Brad Harris

Brad Harris — Biography

Bradford Harris was born on July 16, 1933, in St. Anthony, Idaho; his family later moved to California, where he attended Burbank High School and won an athletic scholarship to UCLA to study economics. A football knee injury led him into weightlifting, which grew into a lasting interest in bodybuilding.

He traveled to Rome for the 1960 Summer Olympics and stayed on to work as a stuntman on Spartacus, entering the European sword-and-sandal, Eurospy and Spaghetti Western boom that followed. He became a leading man in 1961 with the title roles in Goliath Against the Giants and Samson, forming a long collaboration with director Gianfranco Parolini and, alongside co-star Tony Kendall, headlining the Kommissar X and The Three Fantastic Supermen series. Finding that German productions lacked dedicated stunt coordinators, he regularly combined acting with stunt work, stunt coordination and second-unit direction, also serving as executive producer on several of his films and appearing in seven episodes of the soap opera Falcon Crest.

Off screen he marketed his own line of exercise equipment through a company called Modern Body Design, and in 2015 received the University of Arizona College of Humanities' Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award. He married Czech actress Olga Schoberová in 1967, divorcing in 1969; the couple had a daughter. An inductee of the Stuntman's Hall of Fame, Harris died in Santa Monica, California, on November 7, 2017, at age 84.