MOVIE LEGEND HARRIS BATTLES CANCER

IRISH screen legend Richard Harris is fighting a desperate battle against cancer. The film star has spent the last two months in a private ward at a London hospital and has undergone courses of chemotherapy.

Former hellraiser Harris, 72, who starred in Gladiator, A Man Called Horse and This Sporting Life, plays the kindly professor Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter films.

He recently completed the second instalment of the fantasy epic - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, due to be released next month - but a double was needed for some scenes when he began to feel unwell. Harris was signed up to appear in all seven films based on J.K. Rowling's best-selling books.

Warner Brothers bosses are now making contingency plans to recast the third movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban, which is due to begin shooting in January, if he is too ill to carry on.

The actor was admitted to the intensive care unit of London's University College Hospital in August reportedly suffering with a severe chest infection.

But his legion of fans will be shocked by the true extent of his illness.

He has been under the care of a consultant haematologist who is one of the country's leading cancer specialists.

The star is also expected to undergo a series of tests in the future to see if more treatment is necessary.

Harris, famous for his hard drinking lifestyle, has been in intensive care five times before and has been given the last rites twice.

In the early 1970s doctors warned him to give up drinking or he would die. His condition was made worse when he developed high blood sugar levels.

But the Limerick-born star became hooked on hard drugs instead and later overdosed on cocaine.

The incident made Harris give up alcohol and drugs for what he calls 13 "boring" years as he pulled himself back from the brink.

"I wasn't going to die of an overdose of drugs," he once said. "I would rather die of a heart attack on some beautiful blonde or from alcohol."

Two broken marriages were the result of Harris's excessive drinking and womanising.

Elizabeth Ogmore, the mother of his three children, and actress Ann Turkel walked out on Harris, unable to put up with his erratic behaviour.

But Harris has no regrets for the way he has lived his life, saying: "If I was analysing myself I would consider myself an excessive compulsive - which is everything I do has to be compulsive.

"I have to go the whole way or it doesn't work for me"

News of the illness comes as his latest movie, My Kingdom, is released this weekend.

In the film, inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, Harris plays an ageing gangster whose kingdom is his criminal empire in Liverpool.

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