RICHARD HARRIS RESURFACES

In his 60 years on Earth, Richard Harris has been written off as a hopeless case more than once. An actor of unquestionable gifts, he’s widely regarded as someone who squandered his career in riotous bouts of drinking and a slew of rotten movies.

So when he announced plans to return to the stage in a serious drama after 26 years, bringing Pirandello’s madman Henry IV to the West End after out-of-town tryouts, the gossip vultures gathered in waiting.

Word from out of town gave them plenty to salivate over. From the start, “Henry IV” was a troubled production; Harris, inevitably, was at the epicenter of the tempest.

As a self-styled amateur Pirandello scholar, he held strong views on how the play should be mounted, which did not mesh with those around him.

Leading lady Sarah Miles quit in a glare of publicity, but that was only part of it. By the time of her withdrawal, three directors and two designers had already departed from the production, and the cast was working with a third translation of the text. Richard Harris, it appeared, was living up to a well-established reputation as a hell-raiser.

“I had approval of everything, including the set,” says Harris. “But meetings between me and the designer which were supposed to take place never did. There were various submissions of design ideas that I never received.”

When Harris finally saw the set and rejected it, he was told it could not be changed before the tour opened.

“There came a moment when we had to make decisions--painful decisions,” recalls Harris. “Finally, when we were playing Guildford (a commuter town southwest of London), I told the producer, Duncan Weldon, ‘That’s it. It’s over. This production won’t last. It’s not good enough for the West End. It’s insulting to Pirandello. I’m only doing this because I love the play, not because I need the job.’ ”

Harris would now produce the play himself, changing it as he wanted. Weldon quickly calculated it needed an extra 200,000 to upgrade “Henry IV” to Harris’ specifications.

“He then said he would like to go along with me, and he’d put up the extra money,” says Harris. “He was so honorable about it that I thought I’d put my money where my heart was, and threw in 100,000--which he didn’t ask me for. It doesn’t make me a manager, but I’m an investor.”

Val May, the artistic director of Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, was hired, as well as new set, lighting and costume designers; they worked day and night for three weeks to prepare for the play’s West End opening. May admits he had doubts about stepping in as director.

“I felt--why involve myself in something that seems to be in such difficulty?” he said. “The reason I did say yes was mainly because of Richard’s performance. I felt it would be dreadful if that went to waste. If I had not come on board, I think the production might not have gone on. They may have pulled the plug.”

The show’s eventual first night was the fourth one scheduled--and Wyndham’s Theatre was the third London venue into which “Henry IV” was booked. The gossip vultures looked to be in for a field day.

Backstage on opening night, minutes before his first entrance, Harris neatly divulged his state of mind by throwing up noisily. But, then, much depended on this performance. “We desperately needed the reviews,” he says now. Indeed: Advance sales for “Henry IV” were the lowest in the Wyndham’s 90-year history. “People either thought it wouldn’t open, or if it did, it would be a catastrophe,” said Harris.

But, by curtain call, he knew the production had been pulled out of the fire. “There seemed to be a great joy and relief in the audience that we’d done it,” he says.

Instead of becoming dead meat for the gossip vultures to pick from its bones, “Henry IV” turned out a triumph. Of 25 London theater critics, 23 gave the production rave reviews. Its run has been extended until September. Implausibly, Richard Harris is the current toast of West End theater.

Now Harris sprawls in a track suit in his Savoy Hotel suite, savoring his success. “I’m thrilled,” he says. “I think this is the result of real persistence. I believe once your instincts dictate that what you’re doing is right, you’ve got to go with it. Even if . . . ,” and he leans forward, dropping his voice conspiratorially, “everybody else is against it.”

At 60, Harris’ face--once described as looking like five miles of bad Irish road--tells its own story. Craggy, haggard and beaten, the wildly fluctuating fortunes of its owner seem etched in its lines. But his blue eyes, from behind steel-rimmed glasses, can blaze with impatience or passion, and occasionally dart a sly sideways glance to check that a listener has picked up the humor in a throwaway aside.

Like many other Irishmen, Harris talks well and at great length. He speaks of past exploits--affairs, fights, drinking, two broken marriages--as “a fine madness,” a phrase that might make a good title for his autobiography.

Maybe it’s more than coincidence, then, that madness should be the theme of Pirandello’s “Henry IV.” The central character is a wealthy man in 1920s Italy, who, while playing the medieval emperor Henry IV in a local pageant, was thrown from his horse and hit his head on a rock; on reviving, he really believed he was Henry. For years he was humored in his delusion, being surrounded by servants in medieval costume. On regaining sanity, he chose to maintain the pretense of madness.

He is visited in his kingly asylum by a Marchesa, whom he once loved; his rival for her, who caused his fall from the horse; and a psychiatrist, bent on jolting him from madness.

But is Henry IV mad or sane? It’s a question that has been posed not infrequently about Harris, but Pirandello uses his character’s self-imposed predicament as a starting point to examine role-playing and identity, reality and illusion.

The role has haunted Harris ever since he saw legendary Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir play it in Dublin in 1949. It was his first trip to the big city. “It may be because of that night that I decided to become an actor.”

