He topped the charts, dated a princess and was a screen star from the kitchen sink 60s to Harry Potter. Yet his achievements were eclipsed by his hell-raising image. As a new film searches for the real Richard Harris, his son Jared looks back
It was in the late 1990s that Adrian Sibley first conceived of making a Richard Harris documentary. Back then, the brilliant Irish actor was in his early 70s, and best known for his defiant, broad-shouldered roles in such films as the 1963 kitchen-sink drama This Sporting Life and the violent 1970 western A Man Called Horse. But he also found himself beloved by a new generation of fans, thanks to his gentle, timeworn performance as Professor Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Wary of hagiography, yet a keen storyteller, Harris agreed to do Sibley’s film under one condition.
“He said, ‘I’ll do it but only if I can lie half the time,’” explains Sibley, zooming from a family holiday in Italy. “He said, ‘I don’t want to have to tell the truth.’ He was a storyteller and he controlled how he was perceived. I think he felt the documentary might be an opportunity to explore his own life in a different, unpredictable way.”
