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Sun 2 August 2026 9:00, UK
As the son of a bookseller and a travel agent, Ed Harris would have never expected his life would see him become a four-time Oscar nominee with dozens of memorable movies under his belt, and while he might not be your favourite actor, he is undoubtedly in at least one of your favourite films.
After paying his dues on stage and screen, things started to fall into place for Harris during the early 1980s, with his role as astronaut John Glenn in Philip Kaufmann’s much-loved The Right Stuff bringing him to a whole new level of fame.
By the time the decade was at an end, he was a household name ready to further establish himself as one of the best in the business, and it all started on the big screen with a very unassuming part in a 1978 thriller called Coma.
“I just had a small role of a pathologist, cutting up a lung,” Harris told the Irish Times in 2006, “A few lines”.
Based on a novel by Robin Cook and directed by Michael Crichton, who would eventually create Jurassic Park and ER, Coma starred Michael Douglas (who hated working on the film) and Geneviève Bujold as a doctor working at a Boston hospital where seemingly healthy patients, one of them a young Tom Selleck, are suddenly slipping into comas, and despite facing the dismissal of her male colleagues, she takes the investigation into her own hands.
Two years before Coma, Harris made a different breakthrough with his TV debut on an episode of Gibbsville, an NBC drama, and while this cameo is long forgotten now, at the time, it meant the world to the young actor.
“I remember actually crying with relief when I got that job,” Harris recalled, “I had been auditioning for television shows without any luck for about a year. I had been busy doing theatre in LA, but not for pay”.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Gibbsville followed the adventures of two journalists (John Savage and Gig Young) working in a small Pennsylvania town in the 1940s, with Harris featuring on an episode titled ‘Trapped’, revolving around a group of miners who are confined underground following an accident, and it’s up to the reporters to find out who’s to blame before it’s too late.
The show has its origins in a TV movie called The Turning Point of Jim Malloy, named after Savage’s character, a year after which the series premiered, but it hardly took the world by storm. Of the 13 episodes that were produced, only six made it to air before NBC pulled the plug, but fortunately for Harris, his appearance came in episode number three.
Every great actor’s story has to start somewhere; he might have only been a background pathologist or a miner trapped underground, but these two early roles helped kickstart Harris’ journey to becoming the beloved megastar he is today.
