Trivia: Though he once declared, "I hate movies. They're a waste of time," Irish actor Richard Harris built a film career that lasted six decades and withstood a long fallow period in the 1970s and '80s. Often as famous for his offscreen exploits as his acting, Harris nevertheless was lauded for charismatic performances ranging from the tough, inarticulate rugby player in This Sporting Life (1963) to the wry bounty hunter in Unforgiven (1992) and the contemplative emperor in Gladiator (2000). After winning over a new generation of fans with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harris passed away in 2002.Born in Limerick, Ireland, Harris was the fifth of nine children. More interested in sports than art, Harris became a top rugby player in his teens. His sports career, however, ended after he came down with tuberculosis at age 19. Bed-ridden for two years, Harris read voraciously to pass the time. Calling his illness the "luckiest thing that ever happened to me," Harris was inspired by his volumes of Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas to pursue a creative profession. Harris left Ireland to study in London, signing up for acting at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in 1956 after he failed to find good classes in directing; he also joined the more experimental Theatre Workshop. Harris made his professional stage debut in The Quare Fellow in 1956, earning praise from Method guru Lee Strasberg. Spending the next few years on the stage, Harris appeared in Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge and became a theater star with his turn as a drunken Dublin student in The Ginger Man (1959). Branching out to the screen, Harris appeared in the British TV movie The Iron Harp (1958), winning a contract with Associated British Pictures Corp. that lead to his feature debut in Alive and Kicking (1959). Playing Irishmen, Harris appeared alongside Hollywood heavyweights James Cagney in the IRA drama Shake Hands With the Devil (1959), Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston in The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959), and Robert Mitchum in A Terrible Beauty (1960). After switching accents to play an Australian pilot in the World War II epic The Guns of Navarone (1961), Harris held his own as one of Marlon Brando's mutineers in The Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).Confirming his status as one of the best of the new generation of British rebel actors that included Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, Harris became an international movie star with This Sporting Life. One of the gritty cycle of "kitchen sink" films, This Sporting Life starred Harris as a miner's son-turned-professional rugby player who achieves success on the field at the expense of his personal life. Along with showcasing Harris' physical prowess, his tough, sensitive performance evoked the tragic anguish of Brando at his 1950s peak. After winning the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Harris received his first Oscar nomination. Rather than be pigeonholed, though, Harris collaborated with This Sporting Life director Lindsay Anderson on the stage production The Diary of a Madman and co-starred as Monica Vitti's lover in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1964 study of upper-middle-class malaise, Red Desert. Harris then (appropriately) co-starred as Charlton Heston's nemesis in Sam Peckinpah's butchered-cavalry epic, Major Dundee (1965). Devoting himself full-time to movies by the mid-'60s, Harris appeared with Kirk Douglas in Anthony Mann's World War II yarn The Heroes of Telemark (1965), joined the cast of island epic Hawaii (1966), raised Cain in The Bible (1966), and co-starred with Doris Day as spies caught up in a mod web of intrigue and romance in Caprice (1967). In still another change of pace, Harris tried his hand at musicals and became a dashing King Arthur in the film version of Camelot (1967). He subsequently scored a hit single in 1968 with his version of "MacArthur Park." Always a fancier of the pubs, Harris descended into alcoholism after his first marriage ended in divorce in 1969. Rebounding professionally from the disappointing biopic Cromwell (1970) and the intermittently engaging The Molly Maguires (1970), Harris scored a box-office hit with the sleeper Western A Man Called Horse (1970). Starring Harris as a British aristocrat captured and then embraced by the Sioux after a then-notably gory initiation, A Man Called Horse found a large audience for its pro-Indian sympathies and macho rituals, spawning two less-popular sequels The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976) and Triumphs of a Man Called Horse (1983). Returning to his original career goals, Harris stepped behind the camera to direct and write, as well as star as an aging soccer player in, The Hero (1971). As the 1970s went on, however, Harris' well-publicized hell-raising with famous drinking buddies Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton became more entertaining than his movies. Summing up the period as "drifting from one piece of crap to another," Harris funded his offscreen antics with such works as The Deadly Trackers (1973), Ransom (1974), Orca: The Killer Whale (1977), The Ravagers (1979), and The Bloody Avengers (1980). The Wild Geese (1978), at least, featured Burton as Harris' onscreen co-star, while Juggernaut (1974) and The Cassandra Crossing (1976) were mildly engaging disaster thrillers. Plunging to his career low in the early '80s with his appearance as Bo Derek's father in the risible Tarzan, the Ape Man (1981), and experiencing personal lows with his divorce from second wife Ann Turkel and dire warnings about his health, Harris quit drinking and took a sabbatical from movies. He published the novel Honor Bound in 1982.Still, Harris continued to perform during the 1980s, reprising his role as King Arthur in the touring company of Camelot. After he showed that he still had his serious acting chops in a 1989 production of Pirandello's play Henry IV, Harris recovered his film actor credentials with The Field (1990). Though the film received a limited release, Harris' commanding performance as tenant farmer Bull McCabe earned the actor his second Oscar nomination. Harris was back for good with his lively turn as an IRA gunman in the summer blockbuster Patriot Games (1992) and his self-mythologizing bounty hunter English Bob in Clint Eastwood's Oscar-winning Western Unforgiven. Harris garnered still more positive reviews for his performances opposite Robert Duvall in the amiable character study Wrestling Ernest Hemingway (1993), and as a South African landowner in the remake of Cry, the Beloved Country (1995). Though his stint with Camelot had made him a fortune and he preferred hanging out at the local pub (imbibing his Guinness in moderation) to going Hollywood, Harris refused to retire as the 1990s went on, appearing in the adaptation of Smilla's Sense of Snow (1997) and To Walk With Lions (1999). Bringing a majestic gravitas to a cameo role, Harris earned Oscar buzz (though unfulfilled) for his Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator. Acquiescing to his granddaughter's wishes, Harris subsequently accepted another blockbuster project and agreed to play Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. After shooting the Potter movies, Harris delivered a final superb performance as a gangster King Lear in My Kingdom (2001). Though he predicted that he'd recover in time to begin the third Potter movie, Harris passed away from Hodgkin's disease in October 2002. He was survived by his three sons, actors Jared Harris and Jamie Harris, and director Damian Harris.

