An Evening With Ed Harris

70 Minute Running Time

Why did Ed Harris become an actor? Because he could never hit a curve ball.

Just as well. For almost three decades, the blue-eyed former baseball player from Tenafly, New Jersey, has been a fascinating presence onstage and in films – a four-time Academy Award nominee whose carefully chosen roles have measured the restless pulse of America itself.

In the 1983 performance that made him famous, Harris captured the strength, ambition, and rectitude – that is, The Right Stuff, – of astronaut John Glenn. Seventeen years later, he directed and starred in Pollock, a remarkably detailed portrait of a great painter in all his seething genius. In between, he ranged from the jealous, hard-drinking husband of Jessica Lange’s rising country singer, Patsy Cline, in Sweet Dreams, (1985) to an AIDS-stricken writer struggling with his troubled past in The Hours (2002). Playing a shadowy intelligence officer opposite Russell Crowe in 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, Harris brought flesh and blood to a character who is, it turns out, a hallucination. And while the cast of desperate real estate salesmen in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) included Hollywood heavyweights like Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, and Alan Arkin, Harris emerged as a memorably odious participant in the capitalist bloodshed.

But that’s hardly all. He’s shown the same dedication to his craft in more than fifty movie roles, some of them seemingly unlikely for an actor often cast as an American Everyman. In Agniezka Holland’s Copying Beethoven (2006), Harris portrayed the eponymous German composer in the throes of composing his Ninth Symphony. David Cronenberg’s 2005 thriller A History of Violence shows him plumbing the depths of menace: visiting a quiet Indiana town, his wise-cracking Carl Fogarty terrorizes the repentant criminal-turned-family man played by Viggo Mortensen.

Instinct and integrity are the keys to his long career. When, at the 1999 Academy Awards, Harris refused to applaud director Elia Kazan’s Lifetime Achievement Award because Kazan had named names during Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch hunts, no one was surprised. And when it comes to his own achievement over the course of a lifetime, the actor has always applied one standard, as he told an interviewer: “I chose films being made by people I wanted to work with, about subject matter I thought was intriguing.”

Call it versatility. Call it art. Call it courage. In Ed Harris’s meticulous and heartfelt work, the right stuff endures.

-- Bill Gallo