Tributes pour in for Ireland's hell-raiser

For someone who spent much of his life cementing Ireland's reputation as a land of drunken hell-raisers, Richard Harris would have been delighted to find tributes being led by the Irish Prime Minister.

Bertie Ahern took a break from repairing the peace process to pay tribute, describing him as "one of Ireland's most outstanding artists".

After a week in which all eyes have been focused on international crises, tributes poured in from across the globe as news spread that the star had died after showing characteristic defiance in the face of Hodgkin's Disease.

Chat show host Michael Parkinson, who interviewed Harris three times, once devoting an entire programme to him, described him as "an extraordinary man, a great storyteller, very intelligent".

He added: "He was a hellraiser – it's a cliché, but that's what he was. He was from the old school of stars, like Peter O'Toole, strolling players, guys who love life."

From the Los Angeles headquarters of Warner Brothers, the studio which cast him as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies, came the statement: "Richard Harris was a remarkable actor and a generous and free spirit."

Though Harris never won an Oscar and continued to be ignored by the establishment into old age, he was rated as one of the most dynamic actors of his generation. Among his most celebrated films were Camelot, A Man Called Horse and This Sporting Life, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.

As the tributes continued to flood in last night, Sharon Thomas, the actor's agent, confirmed that Harris would be remembered at a small family funeral on a date to be fixed in London. His ashes will later be scattered near his home in the Bahamas.

A snarling, impassioned Hibernian Brando

John Walsh

"Volatile" was the word most often used of Richard Harris in his heyday. His acting was so intense that he often seemed liable to burst – out of the screen, out of the scene he was in, even out of the part he was playing. A force-field of banked-up fury surrounded him. He played nervy, wired, confrontational rebels, men who were nursing a nameless grievance. He was always spectacularly pissed-off. Consequently, despite his blue-eyed good looks and athletic frame, he was never a convincing romantic lead, despite sharing screen clinches with Julie Andrews (in Hawaii), Doris Day (in Caprice) and Vanessa Redgrave (Guinevere to his King Arthur in Camelot).

He was Irish, born in Limerick in 1930, but he transcended the kind of Irishness associates with shamrocks and shillelaghs. True, in three of his first four movies – Alive and Kicking, Shake Hands with the Devil and A Terrible Beauty – he played begorrah-Jaysus village Irishmen, but thereafter he abandoned the stereotype in favour of an unclassifiable Celtic waywardness that filled the screen with energy. His best roles were the early ones – as the bullying corporal in The Long and the Short and the Tall and the noisy, obsessive, rugby-playing miner, Machin, desperate to secure the love of his frigid landlady (Rachel Roberts) in This Sporting Life. Resplendent in a sweaty white vest, his features contorted in a snarl, he briefly resembled a Hiberno-English version of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire.

In the early Sixties he turned up everywhere in supporting roles, cheeking his (usually British) betters. In The Guns of Navarone, he's the only soldier in the platoon who'll tell Gregory Peck et al that their plan is bloody rubbish. In Mutiny on the Bounty, he plays Mills, the chief troublemaker, who accuses the captain (behind his back) of stealing from the ship's cheese supply, and is given 24 lashes for his impertinence. Harris's face in close-up, as he contemplates being flogged half to death, is an eloquent picture of a mad dog at bay.

The trouble was that Harris was too explosive a presence to be truly subversive – to be a Brando or a Jack Nicholson. He became stuck with roles where he could erupt – clunking war movies like The Heroes of Telemark and The Wild Geese – or where he suffered extreme forms of violence, like the moment when he is hoisted in the air by metal hooks attached to his chest for the Sun-Vow ceremony in A Man Called Horse. He might appear in three movies a year, but none of them (no, not even Orca – Killer Whale) would be any good. It was an unforeseeable miracle when he returned to top form 30 years after his debut, in The Field (1990) playing a malevolent Irish King Lear with elemental passion, but a passion focused into pure hatred and desire for vengeance. He was impressive, too, in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) as an English gent who is beaten black and blue by Gene Hackman.

But he also had a romantic side, which emerged quite unexpectedly when he recorded one of the oddest songs of the Sixties, "Macarthur Park". In Jimmy Webb's lushly surreal farrago of yearning and regret – "I will have the things that I desire/ My passions flow like rivers to the sun/ And after all the loves of my life/ You'll still be the one" – Harris's strangulated whisper is strangely moving. He was a ferocious roustabout with a glowing, unquenchable thirst for experience. And the title of the LP on which "Macarthur Park" appears could stand as a tribute to his shaggy, disreputable spirit. It was called A Tramp Shining.