Harry Potter hero, Sixties pop star, part-time barkeep: The storied life of Richard Harris

With a new feature documentary set to tell the tale of the late Irish star, Geoffrey Macnab casts a look back at the renowned actor’s inimitable career – and infamous antics

Richard Harris (1930-2002) in costume as Oliver Cromwell in the film ‘Cromwell’ (Getty)

Taking a break from shooting a movie in the late Sixties, Richard Harris chartered a private plane. The actor and his entourage travelled to Hamburg to visit the brothels, and then went on a day trip to Ireland, spending an afternoon at one of Harris’s favourite pubs. They weren’t sober for a moment of the jaunt, which was chronicled by a photographer sent along for the ride.

The story of their antics is told in Adrian Sibley’s new feature documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris, a world premiere at the Venice Film Festival this week. What is most extraordinary about this particular episode is that it was nothing out of the ordinary for the Limerick-born star. Zigzagging across Europe in search of adventure, sex and alcohol was simply what Harris – at that stage of his life, at least – did.

His various paramours could likely attest to that. Sibley’s documentary alludes to a brief affair the actor may have had with Princess Margaret, a rumour he himself never confirmed. “Although Richard was a ‘swordsman’ in the Errol Flynn way, he was not somebody that I felt would be attacked by #MeToo. People may disapprove of his behaviour, but he was always quite gallant in his attitude toward women,” Sibley tells me. “I like the nobility of the fact that, although he had conquered the bastion of Windsor Castle by mounting the Queen’s sister, which I felt was like an Irishman planting a flag... he never revealed that.”