Rise to Fame
He dropped out of Columbia, leaving behind two years of varsity football, and eventually landed at CalArts for acting. Nobody saw that coming. His first real leading role came in George Romero's Knightriders (1981), playing an Arthurian king running a Renaissance fair on motorcycles (which is either deeply weird or deeply earnest). The Right Stuff (1983) was the real inflection point: his John Glenn had a quiet moral clarity that made Glenn the conscience of the whole film. An Obie for Sam Shepard's Fool for Love followed in 1984. He arrived in two worlds at once.
In the Spotlight
Four Oscar nominations and he's never taken one home. Gene Kranz in Apollo 13, Christof in The Truman Show, Jackson Pollock in Pollock (his directing debut), a dying writer in The Hours. Four nominations, four wildly different characters. Pollock barely grossed $8.6 million. Westworld brought him a new generation. Love Lies Bleeding (2024) scored 94% on Rotten Tomatoes at 73. Zero Oscars, zero slowdown.
Side Notes
At the 1999 Oscars, when Elia Kazan got his honorary award, Harris and his wife Amy Madigan stayed seated. Half the room stood, half didn't. Kazan had named names to HUAC in the 1950s, and not everyone had forgotten. He met Madigan in 1980 when she saw him perform Sam Shepard's Cowboy Mouth and decided that was it. They married in 1983 on a Places in the Heart location shoot, which is the kind of thing that happens when two actors are doing their best work at the same time.