Brad Harris on AllMovie

Brad Harris was born in St. Anthony in Idaho in 1933 and studied economics at UCLA in the early '50s. He came from a family in the banking business and intended to make a career in the same area, but he was sidetracked by his sports activities, especially playing for the college football team as a full-back. He also chanced to pick up stand-in work and stunt-double work in Hollywood movies, which lead to his becoming a stuntman. During the second half of the '50s, he was hired as a stunt coordinator on a German-Italian co-production and discovered that there were virtually no trained stuntmen in Germany, and a lot of money to be made doing that work and training men and women to do that work. He later moved up to second unit director, and with his build and stuntman skills, it was only a matter of time before Harris was invited to join the ranks of American actors and body-builders -- following in the wake of Steve Reeves' portrayal of Hercules -- playing heroes in Italian-made sword-and-sandal movies. Harris made his starring debut in the title role of Goliath Against the Giants (1960), followed a year later by Samson. Although he also played in some subjects set in modern times, he spent a lot of the next few years portraying Hercules and other heroes of ancient myth, until, after the mid-'60s, the spy movie craze overtook the sword-and-sandal boom, and he started playing secret agents, and from there branched into all manner of action movies. Harris later became a producer and founded his own production company. In the late '80s, he appeared in a pair of episodes of the American police series Hunter. In 1967, Harris married Czechoslovakian actress Olinka Berova.