experimental type films.
You come a time when you are
faced with obligations.
You have to.
Got children, you must support the children.
You must support your wife.
You can't support that on art films.
'Cause we were living at...
I'm not making excuses.
We were living in a tiny flat.
I remember the day I made the choice.
I was offered to do "Major Dundee" in Hollywood
for a lot of money.
And I made the choice.
And the choice was I was gonna do the Hollywood picture
and make the money.
And now you're a murderer.
Tomorrow morning I am gonna hang you and be done with you.
Jailer.
I'm fighting for the only country I have left
and I kill men in a hopeless war for it.
But not men who are my neighbours and my friends.
You know, Hollywood does that to people.
I've seen it so many times where, you know,
you go to Hollywood as one person and...
A few years later you're somebody else.
You know, you buy into the system.
He was attracted by the money, by the staring role,
a musical, big mainstream Hollywood film.
And listen, playing King Arthur is a great role.
So I didn't know Richard at all
until we met at the studios in Warner Bros.
And from the moment I met him,
I thought, oh, I'm going to love working with you.
Why did you feel that, Vanessa?
What was it about Richard that made you think that?
Well, all the obvious things, darling.
* A law was made a distant moon ago here *
* July and August cannot be too hot *
He was enchanting.
He looked great.
He had the most wonderful voice.
I think he's absolutely adorable on screen, you know.
And I think a lot of people thought he was too.
* In short there's simply not *
* A more congenial spot *
* For happily ever aftering than here in Camelot *
Look!
There, on the hill!
Having done a scene in which we had one of the songs,
I forget which one it was.
Anyway, I had an idea and I said to Richard,
"Why don't we ask If we can sing them live?
It would make it so much more spontaneous."
* Simple folk do *
* We do not *
* I have been informed by those that know them well *
* They find relief in quite a clever way *
We're now free to really be our characters.
No lip syncing, just be our characters,
revolutionised the whole way of doing musical comedies,
which we were quite proud of, Richard and I.
* In Camelot *
* Camelot *
What I can never forget is Richard's generosity of spirit.
It's rare to feel so relaxed and so happy
to be with another actor,
and believe that you are in love with them.
I wasn't ever in love with Richard.
I was in love with him as an actor.
Did you ever read that great line
that Elizabeth wrote in her book?
"Richard went to London, but Dickie stayed in Limerick."
Great line.
I'm afraid I can't claim to have the romance
of coming from a poor family.
What did happen was I came from a very, very rich family.
My great-grandfather, he had a huge flour mill here
and a bakery.
But we would be small millers compared to the British,
English Millers who came in here.
And they came in with huge monies and huge combines
and broke all the small miller.
During my youth, they began to lose the money.
They went bankrupt in the end.
I remember the staff got less and less.
I don't know, so I came from a huge family.
The eight children, there were eight of us.
I got lost.
I was kind of situated in the no man's land of my family.
This army, Harris Brigade.
I don't remember the stroke, the touch from the mother
or the affection from the father very much.
You had to learn to fight for the affection of your parents,
to fight for the attention.
You didn't get it free.
You had to tap dance, you had to tap dance,
you had to tap dance to be recognised.
You had to put up the flag and say,
"Hey look, I'm here too, you know, don't miss me."
And you were missed.
And I can remember my father saying, putting me and saying,
"What's his name again?"
And my mother saying, "That's Dick."
"Oh yeah, okay Dick.
Now look, don't do that, Dick.
What's his name again?"
"Dick."
I kind of said, well, I'll make sure he remembers my name,
next time he looks at me I'll break a window.
Horrendous introductions to the Jesuits.
Very tough the first couple of years.
And I unfortunately had been discovered later on,
been diagnosed with not chronic, but as semi dyslectic.
It was tough for me to read, put things together right.
They didn't realise that as it's only really
a modern thing now.
But my first couple of years they were really very tough.
No one knew at the time that Dickie had dyslexia.
So he was a bit behind.
Your exercise was checked and if they weren't bright,
you got punished for that.
In our case, it was the priest.
He had a docket and everything was in Latin.
They'd tell you first of all what it was for.
And then parcome was how many, that was slaps.
So when Dickie got the docket,
say at half nine in the morning,
it would be burning a hole in that pocket until 11 o'clock.
That was the time the whole school would break.
It was administered by a leather,
lead lined, three in each hand, six.
And if there was a ring around it on that docket,
it meant six hard.
We loved rugby.
Rugby was our outlet.
I would give up
all my Academy Award nominations,
all my Golden Globes that I've won,
my Grammys that I have won,
my town film festival, the Palme d'Or that I won,
I'd give it all up,
to have just played once for Ireland rugby.
I mean, I can remember nothing else from Limerick but rugby.
It was inbred in us as kids.
It was tribal.
He was an outstanding player.
He was on two teams that won the Munster Senior Schools Cup.
Dickie could have gone and played professional rugby.
He was a fine second row and played in the back row as well.
The original jersey,
and there's still mud on it here in the back look.
Never washed it.
That was 1948,
when I played for Munster Schools against Connacht.
I got one cap.
And that's it.
And I wouldn't...
That's it.
And I wouldn't give it up for anything.
You tackle well.
Tackle!
I often say, well, who are we?
Who was Richard Harris?
Someone said to me once,
"Of course, you know you're an alcoholic."
I said, "I'm not, no.
If you think so, that's okay.
It doesn't necessarily mean that I am.
If it makes you feel good, that's okay."
It doesn't do anything for me to be told what I am.
All I know is that I drank because I loved it.
The wonderful tendency again is why did you drink?
Are you running away from something?
Are you hiding?
Was it something to do with your work?
Your personality?
