He trained as a drama teacher at Alsager College of Education (where he acted with and became close friends with Joe Leeway, who later became one of the Thompson Twins) in 1973 and as an actor at the Birmingham Theatre School (where he was a contemporary of Toyah Willcox) in 1976.
In film, he has worked with directors Federico Fellini (playing Guianin Micheluzzi in The Voice of the Moon),[1] Anton Corbijn, and Asif Kapadia.
His theatre credits include working with the English fringe theatre company Foco Novo (which was set up by director Roland Rees and playwright Bernard Pomerance so as to produce Pomerance’s plays Foco Novo and The Elephant Man).
For Foco Novo, Harris created the role of The Journeyman (a conflation of the fairground barker, the knife-supplying Jew, and various other characters) in Peter Hulton's translation of Woyzeck.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he worked at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, creating the role of Abb in David Rudkin’s The Triumph of Death.