Ed Harris

The person record files Ed Harris as an actor, yet two of the forty titles we list for him carry his name as director, and on Pollock he took both jobs. The British Film Institute review of that film judges the picture rather than the playing: it calls the painter a walking minefield of brilliance and neurosis and says the film sets out to examine exactly those qualities. In another piece from the same archive Harris is the one speaking, admitting outright that showing a painter at work risks looking either dull or ridiculous on screen. Twice more the archive reaches him through parts kept to the margin, Luke in Stepmom, pushed almost entirely aside, and the sinister gangster Fogarty in A History of Violence.