This Sporting Life starring Richard Harris; Film Director Jim Sheridan will speak after this screening
The ICC’s Film Club Presents THIS SPORTING LIFE (1963: Length 2hrs - 14mins) Directed by Lyndsey Anderson; Script David Storey. Starring Richard Harris and Rachel Roberts
To mark the anniversary month of the Irish actor Richard Harris’s death (in 2002), the ICC’s Film Club is delighted to present a special screening of the ground-breaking film “This Sporting Life” in which the young Richard Harris gives his spellbinding debut performance as the boozy, brawling rugby-league player Frank Machin in this potent adaptation of David Storey’s 1960’s novel.
Talk and Discussion
This screening will be followed by a talk and discussion about the life and works of the Richard Harris. The ICC’s Film Club Curator Stephen Martin will be in conversation with the Oscar Nominated Director Jim Sheridan, who worked with Harris on the film The Field.
Doors at 1:30pm, Starts at 2:00pm
Tickets: £8
The Plot of “This Sporting Life”
Yorkshire coal miner Frank Machin (Richard Harris) picks a fight in a club and subsequently finds himself being recruited for a rugby team. He’s an unpolished, player, but his aggressiveness, brutality and indifference to the rules of fair play impress the team owners. Suddenly a rising star, Frank despairs that his success on the playing field isn’t equalled in his personal life. He loves a widowed, emotionally challenged landlady (Rachel Roberts) who’s too damaged to return his feelings.
This Sporting Life is regarded as one of the finest British films ever made, this benchmark of “kitchen-sink realism”. With an astonishing, raging debut performance by a young Richard Harris, an equally blistering performance by fellow Oscar nominee Rachel Roberts as the widow with whom he lodges, and electrifying direction by Lindsay Anderson, in his feature-film debut, This Sporting Life remains to this day as a riveting dramatic powerhouse of British Cinema.
What The Press say about Richard Harris in ‘This Sporting Life’
“Certainly Richard Harris’s best film in which he gives an unforgettable performance to equal Marlon Brando’s in “A Streetcar Named Desire” – which rightly led to him to being Oscar Nominated as Best Leading Actor 1964. Peter Bradshaw The Guardian.
“It is perhaps the most unflinching look at the misery of the human condition that British film culture has ever contrived”.
BFI.
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