He nearly did “Henry IV” in London in 1964, but Albert Finney was doing it in Glasgow, with a view to bringing it south. “Finney and (Peter) O’Toole were the two big roaring giants at the time, and I didn’t want to go up against Finney. So instead I did Gogol’s ‘Diary of a Madman.’ ”

By then, he’d been named best actor at Cannes for “This Sporting Life.” His reputation as a wild-eyed slice of trouble was already intact. He fell out with Antonioni on “The Red Desert,” and refused to hit the deck when Marlon Brando punched him too weakly for a scene in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

His first wife Elizabeth bore him three sons, but his brawling and infidelity doomed the union. Harris had another movie hit in “Camelot” and enjoyed a pop career, having a worldwide hit with Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.”

But in the 1970s, decline set in. One could program a weeklong Bad Movie Festival around his less judicious film choices: “Orca,” “Tarzan, the Ape Man,” “The Wild Geese,” “The Return of a Man Called Horse.”

“I drifted,” says Harris eloquently, “from one piece of crap to another.”

A decade ago, things started to change, in part because he had become very rich. For a supposedly wild man, he guarded his money well and invested shrewdly in Southern California property. Touring with “Camelot” for six years made money too. “Never disliked a performance,” he says disarmingly.

He now cast off from his life those elements that were hard to handle. Marriage went first: He divorced his second wife, actress Ann Turkel, in 1981. They remain friendly, but their marriage had been no more successful than his first.

Next, booze: On Aug. 11, 1982, he sat down at Washington’s Jockey Club and drank two bottles of their best Chateau Margaux 1957. He has not touched alcohol since. Doctors warned that he was becoming diabetic, and he is hypoglycemic. A neat phalanx of vitamin bottles in his suite testifies to a surprising sense of self-preservation.

Movies bit the dust too. He knows the exact day when he decided to quit. “I was in Sri Lanka in 1981 with Bo Derek and John Derek, doing ‘Tarzan.’ I got home to my room after the first day’s shooting, and wrote in my diary: 44 days left. And I started thinking to myself--why should I be wishing 44 days of my life away? That was it, right there.”

Except that it wasn’t. Earlier this year he came out of retirement to take the lead in “The Field,” directed by fellow-Irishman Jim Sheridan (“My Left Foot.”) “It’s a great movie!” roars Harris, his voice filling the suite. “It’s ‘King Lear’ only in different circumstances. It’s monumental!”

“The Field,” which debuts in the United States at the New York Film Festival in October, is about a patriarchal Irish peasant (Harris) who rents a barren field from his widow neighbor, tends it and turns it into a green pasture. Because of unspecified bad blood between them, she offers it for sale at a price beyond his means. When a visiting American (Tom Berenger) buys the field despite warnings, tragic consequences develop.

“It’s about everything,” says Harris. “Possession, land, inheritance, nationality, politics.”

But Harris wouldn’t be Harris if he hadn’t squabbled with Sheridan about the editing of “The Field.” “We went through it scene by scene, and I advised him to make about six major changes,” says Harris. “I think he made them all except one. I told him he was an extraordinary man who’d been asking advice from ordinary people. So he’d have an ordinary film.”

Does this mark the start of the second phase of his film career?

“That’s what my agent at CAA, Marty Baum, asked,” says Harris. “I’d been with Marty for years, then I didn’t have an agent, then he asked (if) he could represent me again. I said, ‘Fine, as long as you understand the rules of the game.’ Those are: I don’t want a movie career. I’m rich enough never to have to work again. So I’ll only do something really interesting. Like ‘The Field.’ I certainly don’t want a career like Michael Caine. Four movies a year? It wouldn’t make my life work.”

Theater will, apparently. “Henry IV” is scheduled to open on Broadway around February. And then? “I’ve been asked to go to Stratford to do any two major parts for the Royal Shakespeare Company,” says Harris. “But I’m not sure I want to commit to the 18 months that would take. I’d prefer to do it myself. I’ll do ‘Lear’ or ‘Macbeth’ next year, I think. I’m going to make up for lost time.”

He has only one regret in life, one which had nothing to do with past excesses: “I never did get to play Hamlet. I suppose I’m too old. But am I? Hamlet’s not about age, anyway. Val May (director of “Henry IV”) says I should go down to Guildford and do Hamlet very quietly. I just might.”

These days his life is circumscribed by taxes. He flits between New York, London, Ireland and his primary home in the tax haven of the Bahamas, spending as long as he can in each without being taxed as a resident. “I count my days meticulously,” he says.

Harris feels he’s somehow arrived at his life’s best period. “I’ve eliminated sources of aggravation from my life,” he says. “Very rarely do I go off in a real temper. I mean, why bother with all the rows? You just have to enjoy the madness.”

He reflects on having emerged in the 1960s: “There was a feeling none of us would last--that it was just a fine madness, an explosion of talented people who would probably burn out. But take a look--Rod Stewart’s still around, the Rolling Stones, the fragmented Beatles. David Bailey. And the actors. O’Toole’s still there, Finney, Alan Bates. And me.”

His eyes suddenly blaze. “That’s because we were men of steel!” he roars. “We decided our own destinies!”