Ed Harris Biography

Edward Allen Harris was born on November 28th, 1950, into a family of devout Presbyterians in Tenafly, near the Hudson River in Englewood, New Jersey. He describes the place as very middle-class, "a sort of idyllic Fifties thing, four miles from the George Washington Bridge". His father, Robert, was a singer in Fred Waring's chorus. Waring had been a popular dance-band leader in the Twenties and later recorded with the likes of Bing Crosby but, by the time of Ed's birth, he'd moved on from radio to TV, to even greater success. Robert would appear many times, notably on the Perry Como and Carol Burnett Shows.

Ed would grow up in Tenafly, along with elder brother Robert and younger brother Spencer, cared for by mother Margaret. Attending Tenafly High School, Ed did not participate in school drama projects, unlike many of his film-star peers. Quite the opposite, in fact. For all his famed sensitivity onscreen, at school Ed was a MAJOR jock. He'd hang around Tenafly with the other kids, with his collar up and his hair (he had hair then) combed into a quiffy pompadour (this was pre-Beatles), but what he loved most was sport. And, God was he good at it. Ed was a mere 5' 9", and not particularly fast, yet he starred in two sports. He was the catcher in the baseball side and fullback at football.

In his senior year, Ed led the football team to the league championship, and won a sports scholarship to Columbia University. But here it began to go wrong - or very right, depending on how you look at it. As with many kids who spend their early years on the straight and narrow, college opened Ed up to a new world of possibilities. "It was just overwhelming to me, the amount of people and the noise". There was the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), there was marijuana. "You start experimenting," Ed later explained to My Generation magazine, "You start thinking about things a little differently and you realise you've got to do something different with your life. I stopped playing ball. I'd seen some summer theatre in Oklahoma and I thought maybe I could do that".

So, in 1971, after his sophomore year, Ed dropped out and followed his parents back to Oklahoma (they'd both been born there and had recently moved back). Having become interested in attending the theatre, he soon began to join in and spent a year in Oklahoma University's drama programme, before dropping out to perform with local theatre groups. "At first it was about attention", he told Privy magazine "people applauding. But as I got into it, I saw acting as a way of looking at life". Opened up by college, the counter culture and, maybe, drugs, Ed started listening to different music, reading different books, trying to appreciate art. Suddenly, those years spent perfecting his sporting abilities seemed wasted (though they certainly helped make him the extraordinarily deft physical actor he is today) and, now wishing to be an aesthete, he had to catch up.

As he gained confidence onstage, so he gained it off-stage. He'd always been terrifically shy with those he didn't know. He'd found conversation with a stranger absolutely excruciating. That began to change. He graduated through bit-parts to the role of King Arthur in Camelot, for which he received his first standing ovation. Now he knew where his future lay and, in 1973, he took off for Los Angeles, enrolling at the California Institute of Arts and, in 1975, graduating with a BA in Fine Arts.

In the meantime, he'd worked as a housepainter and lived in the Sierra Madres, renting the side part of a garage for $25 a month (he was actually evicted for non-payment of rent - a level of poverty he cannot quite believe today). He took what stage parts he could, always working, always trying to improve. Ed's very vocal when it comes to actors complaining about not getting film roles. "You do theatre!" he told The Journal "You don't spend all your time worrying about TV auditions or getting new glossies of yourself. You wanna act? Act! It's not just a job, it's part of my life". He did A Streetcar Named Desire and The Grapes Of Wrath. And he auditioned for film and TV parts, over and over and over again. Finally, he got a part in a TV movie called Gibbsville, starring John Savage and Gig Young and based on a John O'Hara story. Harris remembers weeping in his car on the way home from the audition, "after years of horrible interviews where casting directors treat you like dirt".

After several very minor roles, Ed scored a part in the TV series The Seekers, where the Kent family tried to make a life for themselves in America. The show featured George Hamilton and a very young Eric Stoltz as First Boy, Ed himself playing Lieutenant William Clark. After this came an abominable precursor to Independence Day, called The Aliens Are Coming, and then Borderline, a fairly lame Charles Bronson vehicle wherein Ed played a killer named Hotchkiss. He could also be unpleasant in real life, admitting that he used to drink "a lot of beer" and get into bar brawls.

Now things began to change. Ed had excelled as King Arthur back in Oklahoma. Now he took on the role again, this time riding a motorbike in George Romero's Knightriders. At the time, Romero was notorious for the first two parts of the zombie trilogy beginning with Night Of the Living Dead. Now he was branching out and Knightriders, concerning a troupe of modern-day jousters battling to keep their honour intact, was his first departure from horror. As the troupe's troubled leader, King Billy, Ed was tremendous, impressing Romero so much he included him in his next project, Creepshow, involving adaptations of several Stephen King stories. There would be more King ten or so years later.