I remember being with Burton one day in South Africa
making this picture together.
And both of us said the same thing.
We drank because we loved it.
I loved the trouble I was gonna get into.
I loved to wake up the next day and say, "What did we do?"
Either pick up a newspaper and read it in the papers.
Oh, that's what we did.
With an eye that was closed or a fist that was broken.
All we knew was we had a wonderful time
and we weren't running from anything.
We enjoyed drinking.
* Hey drink up all you people *
* Order anything you see *
He didn't know anybody in New York
when we first met in 19...
Must have been 1958, I think, at PJ Clark's.
That was a great Irish pub.
So then whenever he was passing through,
he always called me.
His fame was coming up and people would say,
"Oh, there's Richard Harris."
Without a doubt, he was both a drinker and a hell raiser.
And he could turn mean, he could turn violent.
Harris was up to get belligerent
when he had a few drinks taken, yep.
There he is behind the bar, at himself, serving beers.
That's my bar.
But he wasn't very good,
'cause obviously he can't pour a beer.
He told me that he was giving up the acting business.
He was tired of it.
So he said, "I want a job as a bartender."
So here is this movie star in my saloon.
And one night, these two elderly ladies,
they said, "Oh, you have a very nice barman.
He didn't charge us anything for our drinks
and gave us a bottle of Pérignon.
And I thought, Jesus Christ.
I didn't say anything to Dickie.
But anyway, he got tired of the routine.
And when he left, my other regular barman said,
"Oh, I have something for you."
So he went to the cash register
and in it was a check for $3,000.
And Dickie had wrote in it,
"This is for all that I gave away."
Richard Harris was what you look for in a talk show guest.
He delivered, as they used to say in production meetings.
You all know Richard Harris, will you welcome him please?
One appearance of his, he came bounding out
and there was a big gob of what, like dried blood
on his face, a big scar.
It's nice to sit down.
Do you know each other?
Have you ever...
But nobody mentioned it right away.
And I thought, this is strange.
So I said...
Mr. Harris.
Yes?
Politeness toward one side.
Oh yeah, sure.
Yes, you've been ignoring it.
I can't help noticing that...
You wanted to mention it.
Everybody else is worried about it.
Well, I can't help noticing that a lot of your face
is not injured.
But he loved that and everyone wanted to talk about it.
He'd been in a brawl.
The row started and I jumped over the bar
and I hid behind the bar 'cause punches were going like mad.
And I hid behind the bar and I said, "Let them fight."
You see?
And there was a guy beside me, crouching too.
And I said, "What are you doing?"
He said, "I'm ducking Harris."
I have a wonderful facility.
I have a wonderful facility of delivering
what people expect from me.
Richard Harris.
Yes, sir.
There are interviews
that don't want to get into anything of any great depth.
What's the difference between this kind of beer
and a bottled beer?
A lot of gas.
Keep it funny, keep it funny.
I think that one of the great dangers of publicity
is that one isn't planned to believe it.
And I think I was probably guilty of that.
I think that very, very often,
I was very conscious when I entered the room
and people looked up and said, "Oh, there's Harris."
That I suddenly had to behave
as they thought I should have behaved.
You know what I mean?
Tough, drunk, loud, funny, careless.
You know, I think I ruined my first marriage
because of that, to Elizabeth.
It was purely because somehow I began to believe
what they said about me was true.
That was very difficult.
I remember once saying to her,
"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."
And I was gone eight days.
Right?
And now, I thought, how am I gonna get back?
How am I gonna say to her?
And at this stage, I'd heard she was gonna file for divorce.
She'd really had it.
Now really, she really had,
the poor thing really suffered a lot.
So I arrived back and I knocked at the whole door
at Bedford Gardens,
and I heard her coming down the stairs.
I thought, what's she gonna say?
And she opened the door and I looked at her and I said,
"Why didn't you pay the ransom?"
* Excuse me *
* While I disappear *
Gentlemen.
Honest men have served us faithfully and many have died,
that this house may sit in freedom
and this nation live in liberty.
In the name of God I besiege you.
Do not dessert them now.
True or false, you've acquired the reputation
of being something of a hell raiser.
But for example, recently in a Sunday newspaper,
there was a report of a sort of continental jet plane binge
that you took, which lasted several days.
Well, it wasn't really, because you see,
the story that was finally printed was the story
that the readers of that particular newspaper
would only want to read.
But I can't deny that any of the reports on the newspaper
were not true.
The outrageous inefficiency...
While Richard was making Cromwell,
the film company had said, "Right, no drinking,
you know, off the bottle for all the time."
But in the middle of the filming, they gave him a week off.
Those against Colonel Cromwell's motion.
An executive jet, you know,
with two pilots and a stewardess.
And I was sort of called in by the letter,
and basically told, "Right, off to Heathrow,
you're meeting Richard Harris
and you're going travelling with him for the next week."
He rang me up and he said,
"It's very important you come here.
This is my divorce," he said.
I said, "What?"
He said, "This is a honeymoon without a bride."
He had just been to the court that morning
and gotten his divorce.
And off we went.
All I know is that I was not sober for about seven days.
The night we flew out, I think it was a Friday night,
we were booked into the George V in Paris.
First thing that Richard did
was try and chat up an American nun.
There was no flight plan.
Richard decided where we were going
and half an hour later we'd be airborne.
Went to Hamburg the next night.
Denmark, Sweden, all over the bloody place.
There's me naked.
Good God almighty.
It must have been in Hamburg that he decided
he would like to visit a brothel.
And we did.
It's a very different era.
It was an era that had no political correctness.
There was no condemnation for behaviour.
In some ways, being badly behaved
was an attractive element and a quality.
