ROLF Harris once declared: “I’d like to be remembered as somebody who spread a bit of love and affection – someone who tried to counteract the vicious side of human nature.”
And for decades, nearly all of us believed that he would.
It was almost 60 years into his TV career before his true character was revealed: the beloved children’s entertainer - who has died aged 93 - was a paedophile.
His victims were as young as eight, and included his own daughter’s friend who he abused for years.
When they eventually spoke out, he was jailed – but he showed little remorse for his sickening actions and died without apologising to his victims.
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In prison he penned a song calling his victims “slimy little woodworms” and sneering: “Perhaps you believe you’re pretty still, some perfumed sultry wench.”
Harris was born on March 30, 1930, in Perth, Western Australia, to Welsh immigrants Cromwell and Agnes.
His father worked at the city’s power station, while his mother – an analytical chemist before her marriage – ran the home.
Harris always described his childhood as “marvellous”, with a river at the bottom of the garden where he learned to swim, and parents who encouraged his love of art and music.
By 15 he was junior backstroke champion of the whole of Australia.
In the same year he painted a picture that ended up being a finalist in Australia’s most famous portraiture award.
But from his earliest childhood, he had a disturbing relationship with sex.
In 1974, he told TV Times magazine: “I grew up in the belief that sex was everything that was dirty.
“I can remember getting a hiding from my mother when I was about four for doing a super drawing of a man with no clothes on.”
He casually added: “When I was 10 or 11 my mother decided I should see her naked to let me know it was all natural and everything – and we had baths together.”
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At about 18 Harris began a swim school at home, teaching pre-teens.
But soon he was earning extra money by performing as a “pianist and comedy vocalist” around Perth.
At the same time he was studying to be a teacher, explaining decades later: “I wanted to be friends with all the kids.”
But after failing the psychology part of the course two years in a row, he decided to be an artist instead.
Move into TV
In March 1952, aged 21, he arrived in London to attend art college, making ends meet with a 2am cabaret slot at the city’s Down Under Club.
But with typical self-confidence he soon wrote to BBC TV asking for work, after seeing an artist on a children’s show and deciding: “I could do better than that.”
By 1954 he had a job drawing with a puppet on a programme called Jigsaw.
Meanwhile he exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy, where during a 1957 show he ran into Devon-born sculptor Alwen Hughes.
She had been a student alongside him at the City and Guilds Art School in his early days in London, but had not liked him at the time.
She explained later: “He was always leering.”
She agreed to go to dinner with him and Harris later recalled: “Suddenly I found someone so clean, sweet and pure - in contrast to this layer of filth over everything.”
This attraction to innocence would be a recurring theme.
They married in 1958, two years before his career went into the stratosphere with his single Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport.
Wobbleboard
It sold one million copies and introduced the world to his invention – the wobbleboard.
The song was the start of a run of Sixties hits, including Sun Arise in 1962, Jake the Peg in 1966 and 1969’s Two Little Boys – his first No1.
Meanwhile in 1964 the couple’s only child, Bindi, now 59, was born.
From the start, he boasted he did not want his daughter to have sexual hang-ups, explaining in 1974: “We have always wandered around the house naked.
"We sleep with nothing on and Bindi comes in and out of our bedroom. We want her to be able to talk to us about everything.”
In 1967 he made the leap out of children’s TV with Saturday night variety series The Rolf Harris Show, complete with mini-skirted dancers called The Young Generation.
Years later he said: “It became known as The Twinkly Crutch Show because you got so many flashes of panties.”
The programme also featured him sloshing apparently random paint strokes on huge sheets of paper, asking: “Can you tell what it is yet?”
It became his trademark.
By this time Harris had also bought his first home, in Sydenham, south east London.
Sickening abuse
Daughter Bindi was soon friends with a girl who lived across the road.
In 1978, when this neighbour was 13, Harris began abusing her. He was 48 years old and had known her since she was two.
The singer invited the teen to join a family holiday to Hawaii, and one day she came out of the shower wearing just a towel in the room she shared with Bindi.
Harris wrapped his arms around her, slid his hand under her towel and assaulted her.
More than a decade later, Harris told her that the bikini she had worn on that holiday “always turned [him] on”.
When they returned home Harris would visit the girl’s house, cornering her in her bedroom.
Even when Harris moved his family to a home by the Thames in Bray, Berkshire, in 1980, he continued the abuse – sometimes on sleepovers, with his daughter in the same room.
His victim told a court in 2014: “I think he got a thrill out of it. I could tell by the look on his face, looking over at Bindi.”
She said she was an “excruciatingly shy” child and just went “numb with it”. She added: “I was scared of him. He was a big man and I thought no one would believe me anyway.”
The abuse went on for years.
Kids' TV hero
Ten years hosting Rolf Harris’s Cartoon Time on BBC1 from 1979, then ITV’s Cartoon Club from 1989 to 1993, cemented his status as a kids’ entertainment hero.
During this time he also chillingly produced Britain’s first video which warned children about the dangers of abuse, called Kids Can Say No.
Designed for use in schools, the 1985 film featured him hugging young children and joining them in a song with the chorus: “My body’s nobody’s body but mine, You run your own body, Let me run mine.”
A few years later, he crowed: “People trust me. I’ve never conned anybody, always been very upfront about what I do.”
The early Nineties saw him reach new heights of fame, topping the list in a 1992 survey which asked people to name a well-known painter.
The following year he was back in the charts, with a wobbleboard version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven.
In 1994 came hit series Animal Hospital, while he also became a regular at Glastonbury.
Musing on his enduring appeal, Harris said: “I think it’s because I am honest and real.”
In 2001, the series Rolf On Art began on BBC1, becoming the most-watched art series in television history.
By that stage his own paintings were selling for up to £100,000, and his own fortune was estimated to be £11million.
And in 2005 he even painted a portrait of the Queen.
In 2010 he did some more high-profile work, painting semi-naked stars including model Lily Cole and EastEnders’ Emer Kenny.
He gushed over the 20-year-old actress: “Emer seemed so sweetly innocent that I decided she would be portrayed as a naïve young village girl in the first flush of teenage beauty.”
But two years later, his performance at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert was the beginning of the end.
Watching the show was his daughter’s old friend who, sickened, “decided I wasn’t going to have any more of it”.
She approached the police.
Arrested
In March 2013 Harris was arrested, and in May the following year he went on trial in London on 12 counts of indecent assault.
As well as the assaults of his daughter’s friend, he was eventually found guilty of assaulting three others between 1968 and 1986.
As well as the women whose cases were being heard, the court also heard from a parade of others with similar stories.
Harris told the jury: “They are all making it up.”
He was found guilty of all 12 counts of indecent assault – although one was later overturned - and in July 2014 he was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison.
Afterwards other women came forward with stories of groping, including singer Linda Nolan who said he assaulted her when she was 15.
He was released from prison in May 2017 after serving three years of his sentence, and spent the rest of his life holed up in his Berkshire home.
Bindi stood by her father following his conviction for sex offences, and went so far as to defend him in her 2018 book, Living With a Pervert.
In October 2022 it was revealed Harris was under 24-hour care gravely ill with neck cancer, and was unable to speak or eat without a tube.
It was said his health declined when his beloved poodle suddenly died earlier in the year. His wife Alwen has Alzheimer’s disease.
It was confirmed today that Harris died in his home - but even on his deathbed he never apologised to his victims.
He once said: “I hope that maybe I am on this planet to try and help people to warm toward their fellow man.”
A former victim will remember him this way: "He has proved to be an aberration of the human spirit."
