• Home
• Trivia
• Quotes
• Characters
• Gallery
• Links
• News

• Main Info
• Cast
• Gueststar
• Trivia

Mostly Credited As:	John Derek
Sometimes Credited As:	Dare Harris Derek Harris
Birth Name:	Derek Delevan Harris
Date Of Birth:	August 12, 1926
Country Of Birth:	USA
Birth Place:	Hollywood, California
Date Of Death:	May 22, 1998
Cause Of Death:	Heart problems in Santa Maria, California

Born Derek Harris in Hollywood in I926 he broke into movies in a time-honored fashion. While out horse riding he was spotted by a 20th Century-Fox talent scout who offered him a screen test. Derek' father, actor-director Lawson Harris, forbade it, but did allow his son to attend David Selznick's drama school. Fox later put Derek under contract, but by the time his call-up papers arrived, he still hadn't been cast in a movie. Discharged from the Army, Derek went to a rival studio and won a delinquent role in Knock On Any Door (1949), which established him as the number one pretty boy of the early fifties. Subsequent films: All the King's Men, Rogues of Sherwood Forest, Mask of the Avenger, Idols in the Dust. The Dark Page, The Family Secret, Prince of Pirates, The last Posse, Eyes of the Skies, Ambush at Tomahawk Gap, Sea of Lost Ships, The Fortune Hunter, Thunderbirds, The Adventures of Hajji Baba, Run for Cover, Prince of Players, The Blue and the Gold, The Leather Saint. Omar Khayyam, The Flesh is Weak, The Ten Commandments, High Hell, The Boatmen, Fury at Showdown and his last film for a major studio, Exodus (1960). In 1961 he was in the TV series Frontier Circus. He then went into production, co-producing Nightmare in the Sun (1961), producing and directing Once Before I Die (1966) also his last appearance as an actor), directing, writing and photographing A Boy ...a Girl (1969; unreleased) and directing and photographing Childish Things (1969; unreleased). He later became a commercial photographer. He photographed one of his wives, Ursula Andress, for Playboy magazine, and was working in Greece with one of his latest spouses, Bo Derek, the sensation of Blake Derek's '10'.