Possibly the weirdest experience of all,
Richard said, "I fancy a beer at Dirty Nellies,"
which is a very well known bar near Shannon Airport.
So climb on board the aeroplane and...
It was a wild time.
That's the lost weekend where they went to...
Is it Amsterdam?
Yeah, and Paris.
Can you imagine anyone doing that now though?
Like bringing your photographer along.
You don't think it's a personal thing against Mum?
He wanted her to see every reason
that you're leaving me for, I'm still doing.
Well, I mean, what you're saying is actually right
because mum would've seen that in the papers.
Exactly.
And that would've been extremely hurtful.
Or she could have said thank God I'm rid of that.
Do you remember they sent each other divorce gifts?
Yes.
The cowbell?
He gave mum a cowbell...
So that he could always hear her coming.
Yeah.
If she wore it round her neck.
And she sent him a birdcage.
An empty bird cage.
Yes.
Saying next time...
Put her in there.
Yeah and don't let him get away.
Yep.
And I have the cowbell.
You do?
Yeah.
Living well means being free.
It doesn't mean living in fucking luxury.
Saying, "I've got 55 fur coats,"
a woman saying, "I've got three Rolls-Royce's, 19 cars.
I've got a private jet."
That is not what I mean by living well.
I mean, living well as being free, been able to laugh.
You've got a bit of money, yes.
I made a lot of money and my life hasn't changed a bit.
It hasn't ruined my taste.
It hasn't made me...
It hasn't.
I haven't spoiled myself.
She's a 1964 Rolls-Royce Phantom V state limousine.
Incredibly rare.
The car was circa £12,000.
And back in '64, you could buy a house for £450.
Anthony, how did you get ahold of this car?
Well, I was working at Jack Barclays,
where your father had the car regularly maintained.
And it came in for a full refit.
And I never met your father, but I saw him.
That's how I met the car.
When he died, I said, "Well, I must have that car.
I've known it for years."
It was meant to be.
I think so.
I have its history file.
It was under your father's name servicing wise.
I don't think he bought it new.
He was given it.
Can I ask you about that?
I mean, it's a rumour, but everybody who sees the car
tells me that the Princess Margaret
actually bought this car new
and gifted it to your father.
That's not the story that we heard.
It was a signing on bonus for him to do a movie.
"The Heroes of Telemark."
A producer, basically said, "What do you want?"
He said, "I want a Rolls-Royce."
Exactly the same one as the Queen's.
And he got it.
I mean, the Princess Margaret thing
didn't come out until after he'd passed away.
That they had a relationship.
Yeah.
He didn't talk about it.
He never mentioned it in the press or anything.
I did a charity show for a theatre
called The Theatre of Beam,
And I put together a series of poetry.
Really a fantastic evening,
with the most extraordinary, Mia Farrow,
Walter Pidgeon, Jean Simmons, Peter Sellers, et cetera.
There's this great Irish actor in town, you know,
he's doing an evening of peace and love and anti-war.
And I was, you know, absolutely in whole hog for that.
Someone brought along a young fellow
called Jimmy Webb,
he hasn't done anything.
So I met him, liked him, and said,
"Write me six songs, here's what I want."
And he came to the rehearsals,
went up and wrote the numbers.
Fucking beautiful numbers.
I said, "God, these are good."
We became fast friends, and I said, "Richard,"
I said, "You should come into the studio sometime
and we'll make a tape together, let's make a tape together.
I know you sing."
And he said, "Ah, Jimmy Webb, I'll do that."
We were sort of beginning to put this album together,
but I'd played several songs for him.
Jim sat down and he played "MacArthur Park",
and I thought it was stunning.
I think if it moved me, I want to do it.
And he went slam like this, wham right in front me.
He says, "I'll have that and I'll make a hit out of it.
And I'll be a pop star."
It happened, just like he said.
He played me "MacArthur Park".
I thought, my God, that's good.
* Spring was never waiting for us girl *
* It ran one step ahead *
* As we followed in the dance *
"MacArthur Park", to this day,
will still be in my top five finest record of all time.
I mean, it was groundbreaking.
And the vocal on that is, it's quite astounding
for an actor.
Now ladies and gentlemen,
here is the real treat of the evening,
the musical side of that marvellous actor
and exciting recording star, Mr. Richard Harris.
"MacArthur Park".
That song swept the nation somehow.
I never knew why.
It had to do with a cake that got left out in the rain,
but it was a big phenomenon in his life.
In those days, two minutes and 40 seconds,
that was your optimum,
because then you would get played on radio.
Now, "MacArthur Park" is between seven and eight minutes.
It's seven minutes, 21 seconds.
But still managed to get played on radio.
* MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark *
* All the sweet green icing flowing down *
"MacArthur Park" was a gold record.
My God, we had only set out to do this for fun.
You know, I was a jack of all trades
in those days.
I felt that somehow I wanted to challenge myself, I suppose.
See, could I do it?
Richard had my heart and he invited me into his world.
And I can remember when the two little boys
were about this big and they would go off to school.
I remember thinking that I'd never met anyone
who loved their children as much as he did.
And he was going through a divorce
with their mother at the time.
He loved his children, I think,
more than any man I've ever seen.
And I sort of became a part of that.
I was always welcome there up until a certain point
and this all...
There is a point where all of this ended unfortunately.
When we were making the first album,
he told me that if "MacArthur Park" was a hit,
he would give me that Phantom V.
After, you know, after the fact,
he had started sending me photos of Rolls-Royces.
How about this one?
How about this other one?
It wasn't the Rolls-Royce though.
It wasn't the one.
And it had nothing to do with money.
It had nothing to do with anything
except I was like 21, 22 years old.
He had promised me that car and I was hurt.
