The Richard Harris Page contains information on the much missed actor who played Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films. It contains a biography, pictures and links to Richard Harris tribute pages.

Born in Limerick, Ireland, Richard Harris was the fifth of nine children. More interested in sports than art, Harris became a top rugby player in his teens. His sports career, however, ended after he came down with tuberculosis at age 19. Bed-ridden for two years, Harris read voraciously to pass the time. Calling his illness the "luckiest thing that ever happened to me," Harris was inspired by his volumes of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas to pursue a creative profession.

Richard Harris left Ireland to study in London, signing up for acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in 1956 after he failed to find good classes in directing. Harris made his professional stage debut in The Quare Fellow in 1956, earning praise from Method guru Lee Strasberg. Spending the next few years on the stage, Harris appeared in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge and became a theatre star with his turn as a drunken Dublin student in The Ginger Man (1959).

Branching out to the screen, Richard Harris appeared in the British TV movie The Iron Harp (1958), winning a contract with Associated British Pictures Corp. that lead to his feature debut in Alive and Kicking (1959). During the 60's Harris appeared alongside some of Hollywood's heavyweights such as James Cagney , Charlton Heston and Robert Mitchum. He played an Australian pilot in the World War II epic The Guns of Navarone (1961) and held his own as one of Marlon Brando's mutineers in The Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).

Confirming his status as one of the best of the new generation of British rebel actors that included Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, Richard Harris became an international movie star with This Sporting Life, one of the gritty cycle of "kitchen sink" films. Always a fancier of the pubs, Harris descended into alcoholism after his first marriage ended in divorce in 1969 and this perhaps sparked a fallow period in the 1970s and '80s.

Despite dire warnings about his health, Richard Harris continued to perform. His lively turn as an IRA gunman in the blockbuster Patriot Games (1992) and as bounty hunter English Bob in Oscar-winning Western, Unforgiven put his career back on track. Harris refused to retire as the 1990s went on, appearing in the adaptation of Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997) and To Walk With Lions (1999). Bringing a majestic gravitas to a cameo role, Harris earned Oscar buzz (though unfulfilled) for his Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator.