Behaving Badly: Richard Harris

Oct 5, 2024 7:12 AM

Author:Cliff Goodwin

Richard Harris was never an easy person to get along with. He was a difficult schoolboy (and was later disowned by his Limerick teachers), then he went to work in the family flour and milling business - where he organised a strike against his father.

It was as a gifted and compelling actor that Richard Harris dominated stage and screen for more than four decades. He was nominated for an Oscar twice: for his earthy portrayal of a rugby player in This Sporting Life and as a dominant and bullish Irish farmer in The Field. More recently he delivered gripping screen performances in Gladiator and two Harry Potter films.

But it was his violent, drunken, womanising private life that fed the public myth and made Harris, one of a new breed of rogue male actors, an international celebrity. Married and divorced twice, with three sons - two actors, one a film director - he claimed the only time he had been miscast was as a husband. His lovers included legends such as Merle Oberon, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner and Vanessa Redgrave.

Reviews

One of the most poignant, funny, intelligent, frank and horribly addictive books you're likely to read all year

—— Sunday Telegraph

A remarkable, perhaps even unique, exercise in autobiography ... that aroma of authenticity that is the point of all great autobiographies: of which his, I rather think, is one

—— Evening Standard

Stephen Fry is one of the great originals ... This autobiography of his first twenty years is a pleasure to read, mixing outrageous acts with sensible opinions in bewildering confusion ... That so much outward charm, self-awareness and intellect should exist alongside behaviour that threatened to ruin the lives of innocent victims, noble parents and Fry himself, gives the book a tragic grandeur and lifts it to classic status

—— Financial Times

He writes superbly about his family, about his homosexuality, about the agonies of childhood ... some of his bursts of simile take the breath away ... his most satisfying and appealing book so far

—— Observer

This is one of the most extraordinary and affecting biographies I have read . . . Stephen is . . . painfully honest when trying to grapple with his ever-present demons, and often, as you might expect, very funny

—— Daily Mail

The writing is rhapsodic, intoxicated and very touching

—— Mail on Sunday

[A] wonderful, self-lacerating autobiography

—— Humphrey Carpenter, Sunday Times

He has produced a remarkable autobiography . . . It makes gripping, sometimes unbearably sad, sometimes confusing reading . . . exhilarating, humane, zany, literary

—— Spectator

No one can make you feel quite like Stephen Fry can . . . Funny and tormentedly frank

—— Time Out

Hugely enjoyable . . . compulsively readable . . . Fry is excellent on the details of memory, too, and always able to embellish them with effortless erudition . . . this engaging, engrossing read is as honest a portrait of a young liar as one could hope to read

—— Scotsman

He is bubbly, funny and charming, and he gives his fans plenty of material if they want to speculate on why he is both so gifted and so wayward

—— The Times

The jokes . . . transcend the complexes of the joker, turning the Stephenesque into a national as well as a family treasure

—— Guardian

Not so much an autobiography, more a way of life; discursive, funny, sometimes almost unbelievably sad, opinionated, nostalgic and very infectious

—— Claire Rayner, New Statesman

Fry can be funny about anything

—— Good Book Guide

So charming and so acute that one cannot help forgiving him

—— Daily Express

You need to read this - period

—— Fact

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