Trivia: A trained painter, Australian-born Rod Taylor switched to acting in his early twenties, toting up Australian stage credits before making his first Aussie film, The Stuart Exposition, in 1951. A villainous stint as Israel Hand in the 1954 Australian/U.S. production Long John Silver gave evidence that Taylor might be able to handle leading roles. However, he was still among the supporting ranks in his first American film, The Virgin Queen (1955). Signed to a nonexclusive contract by MGM in 1957, Taylor was cast in predominantly American roles, and accordingly managed to submerge his Australian accent in favor of a neutral "mid-Atlantic" cadence; even when playing an Englishman in 1960's The Time Machine, he spoke with barely a trace of a discernable accent. His film career peaked in the early to mid 1960s; during the same period he starred in the TV series Hong Kong (1961), the first of several weekly television stints (other series included Bearcats, The Oregon Trail, Masquerade and Outlaws). He was so long associated with Hollywood that, upon returning to Australia to appear in the 1977 film The Picture Show Man, Taylor was cast as an American. In his later career, Taylor thrived in character roles as ageing, but still virile, outdoorsmen, appearing in television shows like The Oregon Trail and Outlaws. He had recurring roles on Falcon Crest, Murder, She Wrote and Walker, Texas Ranger before mostly retiring from acting. In 2009, director Quentin Tarantino lured him out of retirement with the chance to play Winston Churchill in Inglourious Basterds. Taylor died in 2015, at age 84.

Trivia: Italian-American actor Al Lettieri also dabbled in playwrighting and directing during his years on stage. In films, Lettieri was generally typecast in blunt, gangsterish roles. One of his more prestigious assignments was the part of Sollolo in The Godfather (1972). Al Lettieri also served as producer of the 1971 Richard Burton melodrama Villain.

Trivia: The oldest child of an itinerant bridge builder, actor Neville Brand intended to make the military his career, and indeed spent ten years in uniform. During World War II, he became America's fourth most decorated soldier when he wiped out a German 50-caliber machine gun nest. He also decided that he'd seek out another line of work as soon as his hitch was up. Paying for acting classes with his GI Bill, he started his career off-Broadway. In 1949, he made his film debut in D.O.A., playing a psychotic hoodlum who delights in punching poisoned hero Edmond O'Brien in the stomach. Brand spent most of the early '50s at 20th Century Fox, a studio that surprisingly downplayed the actor's war record by shuttling him from one unstressed supporting role to another (though he's the principal villain in 1950's Where the Sidewalk Ends, he receives no screen credit). He fared far better on television, where he won the Sylvania Award for his portrayal of Huey Long in a 1958 telestaging of All the King's Men. Even better received was his portrayal of Al Capone on the TV series The Untouchables, a characterization he repeated in the 1961 theatrical feature The George Raft Story. In 1966, Brand briefly shed his bad-guy image to play the broadly hilarious role of bumbling Texas Ranger Reese Bennett on the TV Western series Laredo. His off-camera reputation for pugnacity and elbow-bending was tempered by his unswerving loyalty to his friends and his insatiable desire to better himself intellectually (his private library was one of the largest in Hollywood, boasting some 5000 titles). Fighting a losing battle against emphysema during his last years, Neville Brand died at the age of 70.