By now, Harris had met his future wife, Amy Madigan, when they were both appearing in Prairie Avenue, in Los Angeles, 1981(for which Harris would receive an LA Drama Critics Circle Award). Madigan, a rock musician turned actress, was also just breaking into films. She'd appear in many of Harris's later movies and, in her own right, would star in Field Of Dreams and Uncle Buck, even being Oscar-nominated in 1985 (before her husband!) for Twice In A Lifetime. After dating for two years, the couple would marry in Waxahachie, Texas, while they were both filming Places In The Heart.

1983 was a big year for Ed Harris. Aside from the wedding, he appeared alongside Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as a mercenary in 1979 Nicaragua in Under Fire. Then he played one of America's greatest modern heroes, John Glenn, in The Right Stuff, the super-macho tale of the Mercury 7 space programme, based on the work of Tom Wolfe. Tellingly, Harris portrayed the squeaky-clean Glenn as a man dedicated to the point of madness. Co-starring in the movie was Sam Shepard and Harris would make his New York stage debut as a desert drifter in Shepard's Fool For Love, for which he'd win the 1983 Obie. Harris has been cited for most of his theatre appearances since. He'd get a San Francisco Critics Award for Scar in 1985, then a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut in George Furth's Precious Sons, a year later.

After The Right Stuff, Harris was the critics' darling. He even made the cover of Newsweek. But his movies were not making big money, causing him to comment that "To be in a film that's in theatres for more than two weeks would be a milestone". Throughout the Eighties, a painful pattern emerged. When Harris starred, the film did not succeed. Take Louis Malle's Alamo Bay, where he played a bigoted Texan war vet suffering the sight of Vietnamese immigrants moving into his community. What about Alex Cox's weird, brilliant Walker, where Ed returned to Nicaragua, this time as American mercenary William Walker, who marched in and declared himself President in the mid-1800s. Or A Flash Of Green, where he played a journalist struggling with his ethics. No winners there.

When he supported, though, it was a triumph, if not necessarily a financial triumph - the Oscars certainly came flying. In Places In The Heart, where Sally Field starred as a Southern widow running a cotton farm during the Depression with a crazily varied bunch of workers, including Danny Glover and John Malkovich. Harris was terrific as the philandering husband of Field's sister, Lindsay Crouse, who was Oscar-nominated (along with Malkovich), Field herself actually winning for Best Actress. Also up that year was Christine Lahti, for her part co-starring with Harris in the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell vehicle Swing Shift. The next year, it was Jessica Lange who was nominated, for her performance as Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams, Ed playing her husband Charlie Dick. Come to think of it, it's no WONDER they wanted Harris in The Hours - a girl just has to stand next to the guy to find herself up for an Oscar!

As the Eighties approached, the parts grew more consistent. In Jacknife, he was excellent as a troubled veteran troubled even more when his sister (Kathy Bates) begins to date fellow vet Robert De Niro. For this he was Golden Globe-nominated. Now came a horror-shoot, James Cameron's The Abyss. Here Harris played a civilian drilling expert who's called in to help locate a downed nuclear sub and also finds, well, let's just say it's WEIRD down there. Much of the actors' time was spent in huge tanks of water, with Cameron driving them ever harder to achieve maximum effects. Once, the usually calm Harris exploded. "Jim was asking us to do life-threatening things in that tank and then calling us cry-babies when we complained" he recalled. Reports claimed that Harris actually slugged the director.

The Nineties brought a great run of roles. First, he was Frankie Flannery, leader of the Irish Mob in Hell's Kitchen in the magnificent State Of Grace. The three younger leads - Sean Penn, Gary Oldman and Robin Wright - were tremendous, but they still couldn't touch Harris. He was violent, merciless, manipulative, but also a little bit dumb and kind of nice, really. That contradiction again. Next, Ed was the lawyer falling for the wife of mad southern bigot Dennis Hopper in Paris Trout.

Then there was China Moon, where Harris played a detective tricked and used by the stunning Madeleine Stowe. Then he stood out in David Mamet's harsh ensemble piece Glengarry Glen Ross, as the beleaguered real estate agent who plots to get back at the cruel boss. On he went, playing a double-dealing FBI agent in the Tom Cruise vehicle The Firm. Now came that return to Stephen King, when he was Sheriff Alan Pangborn, trying to maintain law and order while spooky shopkeeper Max Von Sydow spread terrible chaos in Needful Things. And there was yet more King with The Stand. Here he appeared very, very briefly, right at the beginning, as a general who blows his brains out when he fails to control an airborne bug. And, naturally, it's the most moving moment in the whole miniseries.

After the fairly pitiful Milk Money, where he played a decent widowed guy set up by his kids with prostitute Melanie Griffith (he actually had a real kid of his own by this time, Lily Dolores), there came that scintillating show in Just Cause, where he blew Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne off the screen. No easy task. Now he really took off. As Gene Kranz, leading Mission Control in Apollo 13 and generating maximum emotion when it looks like Tom Hanks and the guys aren't going to make it home, he added a dimension to the movie that it absolutely needed. Said director Ron Howard of Harris: "It's what a Duvall or a De Niro brings. He's always truthful and interesting, never bland or fake, he rides that line. There's just an integrity you trust". The Academy agreed, nominating him for the first time.