I was hurt.
* Is everybody warm *
And then somewhere along the way, someone said to him,
"Jimmy's making all the money.
You're doing all this work and Jimmy's making all the money
because he owns the company and he has all this publishing."
* Standing with the Kansas City housewives in doorways *
And we didn't speak for about 20 years.
And it's silly.
It's all stupid.
It's all over material things, which, you know,
when you're young, those things matter a lot more.
But now I would rather have had the friendship.
I would rather have had the friendship.
And then what got away from us, what got away from us
is a really cautionary tale, I think,
for anyone who might be going through something similar,
even right now at this moment.
You know, it's never late to go back
and make a phone call and say,
"Hey, listen, let's start over.
Let's have this conversation again.
Let's start again."
Richard Harris!
Well, I met Dick socially first
before we started working together.
He'd become a little bit disenchanted
with the whole recording thing,
but I kind of persuaded him to think about
the singing bit again.
* You're sleeping son I know *
* But really this can't wait *
* I wanted to explain before it gets too late *
I had in my kit bag, this song that I had worked on
with Claude François.
I turned that into "My Boy".
For me, it was the perfect fit for Dick.
* But God knows how I tried *
* Because you're all I have my boy *
* You are my life my pride my joy *
The whole scenario of "My Boy",
it was very tied up with his own
personal situation right then.
* My boy *
One of the few occasions where we actually fell out
was when we were preparing for the American tour.
We'd made the album and so of an evening time,
we would be kind of in the bar together.
And on one of those nights, Dick was on a bit of a rampage.
When the barman finally called last orders,
Harris goes up to the counter,
and demands more drink and starts kind of shaking...
Not the barman, but the cash register
and making a lot of noise.
So I went up to say to Dick, "Dick, for God's sake,
I mean like, this is not the place."
And he just turned around and hit me, a blow like that.
I crashed onto the floor and slid halfway along the bar.
So I picked myself up.
I'm outta here.
A few hours later,
and now it's well in the middle of the night,
there's banging at the door and I thought, oh God,
I know this is Harris.
And he's shouting and he's shouting at me,
"Phil, Phil, Phil!"
And he was like all teary and apologetic.
As I recollect he got on his knees in front of me
and pleaded with me not to go and da da da da.
Anyway, I relented.
Hello, I'm Richard Harris.
I'm coming to town to sing some songs for my albums,
read some poems I've written.
Hello, this is Richard Harris.
I'm coming to town to sing some songs from my album,
"A Tramp Shining", "The Yard Went on Forever",
from my recent album "My Boy."
Hello, I hope you'll come and join me.
We had one of those heart to hearts.
"Dick, when we go to America,
I'm going as your musical director,
not your spiritual director
and certainly not as your tour manager,
nor as your minder,
so on the night that you're walking on stage,
having had a feed of drink, you will meet me walking off."
* Side by side *
* And when they say *
And in fairness, it never occurred.
When we were on the road, nothing crazy,
no real kind of drug crazed orgies or any of that.
Back then he still had a bit of a grip on himself.
He was a force of nature, Harris really was.
He was the kind of guy who could suck the oxygen
out of a room when he entered.
He was larger than life and everybody.
That was one adventure I would hate to have missed,
for sure, for sure.
Warts and all.
I'd like to read a poem.
I've written the poem in the point of view of God.
Comes back to the north of Ireland
and sees Christians killing Christians.
The poem is called "There Are Too Many Saviours on My Cross".
There are too many saviours on my cross
lending their blood to flood out my ballot box
with needs of their own.
Who put you there?
Who told you that that was your place?
You carry me secretly naked in your heart
and clothe me publicly in armour, crying-
God is on our side,
yet I openly cry-
Who is on mine?
Who?
Tell me who.
What do you think of it?
It's pretty powerful.
I was never a big fan of his poetry,
and the particular poem about too many saviours on my cross,
about the north of Ireland, I didn't get that.
Believe me, the last thing that people
in the north of Ireland want to hear
is Richard Harris reciting a poem
about the north of Ireland.
Richard was not an actor getting involved
in Northern Ireland.
That's the first thing.
He was somebody who responded on a good level
to political events that he felt wounded by
and moved him deeply.
When he saw Bloody Sunday,
he took out a notebook and he wrote a poem.
But what he says in the poem is
-I am not orange. -I am not orange.
-I am not green. -I am not green.
I am a half ripe fruit needing both colours
to grow into ripeness.
And he's basically saying,
you must find a point of reconciliation.
I in my poverty alone without trust, Christ,
shame on you and shame and shame and shame on you again
for converting me into a bullet
and shooting me into men's hearts.
The situation in the north of Ireland back then
was far more complicated than that.
He wasn't aware of the subtleties,
certainly wouldn't be as aware as I would be
because that's where I come from.
So I advised him against it and that kind of damaged our...
That damaged our relationship.
We didn't collaborate after that at all.
Oh, a thousand pardons, my lady,
please don't run away, I will not harm you.
You lied.
You'll lean into me and throw me to the ground.
I will do no such thing.
Then you'll twist my arm...
The only thing that I keep an eye on
is the situation in the north of Ireland.
I think that's a disgraceful situation.
Everybody is saying,
and Reagan and Maggie Thatcher are saying to the Russians,
don't you dare enter,
don't you dare come into Poland with your troops.
What about the 21,000 troops in Northern Ireland?
They've got no right to be there.
And the sinful situation is that supposing
it was 21,000 Russian troops in the north of Ireland,
the provisional IRA were called Freedom Fighters,
resistance, proud, the resistance.
That attitude of his changed
because I think it was after the policewoman
got blown up outside of Harrod's.
