Mickey Rourke dedicated his 2009 BAFTA award for Best Actor to Harris calling him "a good friend, and great actor.".
A bout with tuberculosis ended his ambition of becoming a professional rugby player.
After giving up drinking alcohol for a time in the 1970s, Harris put a bottle of vodka in every room in his house in London. The temptation was huge but he didn't touch a drop.
An alcoholic, he gave up drinking completely in 1981 and returned to drinking Guinness a decade later.
Appears in Patriot Games (1992) with James Fox, whose niece is his daughter-in-law.
Associate member of LAMDA.
Befriended Russell Crowe while filming Gladiator (2000).
Both he and his fellow Irish actor (and close friend) Peter O'Toole appeared in versions of "Gulliver's Travels": Harris played the title character in the 1977 film version Gulliver's Travels (1977) and O'Toole played the Emperor of Lilliput in the 1996 TV-film version Gulliver's Travels (1996) (TV), where Ted Danson played Gulliver.
By the time he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in August 2002 it was so advanced that there was no hope of recovery.
Died shortly before the U.S. premiere of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002).
During the 1940s and early 1950s he went to see all the films of John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Later, however, he described both actors as "pantomime cowboys". The westerns he made, like _Man Called Horse, A (1970)_, were decidedly revisionist in tone.
Ex-father-in-law of actress Emilia Fox and Annabel Brooks.
Following his death, many of his family members wanted friend Peter O'Toole to take the role of Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).
Graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). He was rejected by the Royal Adademy of Dramatic Art.
Harris did not enjoy his first time in Hollywood making The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959). Production had to be halted several times due to the frequent illnesses of its star, Gary Cooper. He turned down the role of Commodus in The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) and was thirty-four when he starred in his first Hollywood movie, Major Dundee (1965).
Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Richard Burton were drinking buddies from the early 1970s till Burton's Death.
He and Patrick Bergin were two of the only Irish actors to play Irishmen in Patriot Games (1992).
He enjoyed a friendly rivalry with English actor Oliver Reed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Reed would often refer to himself as "Mr. England." When Harris would hear him saying that, he would then refer to himself as "Mr. Ireland.".