Harris’ Search for an Elusive Exit : He intended his role in ‘The Field’ as a defiant farewell gesture, but it looks more like a rebirth of his acting career.

Richard Harris, whose performances as a life-battered rugby player in Lindsay Anderson’s “This Sporting Life” is an indelible cinematic memory, made “Tarzan, the Ape Man” with Bo Derek in 1981, a second sequel to “A Man Called Horse” in 1983, shot a minor Canadian-based melodrama, “Martin’s Day,” in 1984 and then assumed his film career was over.

“For five years my phone didn’t ring with a film offer. Nothing,” Harris said over cups of coffee last week in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel (where in his boisterous early career he was known for stronger beverages and from which he was banned for years).

“John (Derek) and Bo, I love them both, still,” Harris says. “But in my diary after the first day of a 44-day shoot, I wrote, ’43 days to go.’ ” It was a dark entry. After his years of sometimes riotous glory, “Tarzan” seemed like a slide toward nadir. “Sometime,” Harris remembers telling himself, “I’ll want those 44 days back.”

For more than five years, there were no film offers. “Nobody wanted me for anything.” For more than two years he did nothing, enjoying his home on Paradise Island in Nassau, a hideaway which, like John Huston’s in Mexico, is reached by no road but only from the sea. He worked on an autobiography, “Excuse Me While I Disappear,” which he is still pursuing, and another memoir, “People I Did and People I Didn’t,” rather more scandalous, which he dropped. “I realized that some of the women were now grandmothers.”

Then he followed Richard Burton into “Camelot” and toured it for 2,000 performances. It was prosperous but it seemed no more fitting an end than “Tarzan” to the fiery aspirations of the young actor he had been.

In 1989, his friend Noel Pearson, who had produced “My Left Foot,” mentioned the part of the priest, small but indelible, in “The Field,” the adaptation of a play which Jim Sheridan (who directed “My Left Foot”) and Pearson were going to do with Ray McAnally (“The Mission”) as its star.

Harris turned down the priest role. McAnally died while mowing his lawn. Harris, still sought for the priest while two other actors were considered for the lead, now read the script and saw Bull McCabe as a part that could be a farewell reminder to the world of Harris’ gifts as an actor.

“I began to research a part I hadn’t been cast in and hadn’t even been considered for,” Harris says. He grew a beard (now pure white); he spent time in the west of Ireland, pinning down the particular accent spoken there. He then begged Sheridan to come visit him.

Harris received Sheridan in a bathrobe and, as they spoke, began dressing himself as Bull McCabe and speaking in McCabe’s rural accents. “My God,” Harris says Sheridan said, “You must play the part.”

McCabe, a patriarchal figure in his village, has spent his life enriching a field he does not own but leases. He presumes that it will one day inevitably be sold to him. But the widow who has inherited it puts it at auction and the high bidder will inevitably be a rich American (Tom Berenger). The stage is set for a tragedy in which Harris finds echoes of “King Lear.”

“It’s in the first place a question of inheritance,” Harris says. “Lear had three daughters; Bull has one son. Like Lear, Bull has been slighted in front of his own people, a terrible thing, as Aristotle said among others. And then there is the love of land, the need for someplace to belong, someplace to be free. Think of Lithuania, think of Kuwait. It’s a complex movie which can be taken on simplistic terms if you want to.”

In Ireland, the film has outgrossed “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “My Left Foot.” “Amazing,” Harris says, “the Irish are very cynical toward films about themselves.”

Harris is receiving high praise for his performance, including a Golden Globe nomination and letters from fellow performers, as various as Mickey Rourke and Shirley MacLaine.

Meantime, Harris having decided that he did not want to be remembered as either the man called Horse or Arthur in “Camelot,” determined to retire--if retirement was to be his lot--with a dazzling stage exit too.

As a teen-ager, he remembered the other evening, he had hitchhiked with some of his mates from Limerick to Dublin to see a rugby match between Ireland and Scotland. “I had a free ticket and 2 shillings, 20 pence, and it was to be booze and girls as long as we could make it last.”

After the match, hunting the perfect pub, he passed the Gate theater where Luigi Pirandello’s “Henry IV” was playing. He abandoned his mates and blew his pence on a stratospheric gallery seat. But the experience persuaded him that acting was for him, and the play remained a kind of talisman for him.

He was found to have tuberculosis and spent three years in bed. When he was pronounced well, he hitched to Dublin with a thin nest egg of 21 pounds cash, sailed to Liverpool in steerage and hitched on to London to find a drama school that would have him.

RADA and the Central School wouldn’t have him; the London Academy of Music, Dance and Art did. From school, he fortuitously joined the late Joan Littlewood’s influential Theatre Royal in Stratford East.

“I still have her notes, from 1955-57. Even now, if I’m really stuck about something, I ask her, ‘What’ll I do?’ and she’ll tell me,” he says. Hearing Harris, you still feel the passion of the young actor. “It’s what drives you to sleep in doorways and ditches and scavenger for food and put your body through hell. And all because I saw Pirandello.”

What more fitting than that he should make his exit (presumably) in the life-changing Pirandello “Henry IV.” In mid-1990, after completing “The Field,” he opened in Pirandello’s brilliant examination of the shifting line between madness and sanity. His portrait of a contemporary man who for years has been acting out an elaborate pretense, helmeted guards and all, that he is really a 12th-Century German king drew ecstatic reviews. “The cynics said we’d be lucky to do 50 performances. We did 200 and we could’ve done 800, but under the Inland Revenue’s tax laws I can only stay in Britain 180 days a year.”

One visitor, he says, saw the performance 17 times and more people saw it two or three times than saw it just once. It was, indeed, a virtuoso display of dynamic fervor and steely restraint. It has restarted his stage career with a flurry.

Harris will bring “Henry IV” to Broadway this year, for a limited April-October run. At the end of the year he will do “Macbeth” for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, following it with “The Merchant of Venice” and the play he feels he’s been waiting a lifetime to do, “Lear.”

“I’ve got astonishing conceptions for both ‘Merchant’ and ‘Lear,’ ” Harris says, “hooks that will propose them in a new way.”

His sons are following him in the craft. Damian wrote and directed “The Rachel Papers,” a film based on the Martin Amis novel. He is just starting a new film with Goldie Hawn in a serious role. Another son, Jared, is rehearsing Hotspur in Shakespeare’s “Henry IV Part One” at Joe Papp’s Public Theatre in New York. His youngest son, Jamie, is studying acting.

“I did ‘Henry’ to say goodby,” Richard Harris says, “to go out on a note of dignity. But one of the critics said this actor could be the new carrier of our great tradition, or words to that outrageous effect. It was the same with ‘The Field’; I wanted to leave with dignity and grace, and an achievement. I hope I have.”