At that point, he came out and started telling
Irish Americans not to give money to NORAID,
because that money was being used to buy bombs
and blow up innocent people.
And he actually ended on an IRA hit list.
And there was a while there where we had,
you know, we had armed security around us.
So I think it was 17 death threats by phone,
11 letters, and then boxes would arrive at the theatre.
The bomb squad were called every day practically.
Well, not every day.
Regularly.
I'm a Republican through and through.
I believe in united Ireland through and through.
I cannot approve of blowing up Harrod's.
I can't approve it.
There's a succession of films in the 1970s
that were not only commercially successful,
they were artistically viable.
And "Man in the Wilderness" is one of his
great classic movies and he rated it as such.
Hello Harry.
And then he did 99 and 44%'s dead...
Hello Buffy.
I don't even know the title.
I don't want to remember the title.
What are you doing here with all these scrubbers?
Killing time.
He made nonsense for the rest of the seventies.
"Games for Vultures", "Golden Rendezvous".
They were all done for the paycheck.
He lived in LA with Ann.
Ann was younger than my father by quite a bit.
They all got together on a movie set
and he very much became a fixture in Los Angeles with her,
partly to try to help her career as an actress.
He basically used himself as bait by saying,
"I'll do the movie if you put her in it."
And they were all terrible films.
He became my best friend.
We would sit all day and the set and talk
and in the evenings we'd have dinner and eat and talk.
And I had heard about his reputation, I was terrified.
And finally, oh, about two months later,
after seeing each other all day, every day,
we had fallen in love and nothing had happened yet.
It was amazing, after the most incredible experience
I've ever gone through in my life.
Literally we both had fallen so heavily in love
and nothing had happened.
And then when it did, we got engaged and we got married.
I was madly in love with Ann Turkel.
There's no question I was madly in love with her.
I will confess to the fact that there's something in me
that cannot sustain it.
Ann and I were only married about five years.
My restlessness was too enormous.
It's been a turbulent journey in a strange way.
I had a short period when I was on drugs.
I almost died a couple of times.
And knighted twice.
Mid seventies, when I just really swallowed them,
I mean, really got through it.
So I wasn't just taking coke, like I wasn't drinking,
when I drank, I devoured alcohol.
When I did coke, I devoured coke.
I ended up in the intensive care ward in Cedars of Lebanon.
I know I did.
Everything he did, he did with such a sort of...
I dunno how to make sense of it.
He was so passionate and yet he wouldn't draw the line.
And you could not in any way nail Dad down
as to what he was or wasn't gonna say or do.
I walked into his bedroom
and it was like Al Pacino in "Scarface."
He dropped this pound of cocaine on the carpet
and it had burst open and his face
was just in the middle of it.
And I don't think I knew what cocaine was,
but I knew at the time that I probably
shouldn't have come into his bedroom at the time.
So yeah, he was unpredictable.
I must have thrown five or $6,000 worth down the toilet
when I went home and that was it.
I haven't touched it since it.
It wasn't so much that I was into drugs, it wasn't,
I was into experiences.
I think he was still trying to find
whatever it is he was looking for,
and I can't tell you what that was.
Like Lazarus, I've come back from the dead,
I feel.
While I was doing The Field in Ireland,
I said, "This is it."
I kept screaming, "This is a great country."
Maybe it is a great place to be.
Maybe it wasn't the country.
Maybe just the peacefulness of the world.
The tragedy is you'll find it
and you're living it for a while.
I mean, I get restless.
This is exactly how I remember Leenane.
This is the field.
This movie, "The Field", was so important to my father.
That role of Bull McCabe was, to me,
was his most defining role.
Are these the same outsiders who watched
whilst our valley went silent
except for the cries of the last starving child?
The English are gone, Bull.
Gone because I drove them out.
Me and my kind.
I mean the Bull McCabe coat
looked like an army coat, which I found.
He's like the patriarchal figure of Ireland.
He's like all the great heroes of Irish independence,
and the sort of, the symbol of it is "The Field."
That's Ireland, that we have to keep.
I was passionate about that picture.
I worked on "The Field".
I was a runner.
I was the lowest AD.
Everybody knew whilst making "The Field"
that it was gonna be phenomenal.
Dad had been going through a rough patch of movies where,
you know, a lot of them weren't very good frankly.
And he'd felt that, he knew that.
And this was a huge break.
And also he had to work bloody hard to get this role.
He wasn't the first choice.
It was an actor called Ray McAnally
and he did "My Left Foot" for peanuts to help us out.
He came to me and said, "I'd like to do 'The Field.'
If you could get a screenplay."
Then Ray McAnally died,
and that's how Richard got the job.
I mean, he'd come off the road,
tour that musical "Camelot", and he...
I just think he was sick to the teeth
of next town, the next town, the next town.
Camelot!
I had to convince them.
I mean, Jim wasn't so sure and thought I was too...
Hear this.
He thought I was too aesthetic.
Harris, too aesthetic.
Man, that's a joke in itself.
I think Richard thought he could do anything.
He was kind.
You know, he was considerate, he was mad.
But I do think there was a little bit of a war going on
and as much as he pushed me, I pushed him.
I pushed him like mad, you know.
The end of the movie,
Jim Sheridan argued about the way I played a certain scene,
which I thought was the best scene in the movie,
in which Robert De Niro has said on print is one...
It's the best acting scene he ever saw in his life.
They all talk about it still.
Actors still come and say, "Jesus, that scene."
In the room with the priest.
Well well well.
This is the widow's field.
That's the law.
The common law.
There's another law.
Stronger than the common law.
What's that?
The law of the land.
This is the only scene in the movie
where the Bull breaks down.
He openly admits he put the field before his mother's life,
and Jim Sheridan decided he didn't want
the Bull to break down.
