"YOU'VE seen it then?" More accusation than question. "Well?" White-haired and bearded Richard Harris turns away, unfolds his long body across the sofa and stares at the ceiling as I sing his praises: the balance, the nuances, the shifts from tenderness to violence and back again. A beautiful performance, I say. The recumbent form listens impassively, making occasional grunting sounds of assent. Only when I mention Stephen Rea does he say anything ("wonderful actor")
At issue is Trojan Eddie, Billy Roche's contemporary tale of love and power set in the shady world of travellers, unknown to all but those who live there. Harris hasn't seen the film. Nor will he. Why not?
It started with Wrestling Ernest Hemingway, he explains. "I went to see it and I got so distressed. According to Robert Duvall, it's the best thing he ever did. According to Richard Harris it's one of the three best performances I've ever given." A performance not reflected in the finished cut, he decided. But the studio took no notice of his rantings.
"So I called Duvall and told him to fly up and help me. He said `No'. I was shocked. When I met him weeks or months later he told me why. `I know you very, very well. I've worked with you for 15 weeks. You're a perfectionist, you're meticulous and so am I. The worst thing we can do is go and see our work. Because we re not going to like it. We're going to get so upset and we're not going to win the battle. What I do is this. They pay me a lot of money and I give them my best. If they don't want to use my best, that's their problem. It's not mine any more. So, don't go to see your movies until you've got them out of your system, till you've made two or three movies in between and you can just look at it clinically and your emotions aren't involved.'"
Richard Harris fiddles with the zip on his jeans as if to confirm the flatness and firmness of his stomach - 65 going on 40. In spite of Duvall's assessment of his co-star's ability to take advice ("you're very wilful, you know your power and you've constructed your life and there's nobody can advise you"), Harris has followed it ever since. He has seen none of his recent films. Why just recently in New York he refused to attend a celebrity screening of The Hunchback. Angel or fool, arrogance clings to him like barnacles to a boat. In the case of rushes - raw footage that actors usually get to see once a week, and which he also refuses to watch - his advice has real artistic truth.
"When you're creating a part, you don't know what it looks like, or what it sounds like. Like Van Gogh. He didn't know what a painting would look like till it was finished. That's exactly what every actor should indulge in. I discovered Power [John Power, the Godfather-style boss of the tinkers in Trojan Eddie] as I was playing it. If an actor goes to the rushes, the mystery is solved the first time he sees it. It becomes absolute. And what does he do from then on? He impersonates the person he's seen on the screen. And it's dead. The best advice I can give an actor: don't go to rushes. Don't see it until it's finished."
If this performance in London's Savoy Hotel is anything to go by, late-1990s Harris confirms Duvall's description of the meticulous perfectionist. ("Tell them to hurry up with the cigarettes. I'm dying for a smoke. Where is my sugar? No not that. Sweet and Lo. You should have brought it with the tea.") Actors or directors who fail to share his enthusiasm or commitment are prime targets. He tells how in London in 1990, during rehearsals for his acclaimed production of Pirandello's Henry IV he sacked one director because he said the play bored him. ("He didn't get time to finish the sentence.") Then there was an actor in Hunchback. "Up all night, having cocktails, having wonderful fun, and in the morning he'd turn up 15 minutes late, not knowing his lines. I told him, `I'm not here to joke, I'm not here to socialise or party. I'm here because I love this project and love my part.' `So do I,' he said. So I said, `If you do then you wouldn't be doing what you're doing'."
Then creases on the Harris brow soften as he tells me about Brendan Gleeson, who plays his son Ginger in Trojan Eddie. "Every day he would come on the set with these little re-writes, and say `do you mind if I do this extra business' and I said `I love you for it'. He didn't get paid extra money because he came in with extra enthusiasm and extra lines. He was just trying to improve his part, trying to improve the picture. It was wonderfully exciting. They're the guys I love. But there are a lot of the other kind, fellows who just pick up the money from the table."
The kind of fellow Harris was himself in the 1970s, when his fellow actors' lives were made a misery by a star barely able to make it through the day. With the breeziness of the converted, Harris offers up past sins to the altar of the present.
"When I started my career I was obsessive. But in the mid-1970s I didn't want to do it anymore. I wasn't being offered what I wanted to do. And I just walked away from it. I just did crap. I didn't care. I didn't give a shit. Then in 1981, I was making a picture with Bo Derek, some Tarzan crap. And I had my diary I keep a meticulous diary - and I had written `44 days left' on the first day of the shoot. I looked at this and thought, this is not the way to live your life Richard, counting the days till this thing is over. When I am lying on my bed and the priest is there anointing me and hearing my last confession I would want those 44 days back."
