Richard Harrison, the American actor who became a leading man in Italian gladiator pictures and spaghetti Westerns, died Friday of natural causes in Los Angeles. He was 90. Producer and longtime friend Joan Borsten confirmed the news. Born in Salt Lake City on May 26, 1936, he reached Hollywood at seventeen, worked in gyms owned by Vic Tanny and Bert Goodrich, modeled for physique magazines, and studied with Sandy Meisner at Fox. Early credits were small: *Kronos*, *Jeanne Eagels*, *Too Much, Too Soon*, *South Pacific*, *Tall Story*. The career that made his face familiar did not happen on those lots.
Italy did. With a built frame and a hard profile, he fit the sword-and-sandal wave that had already lifted Steve Reeves. *The Invincible Gladiator* in 1962 made him a European lead. *Avenger of the Seven Seas* and *Gladiator of the Seven* followed. In 1963 he starred in *Gunfight in the Red Sands*, an Italian-Spanish Western scored by Ennio Morricone. Then came the near-miss that followed him for the rest of his life. He turned down Sergio Leone’s *A Fistful of Dollars* in 1964. When the producers read him three Hollywood names, he pointed to Clint Eastwood, he later said, because Eastwood could ride a horse. Eastwood took the stranger. Harrison kept working the circuit that made him a star overseas instead of a household name at home.
When European work thinned in the late 1970s, he spent about a decade in Hong Kong on low-budget ninja pictures. He later called that stretch dirty work and said he felt like a hired extra in films he barely appeared in. By the end he had more than a hundred B-movie credits and had directed a few of them. Cult audiences still hunt those titles. His last features were the 1993 thriller *Angel Eyes* and *Jerks* in 2000.
He never became the American celebrity the Leone part might have made. He became something else: a working face of dusty towns, arena sand, Morricone cues, and the kind of European genre factory that minted rugged heroes by the dozen. For people who grew up on those screens, the name on the poster was less important than the man already standing in the frame.