He believed that the Bull should always be the Bull
and show no form of weakness.
My father knelt beside her, he knew she...
Knew she was dying.
He said an act of Contrition into her ear
and asked God to forgive her her sins.
And he looked at me, and he said, "Fetch a priest.
Fetch a priest."
And I said,
"Let's bring the hay in first."
Let's bring the hay in first.
I went, "Cut."
Like that.
And I heard the cameraman clapping,
the first AD clapping and the entire crew, hair and makeup,
all clapping.
And I was like, that's the worst performance I've seen.
I knew Richard was staring at me
and I just looked up and I said,
"Richard, that was the most over the top thing
I've ever seen in my fucking life."
And then it became a war.
Do you know what I mean?
But Jim didn't like it somehow
and he wanted me to do it again.
I said, "I won't do it again."
He said, "Would you come and see it?"
I said, "I won't go and see it,
but when the movie is finished, when the movie's complete,
then you can...
Then I am willing to look at it."
So on the last day after we went to Ardmore
and he saw it and he said, "I can't do better that.
I think that's the best acting I've done."
And I was like, "Okay."
He didn't feel that Jim was right,
and Dad won because he just refused to reshoot it.
You cannot get a better backdrop to a scene than this.
This was by far the hardest scene to shoot,
where the Bull kills the American.
Go on now boy.
The beginning of the scene is
he pits his son against the American.
Make a man of him, is what he's trying to do.
Well Dad was standing out there on those rocks
for four nights in a row.
He had to walk out there with that stick and stand.
I mean, I cannot tell you,
this is like summer compared to what it was back then.
It was freezing cold.
It's at moments like this I realise
how powerful an actor he was to stand out there
and be the Bull.
I was as proud a son as you could ever be.
I'll tell you how mad he was.
He wanted to stand at the waterfall and I was like, "No.
No."
And next minute he's fucking up there
and I'm like, oh man, Jesus, you know,
now he's doing Charlton Heston and "The Ten Commandments",
you know?
And I was like, "Richard,
what the fuck are you doing up there?"
You know?
Anyway, I thought I'll cut around it
if there's a big problem.
And then we set up the scene
where he has to drag them into the water.
We get in the river and it's kind of like minus 10.
We did the scene.
He puts one down.
I go cut and I say, "Okay, let's do that again."
And he goes, "What?
What?"
And I said, "Let's do it again, Richard."
And he just ran off.
And then Harris is up the hill and Sean Bean runs,
goes into the headlights of the car,
and I can hear him saying to Sean Bean,
"That's enough now.
Don't go any further."
And I'm like, what?
He said, "Don't go any..."
I said, Sean, "Just keep going."
And Sean Bean there doesn't know what to do
'cause Harris is telling him he'll kill him.
So I ran after 'em up the hill.
And I was like, "Richard, Richard, what the fuck's going on?
What did you say that for?"
And he said, "Listen to me now.
Any argument you were having with me,
you're having with your own father."
And that was the actual truth of that story.
I had rows with my father.
As a child, I fought him.
There was a conflict between us that was really heavy.
And I realised the Bull was him.
The father in "My Left Foot" was him.
Everybody was my dad.
And that I better write a movie about a good dad.
And in a way,
that was the moment that made
"In the Name of the Father", I think.
And the weird thing was,
when I made "In the Name of the Father"
and on the premier night, I said,
"My father was the prototype for the guy,
the non-violent father."
And he came up in front of everybody and hugged me
and said, in this ear, "I love you."
And I'd never heard him say that.
So that moment of Harris in "The Field" may lead to that.
You know what I mean?
So...
I don't like Dickie Harris.
I don't like the idea of the abbreviation.
Now I like the Richard fuckin' Harris.
Do I sense that some of you want to laugh at me?
That would be most unwise.
It would lead me to believe that you did not understand
that I wear this penitent sackcloth for political reasons.
Tomorrow our positions may be reversed.
And then what would you do?
Pirandello's "Henry IV" is about a man
who either he's pretending to be mad or he is mad.
I knew that there'd been a lot of problems with this play.
Richard got rid of four directors, two designers,
leading lady Sarah Miles walked out.
She left.
If I believe something to be right,
though it may turn out to be wrong,
you've gotta go with your beliefs.
And when I was asked to join it,
people said, "Are you mad?
You're going into the lion's den.
It's going to be horrendous."
And I did enter the lion's den.
Got to London, rehearsed for two weeks in London,
and I worked with the understudy.
No Richard.
He didn't turn up for the dress rehearsal.
He didn't turn up for the first preview, which was cancelled.
The second preview, one of our producers said,
"Look, Richard's very nervous."
I said, "Of course, yes, we're all nervous."
And she said, "Could you go into his dressing room
and tell him that you're nervous?"
So the first time I met Richard,
"Hello, how nice to meet you.
God, Richard, I'm really, really nervous."
Which I was, I wasn't lying.
And he put his arms around me and said,
"You'll be fine with me.
Just stick with me, you'll be fine."
Too old for this.
He cared passionately about his work.
It hurt him that people dismissed his talent.
But that was partly because he created this other persona
of being this, which wasn't a lie, it was true,
as being this wild hell raiser who would,
you know, get drunk and cause mayhem and fuck about.
I mean, people expected that play to be a joke.
A very prominent London critic
said I couldn't play it.
Said the show would be no good.
Give me a chance.
If you see it and you'll say it's bad or you don't like it,
I'll accept that.
But to say so beforehand, that's not fair.
I think that he was afraid of failing in it,
not only for the critics and for the world,
but I think he was afraid to fail for himself.
I say, woe unto him who does not know
how to wear his mask.
