Venice Review: Adrian Sibley’s ‘The Ghost Of Richard Harris’

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Though it sets out on a ghost hunt, Adrian Sibley’s fitfully fascinating documentary works better as an exploration of its subject’s public and private personas, charting Richard Harris’ rise from local sports star to screen legend via an unexpected heyday as a chart-topping pop star in 1968.

Rather than start with a séance, however, The Ghost of Richard Harris, screening in the Classics section of the Venice Film Festival, opens with the more prosaic sight of the actor’s three sons — Damien, Jared and Jamie — going through their late mother’s lock-up, where they find journals full of poetry, King Arthur’s crown (a prop from 1967’s Camelot) and trinkets from the Harry Potter franchise, in which their father played Dumbledore until his death in 2002, aged 72.

This set-up proves to be somewhat self-defeating, as the three middle-aged men, while reminiscing, then admit that they were packed away to boarding school for some two-thirds of their childhoods — pretty much the exact periods when Harris was at the peak of his artistry and in the prime of his hell-raising (a term coined by British tabloids almost exclusively for Harris and his drinking buddies Peter O’Toole and Oliver Reed).

Happily, though, this is not a family whitewash, and Sibley’s film is refreshingly gung-ho about Harris’ carousing: in interviews, the actor is heard to be unapologetic about his drinking, drug-taking and womanizing (with the now-familiar caveat that this was “a different time”), and he even claims that — for an artist — personal demons are actually a gift to be embraced for inspiration rather than sins to be cleansed.This, to be clear, is the public Richard Harris talking, the man who shot to fame after starring in Lindsay Anderson’s This