American actor Richard Harrison has died in Los Angeles aged 90, after a film career spanning more than 100 films that took him from small roles in Hollywood to leading roles in Italy and then to low-budget Asian action and ninja productions.
Harrison leaves his wife and three of his four children, as well as a body of work spread across film industries, countries and genres that is difficult to fit into the traditional career of a Hollywood star. One of the best-known ironies of his career was linked to a role he turned down in 1964, before it became one of the most prominent parts in the history of American westerns.
Harrison turned down the lead in A Fistful of Dollars
He was offered the lead in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, but declined it, later saying that he suggested Clint Eastwood for the part of the nameless stranger. Eastwood took the role that changed his career and made him an international star, while Harrison continued on a different path through international commercial cinema.
The episode was not simply a missed opportunity; it encapsulated the difference between an actor who returned from Europe to Hollywood to build a major career in acting and directing, and another who chose to keep moving through popular cinema outside the American centre. Harrison began working in Hollywood, but did not achieve there the stardom he found after moving to Europe.
When the film genres that had made him famous in Italy declined, he did not return to the United States to try to revive his career there. Instead, he moved towards Hong Kong and the Asian action-film industry, which was seeking foreign faces and producing films at a rapid pace. Harrison’s method of choosing some of his work was closer to deciding where to travel than to conventional career planning.
Producer Joan Borsten, a longtime friend, said he would first ask a producer where the film was being shot. If it was a country or location he had not visited before, he would accept the job and then begin reading the script on the plane. In her account, cinema was not only a route to fame for him, but also a means of discovering the world.
From sport to small Hollywood roles
Richard Harrison was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on 26 May 1936 and grew up in modest surroundings and a family atmosphere described as tense. He left his parents’ home while still a teenager, heading for California in search of a different life, and reached Hollywood when he was 17. Harrison did not begin acting through the theatre or school productions, but came from the world of sport and physical fitness.
He worked in gyms and appeared as a model in magazines aimed at people interested in athletes. His physique was his first entry into the world that would later give him leading roles in historical adventure films. Harrison did not settle for the limited roles his appearance could provide; he studied acting and began securing small opportunities.
Richard Harrison
American actor
- 1957
Film debut
He appeared in the 1957 film Kronos, then featured in Jeanne Eagels alongside Kim Novak. In 1958, he appeared in Too Much, Too Soon with Dorothy Malone, and also featured in South Pacific.
- 1962
Italian leading roles
Harrison found in that industry what Hollywood had not offered him. Instead of appearing for a few minutes alongside a bigger star, he became the lead, with his main breakthrough coming in The Invincible Gladiator in 1962. The physique that had helped him enter American cinema qualified him for leading roles in European productions.
- 1963
European western
In 1963, Harrison appeared in Duello Nel Texas/Gunfight in the Red Sands, an Italian-Spanish production scored by Ennio Morricone before his name became associated with the best-known Italian westerns. In this transformation, the actor who had carried a sword in imagined Roman worlds carried a gun in a European version of the American West.
- 1985
Hosting Oleg Vidov
In 1985, an episode entered Harrison’s life that seemed close to the spy films in which he had appeared. Soviet star Oleg Vidov, one of his country’s best-known actors, later known in the West as the “Russian Robert Redford”, refused an order to return to Moscow within 72 hours and fled from Yugoslavia to Austria with the help of an Austrian friend.
- 1986
Return to Los Angeles
The actor, who had spent much of his life moving between different countries and film industries, thus found himself hosting someone else who was midway through a search for a new country and a new life. Harrison returned to Los Angeles in 1986, about a quarter of a century after moving to Europe, and built a home there.
Harrison continued appearing in American productions, including the 1960 film Tall Story with Anthony Perkins. Despite the major names alongside whom he worked, his roles remained limited in scope. Hollywood allowed him access to the film industry without giving him the status he quickly gained after crossing the Atlantic.
Italian cinema gives him leading roles
In the early 1960s, Italian cinema was seeking stars suited to the wave of historical adventure films known as “sword-and-sandal”. Productions centred on muscular heroes achieved commercial success, and American actor Steve Reeves was one of their best-known faces, opening the way for actors with a similar physical presence.
That same year, Harrison made Avenger of the Seven Seas and Gladiator 7. These films followed a model centred on a strong hero moving through an ancient world amid power struggles, battles, historical costumes and straightforward adventures, and were aimed primarily at a thriving commercial market.
These productions were not necessarily the kind that would place their actors at the forefront of art-history books, but at that stage they gave Harrison a clear screen identity and a market that needed his qualities. He therefore did not return to the United States to try once again to climb Hollywood’s hierarchy, but stayed in Europe and adapted to the logic of the industry that had given him leading roles.
From gladiator to Italian western star
As the sword-and-sandal wave receded, Italian cinema was reshaping American westerns according to its own vision, in the genre later known as the “spaghetti western”. Harrison likewise moved from playing a gladiator to playing a cowboy, benefiting from an industry that reused its stars, sets and locations according to the genre in demand.
A year later came the opportunity to appear in A Fistful of Dollars, which could have rewritten his career completely, but he turned it down and suggested Eastwood for the role. Although Harrison continued working extensively, he remained within the field that had made him famous: low- and medium-budget European commercial cinema. He did not turn his success there into a lasting project to return to Hollywood from a stronger position.
Harrison’s fame in Italy reached a level at which he could not walk down the street without being recognised. This reflected a basic contradiction in his professional life: he did not become a major star in his own country, but in Italy he embodied the image of the American star, and his face appeared on film posters after he had left the industry where he began.
By the end of the 1970s, the European wave that had provided his roles had receded, and work opportunities began to decline.
His move to Hong Kong was his most adventurous professional transition. Once again, he turned towards a new industry rather than trying to recover his American beginnings, benefiting from Asian cinema’s demand for foreign actors in quickly produced action films. Over roughly a decade, Harrison appeared in a large number of low-budget ninja and action films.
His move from Hollywood to Rome, and then from gladiator films and westerns to Asian ninja productions, may appear to have been a continual retreat from the centre of the film industry by the traditional measures of an actor’s career. At the same time, however, it showed his ability to remain in the profession after the market that had created each previous phase had disappeared.
Harrison did not seek to establish a single artistic image for himself; he changed it whenever the country, film genre and market changed. By the end of his career, his filmography exceeded 100 films, most of them B films and low-budget productions. He also sometimes worked behind the camera, directing a number of projects alongside his acting.
Harrison and Eastwood had similar starting points: both were American actors who found in Italian cinema an opportunity they had not received at the beginning of their careers in the United States. Eastwood, however, used his European success to return to Hollywood and build one of the best-known American careers in acting and directing, while Harrison continued in the opposite direction, moving between popular film industries in different countries.
At the border, Vidov managed to cross into the West while the guards were distracted by watching a football match, so they did not check his passport closely. But his presence in Austria did not open a quick route to the United States. He was taken to Rome, where Harrison welcomed him into his home and gave him a temporary place to stay.
Vidov lived in Harrison’s home during a cautious period while contacts were being made to arrange his transfer to the United States. He later obtained his papers through the American embassy in Rome before arriving in Los Angeles in August 1985. At Harrison’s home, Vidov met American journalist Joan Borsten, who became his wife years later.
In his old age, a fire destroyed that home. His journey ended in the city where his career had begun, after he had made his principal fame away from it and left more than 100 films spanning historical adventures, European westerns and Asian action and ninja films.