Be he the pope or the king.
He put this like very, very red makeup on his cheeks
and he's come...
He supposed to be playing man and he was like, woo,
coming out this, whoa, like this, you know.
And after the first act,
I went to the bar and there were these two women.
And I remember hearing them and they said,
"He was a lovely actor when he was young.
What happened to him?
They were, I mean, so disappointed.
Says, "Well, what should we do?
Should we go back in for the second act
or should we just go home?"
And they went, "Well, let's go back in
and if it still doesn't get better, then we'll go home.
Then halfway through the second act,
he walks down towards the front of the stage
with a towel over his head.
And when he pulls the towel off,
all the makeup's gone, the wig's gone and everything.
And he says to the audience,
"I'm so bloody tired of all of this."
The character, the playwright is revealing
that it's all been an act.
People in the audience thought, shit, what's happened?
Is this Richard Harris or the character doing this?
You know, there'd be nervous laughter.
And in the play the character has lines of,
"Are you laughing at me?"
But he'd go right at the person in the audience.
So they'd get fucking terrified.
And it became dangerous
largely because he had dared you
to think that he didn't know what the fuck he was doing
in the first act.
And now he went at you for having made that mistake.
It was incredibly brave.
Really fucking brave performance.
Ballsy fucking performance.
Thank you.
Richard said to me, "We did it.
We did it.
Have you read the reviews?
Have you read the notices?
They're fucking fantastic."
And they were.
But in the words of Samuel Beckett,
if I may quote him for a second,
perhaps my best years are gone,
but I wouldn't want them back.
Not with the fire that's in me now.
And I thank you so much indeed.
I'm thrilled with this.
Thrilled.
There is a secret part of us that nobody has any access to.
We change our masks in every single opportunity that we get.
We read the circumstances and we cast ourselves into a role
depending upon what they want.
You have proved your valour yet again, Maximus.
Let us hope for the last time.
Richard, for me is like a fundamental teacher.
There is always someone left to fight, right?
How can I reward Rome's greatest general?
Let me go home.
Ah.
Home.
With Richard and I, it was like he was very open to me,
you know?
And I was under a lot of pressure on that job, man.
I'd never been in something like that
where the budget is so big and the logistics are so big.
How do we live inside this world where there's literally
thousands of people?
And I knew that Joaquin was having the same kind of feelings
that I was having.
You know, the scale of this thing, I think,
had a lot of us feeling that we couldn't connect
like we normally might in an actor's environment, you know?
And Richard just said to me,
"Well, why don't we get together with him after work?
Let's find out how much we care about him."
So he did that straight up old school thing, man,
you know, we just got together for a drink
in the trailer after work.
Joaquin reminded Richard that Richard had worked with River
and River had come home from that set
with all of these stories about this guy.
And so Joaquin was going, "Is this story true?
Is that story true?"
And all the stories are true.
And we had a few drinks with him
and he started doing poetry for us.
And if you know anything about Richard at all,
grand poet in his own right,
that just made the room just start to glow, you know?
And then, you know, Joaquin went home
and Richard and I were sitting there,
and he goes, "Well, how do we feel about him?"
I said, "I fucking love him."
He goes, "Me too.
That's solved that."
So then it was just, you know, it was easy.
And then because Joaquin and I showed a connection,
then the other actors, they were able to come into
this sort of core of gentle camaraderie
in the middle of all of this crazy shit that was going on.
Please.
The tone of that definitely belongs
to Richard's influence.
I am dying, Maximums.
When a man sees his end, he wants to know
there was some purpose to his life.
How will the world speak my name in years to come?
Will I be known as the philosopher, the warrior, the tyrant?
Authentically masculine,
authentically sentimental,
authentically a storyteller,
be it in prose, in poetry or song,
or via the process of allowing yourself
to inhabit a character.
He was an authentic man.
I like my life.
It's a strange life, I'll admit to that.
And it's a life that I wouldn't recommend
anybody else to have.
But I can deal with it.
I like it.
It's a life where there is no compass.
Now, because I've slowed down, right, from my wild days,
like the pirate ship has landed,
the pirate ship is now beached.
Hey, thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
Hello.
I would say when Richard slowed down, in his own words,
I think that was when he started
building meaningful relationships.
We met in Copenhagen.
He came out to shoot Bille August's
"Smilla's Sense of Snow."
And I was asked if I could go and take care of him
for three days.
And those three days ended up being until the day he died.
And it was, to me, it was the greatest mentor.
There's not one person in the world
that I'm afraid of, at all.
And that's thanks to Richard.
With the boys, I think Richard truly loved
the three of them.
He regretted that he couldn't be the great father
when the children needed him as young boys.
How's the film?
Oh, it's fabulous.
Good.
They perhaps grew the most sincere relationship
when they were all adults.
Hey, dad.
Then Damian brings this wonder into the world.
He had Ella and Ella became his big love story.
I think if you can ever talk about a woman
in Richard's life, it would've been Ella.
I waited from 1957,
when I got married to Elizabeth,
to 1989 for the girl to arrive.
And I basically grew up coming here on the weekends.
Swimming in the pool.
There's something about her
that's sort of like air.
He came to all my sports days and all my school plays.
He had an Oscar made for me.
Do you remember when I did my school play?
He was like a big giant lion protector.
But were you aware of him as, you know,
an artist, as an actor?
No.
He was your grandfather.
Yeah.
And your friends?
Only when we got to about 12 and the Harry Potter days.
And then it was like the coolest thing.
Silence!
Everyone will please not panic.
Now, prefects will lead their house back to the dormitories.
Teachers will follow me to the dungeons.
I mean, you know, when I was asked to do it,
I turned it down three or four times.
