Known for his square jawline, handsome good looks and bodybuilder’s physique, actor Richard Harrison has passed away at age 90.
Throughout a career spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s, Harrison racked up nearly 140 screen credits, appearing in more than a hundred B-movies during the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.
A B-Movie Icon
Originally coming from Salt Lake City, Harrison began his career not as an actor, but a “physique model” whose photos appeared in muscle magazines during the 1950s. Thanks to his striking good looks and buff bod, he soon began landing small roles in Hollywood features, including the beloved 1958 musical “South Pacific.”
Struggling to land bit parts, in the early 1960s Harrison took a gamble and headed to Italy. Following in the footsteps of muscled Steve Reeves, who famously portrayed Hercules in a series of low-budget “swords-and-sandals” movies produced in Italy, Harrison was quickly cast in similar roles.
After his first starring role in 1962’s “The Invisible Gladiator,” Harrison immediately became one of Europe’s hottest actors.
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he was seen as the king of Italian genre movies. These ranged from battling monsters in films like “Perseus the Invincible” and “Medusa Against the Son of Hercules,” to shooting six-guns in Italian-produced spaghetti westerns such as “Gunfight in the Red Sands” and “One Hundred Thousand Dollars for Ringo.”
An Accidental Ninja Legend
Harrison’s career took an unexpected — and somewhat bizarre — turn in the 1980s when he headed to Asia to appear in what he’d been told would be a few martial-arts ninja movies with Hong Kong-based IFD Films and Arts.
What Harrision didn’t realize until later was that IFD utilized a now-notorious strategy of filming actors and then using that footage in multiple movies — often in ways that made little sense to the storyline.
Fragments of Harrison’s performances wound up being edited into numerous low-budget movies throughout the 1980s, with titles such as “Golden Ninja Warrior,” “Ninja Commandments” and “Hands of Death.”
Harrison was stunned to see himself starring in dozens of movies — always as the same character, Ninja Master Gordon — as his fight scenes were intercut with often unrelated scenes typically filmed years later, and even in different countries.
Those films have come to become cult classics of the so-bad-they’re-good variety, and brought Harrison unexpected legions of fans.
The One That Got Away
Interestingly, in addition all the films he did, Harrison was also renowned for the one he didn’t; when offered the lead role in Sergio Leone’s 1964 western “A Fistful of Dollars,” he famously passed on what became a star-making role for Clint Eastwood.
“I had just finished working for the producers Pappi and Colombo, in a western, when they offered me another one,” Harrison recalled in an interview with Nanarland.
“I really did not want to do a western again as they seemed so different than the ones made in America. I kept telling them no, but Sergio Leone insisted I do the lead. The producers told me it was not a good film and since I had other offers I decided against it,” Harrison recalled.
“Leone actually followed me and came on the set where I was working and watched me from afar. Finally, the producers asked to see me again, and after I affirmed I would not do the film they read me three names of actors from Hollywood that had been sent to them. Since they did not know who they were they asked me to recommend one of them. I knew of all three. My choice was Clint, only because he knew how to ride a horse. So many American actors were not able to ride well. That is the real story.”