So he got out. Bought the rights to the stage production of Camelot and travelled the world for the best part of eight years producing, directing, starring, hiring, firing and making lots of money. It is said that the tour grossed £92 million.
BUT the seeds of disillusion and dissolution had been sown back in 1963 with the Academy Award nomination for This Sporting Life, and achieved full bloom in 1967 with the Oscar for Camelot. The miller's son from Limerick had the lot. Except Hamlet
"I should have done it. I would have been great. I have no doubt about it at all. It sounds terribly arrogant. I don't mean to be arrogant but I'm bursting with over confidence and I feel it would have been the Hamlet of the 1960s." He was asked to do it "three or four times". Why did he say no? Fear? Richard Harris nearly chokes on his tea and gives me the look he gave the room- service girl earlier. A withering mix of disdain and contempt.
"Not At All. I turned it down because it was going to take up too much of my time. My drinking time. And having good fun. I thought there's time enough for all that. I wanted to enjoy my life. I wanted to savour it. To get out and enjoy it." Does he regret it? "It is the only regret I have in my life. Not having done it. But I have no regret what I did in its place. Is that Irish, or isn't it Irish?" He waves the tea cup in the air with a flourish.
Richard Harris revels in his Irishness, both real and perceived. ("It's exceedingly chic to be Irish at the moment. We have four Nobel Laureates, do you know.") His contempt for the English never lets up. He recounts how he was treated in the early days by London's drama schools.
"I bullied my way into LAMDA. That was the 1950s. We were regarded as navvies - uneducated, bog throttling navvies. I proudly say it, I was part of the change. Me and O'Toole. I think we did an awful lot from the 1950s through the 1960s to the 1970s, to kick the door open and let the rest come in." And not only through the medium of film.
"I was the first Irishman to have a No 1 album. Not U2, not Sinead O'Connor. Richard Harris from Limerick. So people said, Jesus, Harris can do it, O'Toole can do it, now U2. We are as good as those guys across the sea. We are as good as those who emigrated and were educated at Harvard. And that's what's so exciting. Ireland is a nation that has finally broken through this sense of inferiority and we've discovered that we are as good as some and better than most."
When I suggest that the Harris" hell-raising did little to rebuff this Irish stereotype, the breakerdown-of-doors quivers with rage. What do I mean by that? What about Richard Burton and Peter Finch, he says, his finger jabbing, like an electric drill. No one categorised them as Irish. But Burton was Welsh and Finch Australian, I say. For a moment he is nonplussed.
"I refuse to be caricatured by these people. I was an English actor when I was winning awards. I was an Irish pugilist when I was getting drunk in the street." The anger has gone. Though as unpredictable as summer thunder, he's just as harmless.
BUT nothing in the past excites him like the future. And he leans forward, his long fingers making steeples, never still. Take his new film with Nikita Mikhalkov, The Barber Of Siberia. ("The man's a genius. The greatest director in the world.")
He only takes on projects now that inspire him. He tells me he did Trojan Eddie for a quarter of what he was offered for A Time To Kill. Now there's talk of filming Brian Friel's Dancing At Lughnasa.
"It's beautiful, it's sad and poetic and it's got nothing, to do with the Troubles and that's marvellous. Hollywood and the world should know that Ireland doesn't only make films about Michael Collins." He's not the only one interested and he rolls off the names: Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Glenn Close. Not to mention Gregory Peck, for Harris's own part, the priest. The famous blue eyes open wide at the horror of it. "If they were in it I wouldn't do it." For director he's pushing for Gillies MacKinnon, director of Trojan Eddie: "because he's Celtic, because he understands the Celts, he understands those lonely women".
He saw the play six or seven times. Like many actors, the theatre still has him in its thrall. His own plans include Lear and The Merchant Of Venice, which we had discussed at the beginning of the interview.
"They're going to be vastly different. I see no point in churning out the same old thing. We've got to stop genuflecting at the altar of Shakespeare. Stratford, for instance. It's like an assembly line. When I did the Pirandello I found I wanted to say something about acting, I wanted to say something about people in our profession, in our art, who are exposed to the public, about how personalities keep changing. The Pirandello was all about the reinvention of ourselves and the masks we continually change when we are confronted by different situations, the masks that we wear every single day. I'm wearing one now probably talking to you. I'm sussing you out to find out what kind of interview this is going to be and I'm waiting to see the attitude, i.e. the personality, i.e. the mask I'm going to adopt for the next hour. You probably have thought about that coming in here too. We can't help it. That's what we are."