Ed Harris

Ed Harris (born November 28, 1950, Englewood, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American actor acclaimed for the intensity of his performances, most notably his portrayal of American painter Jackson Pollock 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 the University of Oklahoma and appeared in a number of theater 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 in 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 City 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 in The Right Stuff (1983), the story of the Mercury space program based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same name. In 1986 Harris made his Broadway debut in a production of George Furth’s Precious Sons and was nominated for a Tony Award.

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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 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 as a television producer in The Truman Show, for which he received a second Academy Award nomination 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; 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. He also headlined the cast of Empire Falls (2005), a television miniseries based on a novel by Richard Russo. His subsequent movies included Gone Baby Gone (2007), National Treasure: Book of Secrets (2007), and Appaloosa (2008), which he also directed.

In 2010 Harris reteamed with The Truman Show director Peter Weir in The Way Back, about a group of men who escape from a Siberian Gulag camp during World War II. He then appeared in the drama Virginia (2010), in the thriller Man on a Ledge (2012), and as Sen. John McCain in the HBO movie Game Change (2012), which dramatized the final months of the 2008 U.S. presidential race from the McCain campaign’s perspective. In the Cold War thriller Phantom (2013) Harris starred as a Soviet submarine captain suffering from hallucinatory seizures, and in the action caper Pain & Gain (2013) he portrayed a private investigator. Harris’s other films from 2013 included the sci-fi drama Gravity, in which he provided the voice of mission control, and Snowpiercer, a dystopian thriller in which he portrayed the inventor of a train carrying the last surviving humans. Harris then played a former sheriff whose wife is accidentally killed in the drama Frontera (2014) and a Brooklyn crime boss intent on eliminating a former henchman (Liam Neeson) in the action-packed Run All Night (2015).

Harris’s later notable credits included the HBO TV series Westworld (2016–22), a sci-fi thriller about a theme park featuring humanlike robots. He also starred in James Franco’s In Dubious Battle (2016), an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel about a farmworkers’ strike in the 1930s. In 2017 Harris appeared in Mother!—as a character simply called Man, who, with his wife, disrupts the solitude of a married couple living in a secluded mansion—and as the U.S. secretary of state in the science-fiction disaster movie Geostorm. In 2019 Harris returned to Broadway, portraying Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, an adaptation of Harper Lee’s acclaimed novel. He also appeared in the film The Last Full Measure (2019) as a Vietnam War survivor, and he played General George Patton in the World War II movie Resistance (2020).

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