Disgraced former entertainer Rolf Harris has died aged 93

Entertainer Rolf Harris arrives at Southwark Crown Court in London on June 27, 2014. Rolf Harris is charged with 12 counts of indecent assault and denies the allegations. Image: Reuters/Neil Hall

Rolf Harris, a mainstay of family entertainment in Britain and Australia for more than 50 years before his career collapsed with his conviction for indecently assaulting young girls, has died at the age of 93.

Australian-born Harris was critically ill with neck cancer and was receiving 24-hour care, local media reported late last year.

Harris died peacefully surrounded by family and friends and has been buried, his family said in a statement reported by PA Media on Tuesday, May 23.

An artist and musician who first achieved fame in the 1950s with the top 10 hit song ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’. Harris went on to host prime-time TV shows primarily aimed at children.

He performed with the Beatles, painted the portrait of Queen Elizabeth and presented himself as the affable inventor of the new musical instrument, the wobble board.

His song “Two Little Boys” spent six weeks at No. 1 in Britain, the last chart topper of the 1960s and the first of the 1970s. In 1993, his wobbleboard cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” also charted in Britain.

But as his star faded, the veteran entertainer became one of the most prominent celebrities embroiled in a massive British police investigation that followed revelations that the late BBC TV presenter Jimmy Savile had been a prolific child molester.

In 2014, Harris was found guilty of assaulting four girls 12 times between 1968 and 1986, some of them as young as 7 or 8 years old, and was jailed for almost six years, although one conviction was later overturned on appeal.

He faced further charges in 2017, but the jury was unable to reach a verdict and he was released from prison that year.

At the 2014 trial, the prosecution portrayed the bearded, bespectacled entertainer as a predator who groomed and abused one woman throughout her teenage and young adult life.

Harris denied all allegations, saying the allegations against him were “laughable”. The examining magistrate said he had shown no remorse for the damage he had caused.

In 2015, Queen Elizabeth, whose portrait he once painted, stripped Harris of a royal honor she herself had bestowed on him. Australia also stripped him of numerous honors it had awarded Harris.

Born in Perth, Australia, in 1930, Harris was a prolific performer from childhood, fond of silly noises and voices to mask shyness, a trait he said he learned from his father. He moved to London at the age of 22 to attend art school in hopes of becoming a portrait painter like his grandfather.

A year later he landed a job sketching cartoons on children’s television, work that continued into the 1950s, performing nights out singing comedy songs with a piano accordion, at a club for Australian and New Zealand expatriates.

It was for that audience that in 1957 he wrote what would become his breakthrough song, “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport,” which he said was an attempt to localize Harry Belafonte’s calypso classic, “The Jack-Ass Song.”

With his relentlessly cheerful personality, Harris toured and performed on TV for decades with his unusual act of fast-paced, performative painting – his catchphrase was, “Can you see what it is yet?” — and singing nursery rhymes like “Jake the Peg.”

It was his embrace by the British establishment that ultimately brought his downfall.

A woman who had been assaulted by Harris decades earlier, when she was friends with his daughter, watched his televised performance in 2012 at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Concert.

“Then I decided I didn’t want any more of it” and would go to the police, she later testified. AP