On he went. He was great as co-conspirator E. Howard Hunt in Oliver Stone's Nixon. Even better as Brigadier General Francis X. Hummel in The Rock. Here he led a squad of mercenaries onto Alcatraz, kidnapping 81 people and threatening to fire nerve gas missiles at San Francisco unless the government paid $100 million to the families of soldiers killed in covert action. This was a near-perfect Harris role - he's doing a terrible thing for a thoroughly justifiable reason. Next came a TV version of Zane Grey's Riders Of The Purple Sage, co-starring wife Madigan, that many viewers voted the best TV Western ever. Then came an artistic down-point - Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power. Alongside Gene Hackman and Judy Davis, Ed boosted an extraordinary ensemble cast. But, for the first time, Eastwood was too old for his part and, well, the movie stank.

Harris regained the heights immediately with Peter Weir's The Truman Show. Here he played TV super-producer Christof who creates a 24-hour soap opera around one man who, unbeknownst to him, was born and has lived his whole life on a huge studio-set, surrounded by actors. Again, a perfect Harris role. Christof's show is cruel and inhuman, yet he also feels like a father to poor Jim Carrey. Strangely, he never met Carrey onset. Indeed, Carrey had finished filming before Harris ever arrived - Ed being a late replacement for Dennis Hopper. Once again, he was Oscar-nominated. This time he won the Golden Globe.

After this, came Stepmom. A guy's ex-wife is dying and has to forge a relationship with his new girlfriend so she can pass away knowing the new girl will look after the kids. A tricky one for the producers. Whoever plays the guy has to be so decent, so likeable that we don't hate him for abandoning the sick Susan Sarandon. We have to know that, though their relationship has broken down, he will do the right thing by everyone involved, and he deserves to find love with Julia Roberts. Really, it HAD to be Ed Harris. He's the Nabob of Unselfishness, the King of Kind.

Now - because he's an artist - came a few lower budget efforts. In The Third Miracle, he was a priest investigating the life of a woman up for sainthood (a priest questioning his own faith, of course). He played a big-shot politico in Waking The Dead, alongside Jennifer Connelly, soon to be his co-star in A Beautiful Mind. And then he was a kind of con-man guru in The Prime Gig, with Vince Vaughn as the new kid on the block.

Then came the Big One, Pollock. Ever since his dad gave him a Jackson Pollock biography for his birthday in 1986, Ed had been fascinated by the notorious abstract impressionist. He'd had a script knocking around for the best part of a decade. Now he decided to go for it. And, it being Hollywood, there were no takers. None, that is, till the producers of Basquiat (the tale of a later New York artist) stepped in. They stumped up some money and Ed, keen not to compromise his vision for lack of funds, put in the rest. Ed both directed and starred as Pollock, as the movie followed him from desperate alcoholism, through the discovery of his style, on to fabulous success, then back into alcoholism and his final death in a car crash. Madigan played heiress Peggy Guggenheim, from whose gallery Pollock's work was launched. Marcia Gay Harden, who in 1995 had co-starred with Ed in a stage production of Sam Shepard's Simpatico, played Lee Krasner, a fellow artist who married Pollock and built his career. Harris was Oscar-nominated as Best Actor - quite rightly as he was brilliant AND he did his own painting - while Harden won as Best Supporting Actress. It was a happier occasion than the ceremony of the year before, when Elia Kazan received a special Oscar. Many gave him a standing ovation, but many others, due to Kazan's co-operation with the anti-Communist witch-hunters of the Fifties, did not rise or applaud. Those who did not included Ed and his earlier co-star Nick Nolte. "I didn't stand up," explained Harris "because he hurt a lot of people".

Pollock was an artistic triumph, absolute proof that mega-jock Harris had entirely reinvented himself. But the project left him needing money, so he took on Enemy At The Gates, where he was super-sniper Major Konig, playing deadly cat and mouse with Jude Law amidst the frozen ruins of Stalingrad. Then came the military comedy Buffalo Soldiers, where he appeared alongside the excellent Joaquin Phoenix (himself a Harris in the making). And then, before The Hours, came the surprise $100 million hit A Beautiful Mind, with Harris backing up schizophrenic, Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Russell Crowe and, naturally, egging him (and Connelly) on to yet another Oscar-nomination.

Whatever comes next, we can expect it to be good. Harris spends time not spent working at his low-ceilinged Malibu ranch-house. And even then, he's probably working on the house. What makes him so good, so memorable, is that he hates things to be shoddy and will work his butt off and, as in the case of Pollock, invest all his money in order to make sure everything is right. As a rule, other great actors do not so this. As a tradition, other great artists do.

Dominic Wills