I didn't wanna do it.
I hate commitment.
To do it, I had to sort of sign for the four books,
that's four pictures, like over five or six years.
And that I loathe.
So I didn't wanna do it.
But my granddaughter, who's 11, Ella,
she worships the books,
and she called me and she said, "Papa,"
she said, "If you don't do it, if you don't play Dumbledore,
I'll never speak to you again."
And I thought that is something I can't afford.
According to Richard,
you're responsible for getting him into this.
-Is that true? -Yeah.
She told me she'd never speak to me again.
Why don't we actually now tell the truth?
The truth.
About the Harry Potter story.
I'm afraid I didn't say that I would
never speak to him again
if he didn't do the Harry Potter films.
Because he said the other option was to go to New Zealand
for three years.
And do "Lord of the Rings".
And do "Lord of the Rings."
And he said, "I'll have to miss the Millennium."
Who was he playing?
-Gandalf. -Gandalf.
And I'll be away in New Zealand for three years.
And I said, "That sounds terrible.
Definitely don't do that."
He realised that there was an opportunity
to tell a story, to become...
Oh it was planned.
It was planned.
It was planned for the red carpet.
Harry Potter opens and it's on the news rotation.
It's the premiere in London.
All the press was...
It was either Daniel Radcliffe or you and dad.
And it was, is this your granddaughter,
the one who said...
Yes, this the granddaughter, she said...
All the way up the red carpet.
My granddaughter, she's my date.
And he basically did it so that he could
steal the red carpet a year later.
I remember calling him up and telling him,
that's their only two questions,
they're asking about Daniel Radcliffe
and then about Ella.
And he went, "Ah, they went for it, did they?
Ha ha ha.
It worked!"
I remember that toy.
I remember that toy 'cause I remember
getting my fingers stuck inside there.
That's you.
That's Damian, yeah.
Damian, yeah.
Personally, I've been putting this off a bit.
It's not been something that I've sort of run to do,
'cause he was so vivid in our lives,
you don't need this, personally.
He was so vivid that he existed.
And I think for my...
Sorry.
Scene.
He's never gone away.
And so he's there.
As I said to you earlier, he's consistently in my dreams.
I always thought that once he died,
that the relationship would be over.
But it's not.
We still have conversations.
We still reference him.
He has the last word.
Well, now we can have the last word.
Sort of.
We can get more of a word in.
Here we go.
Compositions.
99.
So they're just like little endless books
with notes scribbled in them.
Poetry lines.
Says...
Hold on.
"I don't want to be around me anymore.
I can't relax with me.
At times, I don't even like me.
The life I liked has gone somewhere.
I don't know where it's gone,
but I don't want to find it, even if I could.
I have come to realise now
that I never could maintain relationships.
Drink even isolated me.
Or love me or gave me a false sense of happiness.
Sober, my life was groundless.
It all began in Overdale."
Yeah.
And that's it.
The rest of the book is empty.
That was a bit of a shocker, yeah.
Excuse me while I disappear.
Picture of a young athlete,
the trained eye of the physician sees the damage
already done by tuberculosis.
Dickie got TB, tuberculosis, and it just swept Ireland.
It seemed every second person that you knew
was getting it and dying.
Probably at that particular time,
one feels a sense of being deserted, I suppose.
All of a sudden, friends don't come anymore.
You become a nuisance.
Fuck it, I'll go and see Dickie Harris today.
He's still in bed.
Mightn't we catch that bug if we're go into his room?
But that happened to me.
I was 19 years of age.
That's a long time ago.
And my theory of it hasn't changed.
It is on your own you survive.
I began to read an awful lot, create things in my own head.
Ah, the letters of Vincent Van Gogh.
And of course Hammond.
This room is the room that he was in
for two years when he caught TB.
TB was considered to be a pauper's disease
and they were, you know, upper middle class family.
They're a wealthy family and they're ashamed
that their son had it.
And he was consigned to bed.
The Richard Harris that dreamed of being the rugby hero
had that future mapped out for himself,
that wasn't gonna be possible any longer,
as he was slowly, you know...
His body is wasting away here.
That's when he got to reading
and that's when he found out about Shakespeare.
And he found out about plays, literature.
He loved words and he became expert at using them.
And I said, "I'm gonna become an actor."
I think it was just identity.
What's his name again?
I want them to realise who I am.
Not just so much me.
What's his name again?
But I want my father Moses to say,
"Hey, we got a friend call Richard here in the family, Dick.
There he is, look.
That's him on the stage there."
Run, boy!
Run!
He often said the greatest part he ever played
was Richard Harris.
Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't.
Maybe I was never I.
Maybe I was where here and there never met.
Lost between the ifs and buts of mind and body,
in the four seasons of a perfect vapour.
I remember after dad died, at the funeral,
we all stood up to say something at the bar afterwards
and there's a line in here that I...
"He was a man.
Take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his life again."
I have a great philosophy about life.
Don't say let's pass the time.
That's a terrible expression.
Don't pass the time.
Live the time.
I mean, I've lived every minute of my life.
The greatest thing in life is to have demons.
Don't try to exorcise your demons.
Don't have anybody explain them away to you.
Use them.
Make a deal with them.
Make a treaty with them and use them.
Don't exorcise them.
* Spring was never waiting for us girl *
* It ran one step ahead *
* As we followed in the dance *
* Between the parted pages and were pressed *
* In love's hot fevered iron *
* Like a striped pair of pants *
* MacArthur's Park is melting in the dark *
* All the sweet green icing flowing down *
* Someone left the cake out in the rain *
* I don't think that I can take it *
* 'Cause it took so long to bake it *
* And I'll never have that recipe again *
* Oh no *
Thank you.