Trivia: Originally from South Carolina, actor Paul Benjamin made his film debut in 1969 as a bartender in Midnight Cowboy. After a small role in Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes, he did television work throughout the '70s. A few notable exceptions involved small parts in Gordon Parks' biopic Leadbelly and Don Siegel's prison film Escape From Alcatraz. He fared better on CBS in the TV adaptations I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gideon's Trumpet. He got his first major starring role in the HBO movie The Man Who Broke 1,000 Chains, based on the novel by Robert E. Burns. On the big screen during the '90s, Benjamin worked with some well-known directors. He appeared in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Robert Townsend's The Five Heartbeats, Bill Duke's Hoodlum, and John Singleton's Rosewood. On television, he appeared in the 1994 pilot episode of ER, which led to his recurring role of homeless man Al Ervin during the next few seasons. Benjamin also worked on the American Masters documentary of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ralph Ellison, which aired on PBS. After 2000, he appeared primarily in small independent films like Stanley's Gig, The Station Agent, Deacons for Defense, and James Hunter's 2004 drama Back in the Day.

Trivia: American actor Read Morgan chose his profession after two years at the University of Kentucky, where he starred on the basketball court. In 1950, Morgan went on a regular dietary and exercise regimen that earned him quite a few photo spreads in major American magazines like TV Guide. Thanks to his physique, Morgan was cast as an athletic mountaineer in the Broadway play Li'l Abner, which led to TV work in a similar vein: he played a wrestler on US Steel Hour, a ballplayer on Twilight Zone, a skindiver on Adventures in Paradise and a boxer on Steve Canyon. Thus it was that Morgan was more than prepared for the strenuous requirements of his role as cavalry sergeant Tasker on the Henry Fonda TV-western vehicle The Deputy (1960). Following the cancellation of this series, Read Morgan found himself on call for innumerable rugged character roles, usually as sheriffs, detectives or highway patrolmen. Among his many film credits were Fort Utah (1967), Easy Come, Easy Go (1968), Marlowe (1969), Dillinger (1971), The New Centurions (1972), Shanks (1967), and the made-for-TV movies Return of the Gunfighter (1967), Helter Skelter (1976), The Billion Dollar Threat (1979), Power (1980) and A Year in the Life (1986).

Trivia: Not to be confused with variety-show host Willie Bryant, American general purpose actor William Bryant kept busy in outdoors films. He was featured in such westerns as Ride Beyond Vengeance (1966), Heaven with a Gun (1969) and John Wayne's Chisum (1970). His additional non-western credits include Gable and Lombard (1976), Mountain Family Robinson (1977) (in a leading role) and Corvette Summer (1977). From 1976 through 1978, William Bryant costarred as Lieutenant Shilton on the Robert Wagner/Eddie Albert TV detective series Switch, and also appeared for a time as Lamont Corbin on the daytime serial General Hospital.

Trivia: Expert horseman Boyd "Red" Morgan entered films as a stunt man in 1937. Morgan was justifiably proud of his specialty: falling from a horse in the most convincingly bone-crushing manner possible. He doubled for several top western stars, including John Wayne and Wayne's protégé James Arness. He could also be seen in speaking roles in such films as The Amazing Transparent Man (1959), The Alamo (1960), True Grit (1968), The Wild Rovers (1969) and Rio Lobo (1970). According to one report, Boyd "Red" Morgan served as the model for the TV-commercial icon Mister Clean.

Trivia: The son of Mexican film legend Pedro Armendáriz, Pedro Armendáriz Jr. became a movie and television star in his own right, both in Mexico and abroad. Indeed, there are intriguing parallels between the careers of the two men: Both portrayed real-life Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa (Sr. in multiple films, Jr. in 1989's The Old Gringo), and both had supporting roles in James Bond movies (Sr. played 007's contact in Turkey in 1963's From Russia With Love, while Jr. played a corrupt politician in 1989's Licence to Kill).Armendáriz started acting in the '70s, mostly with bit parts in violent Westerns starring Anthony Quinn, John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. While he became a leading man in his native country, he was relegated to mostly walk-on roles in U.S. productions for a long time; while American audiences would probably best recognize him from Licence to Kill or The Old Gringo, he also had small roles in Before Night Falls(2000), The Mexican (2001), Original Sin (2001), and The Crime of Padre Amaro (2002). Back in Mexico, he finally received greater recognition for his acting with starring roles in the acclaimed films La Ley de Herodes (2000) and Su Alteza Serenisma (2001).Interestingly, Hollywood grew more interested in casting him in positions of power toward the end of his life, as he he played authority figures in such diverse films as Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003), the Will Ferrell comedy Casa de mi Padre (2012), and The Mask of Zorro (1998) and its sequel The Legend of Zorro (2005). Armendáriz died of eye cancer on December 26, 2011.