Harris, Ed

▪ American actor

in full  Edward Allen Harris 

born Nov. 28, 1950, Tenafly, N.J., U.S.

      American actor acclaimed for the intensity of his performances, most notably his portrayal of American painter Jackson Pollock (Pollock, Jackson) in Pollock (2000), a film he also directed.

      Harris attended Columbia University, where he played football for two years until he became interested in acting. He then studied at Oklahoma State University and appeared in a number of theatre performances before moving to California, where he graduated from the California Institute of the Arts (B.F.A., 1975). He performed in productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and The Grapes of Wrath and took small roles on a variety of television shows. In 1978 Harris made his film debut with a small part in Michael Crichton's Coma, but his first leading role came three years later in George A. Romero's Knightriders (1981), about a band of itinerant motorcycle jousters.

      Harris returned to New York to join the Circle Repertory Company, making his off-Broadway debut in 1983 in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love; he won an Obie Award for his performance. That same year he achieved broad recognition and critical praise for his role as astronaut John Glenn (Glenn, John H., Jr.) in The Right Stuff (1983), the story of the Mercury space program based on Tom Wolfe (Wolfe, Thomas)'s book of the same name. In 1986 Harris made his Broadway debut in George Firth's production of Precious Sons and was nominated for a Tony Award.

      Throughout the late 1980s and '90s, Harris worked primarily in film. He starred as a deep-sea drill operator in the science-fiction thriller The Abyss (1989), appeared alongside Tom Hanks (Hanks, Tom) as flight director Gene Kranz in Apollo 13 (1995; Academy Award nomination), and played U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon's aide E. Howard Hunt in Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995). In 1998 Harris starred in The Truman Show, for which he received an Academy Award for best supporting actor. Two years later he starred in and made his directorial debut with Pollock. His performance resulted in an Oscar nomination for best actor. Harris appeared in a number of critically acclaimed films in the 2000s, including A Beautiful Mind (2001), about the mathematician John F. Nash (Nash, John F., Jr.); The Hours (2002; Academy Award nomination), in which Harris played a writer dying of AIDS; and A History of Violence (2005), a film that portrayed a small-town family man attempting to escape his criminal past. His later movies include Gone Baby Gone (2007), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), and Appaloosa (2008), which he also directed.

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