American postcard by Fotofolio, no. F838. Photo: Herb Ritts. Caption: Richard Gere, San Bernardino, 1977.
American actor Richard Gere (1949) has been hailed as the Sexiest Man alive and a humanitarian, but he is foremost a good actor. He shone in such box office hits as American Gigolo (1980), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) and Pretty Woman (1990). For portraying Billy Flynn in the Academy Award-winning musical Chicago (2002), he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.
Richard Tiffany Gere was born in 1949 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He was the second of five children of Doris Ann (Tiffany), a homemaker, and Homer George Gere, an insurance salesman, both Mayflower descendants. Gere had a strict Methodist upbringing. Richard started as a musician early on, playing several instruments and writing music for high school productions. He graduated from North Syracuse Central High School in 1967 and won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he majored in philosophy. He left college after two years to pursue acting. Gere first worked professionally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1969, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He landed the lead role as Danny Zuko in the London production of the musical Grease in 1973. While in London, Gere gained the privilege of becoming one of the few Americans ever to work with Britain's Young Vic Theater, with which he appeared in The Taming of the Shrew. He later reprised his role as Danny Zuko in Grease on Broadway. In 1974, Gere made his feature film debut with a tiny part in Report to the Commissioner (Milton Katselas, 1974). He returned to the stage the following year as part of the cast of an off-Broadway production of Sam Shepard's Killer's Head. Some of Gere's earliest photos, known as 'head shots' were taken by boyhood friend and struggling photographer Herb Ritts. The people handling Gere were so impressed with the photos that they began hiring Ritts for other assignments. Ritts became a top photographer. Onscreen, Gere had a few roles and gained recognition in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (Richard Brooks, 1977) opposite Diane Keaton. He played his first leading role in the dream-like drama Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick, 1978). Joshua Dysart at IMDb: "A poetic biblical parable played out in the Texas Panhandle at the turn of the century, it gives total preference to the emotion of imagery over the emotion of the actors. It's an exercise in feeling and seeing that's so successful it elevated Terrence Malick into the ranks of visual storytellers like Tarkovski and Kurosawa." In Italy, Gere won the David di Donatello Award (the Italian Oscar) for Best Foreign Actor. Gere spent 1978 meeting Tibetans when he travelled to Nepal, where he spoke to many monks and lamas. Returning to the US, Gere won considerable theatrical acclaim for his performance as a gay concentration camp prisoner in the Broadway production of Martin Sherman's Bent. For his role, he received the 1980 Theatre World Award. Back in Hollywood, he played the title role in American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. His star status was reaffirmed by An Officer and a Gentleman (Taylor Hackford, 1982) with Debra Winger. The film grossed almost $130 million and won two Academy Awards out of six nominations. Gere himself received his first Golden Globe Award nomination. In The Cotton Club (Francios Coppola, 1984), he appeared with Diane Lane. In the early 1980s, Richard went to Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador amidst ongoing wars and political violence. With a doctor, he visited refugee camps. In the late 1980s, his career seemed to have a dip. His celebrity status was jeopardized with roles in the poorly received biblical drama King David (Bruce Beresford, 1985) and the underrated political drama Power ( Sidney Lumet, 1986).
In 1990, Richard Gere returned to the front row with two excellent films. In Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990), he was a sensation as the bad guy. Andy Garcia played an Internal Affairs agent who becomes obsessed with bringing down a cop (Gere) who manages to maintain a spotless reputation despite being involved in a web of corruption. Gere then teamed up with Julia Roberts to star in the smash romantic comedy Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990). His cool reserve as a ruthless businessman was the perfect complement to Julia's bubbling enthusiasm. The film captured the nation's heart, and it earned Gere his second Golden Globe Award nomination. Fans clamored for years for a sequel, or at least another pairing of Julia and Richard. They got that with Runaway Bride (Garry Marshall, 1999), which was a runaway success. Gere received $12 million, and the box office was $152 million. Offscreen, Richard and Cindy Crawford got married in 1991. They were divorced in 1995. Gere had a leading role in the Japanese film Hachi-gatsu no rapusodî (Akira Kurosawa, 1991), a film warning viewers of the dangers of nuclear power. Gere is also active in AIDS fundraising and agreed to play a small role in the HBO film And the Band Played On (Roger Spottiswoode, 1993) despite the prevalent belief in the film industry that a film about AIDS would be detrimental to his career. It was not. He co-starred with Jodie Foster in the box-office hit Sommersby (Jon Amiel, 1993). A Buddhist for over a decade, he was banned from the Oscars once after making anti-China comments on the air at the 1993 ceremony. Gere played one of his best roles in Primal Fear (Gregory Hoblit, 1996), as a fame-hungry lawyer who defends an altar boy (Edward Norton) accused of murdering a priest. People magazine had picked him as one of the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World in 1991, and in 1999, picked him as their Sexiest Man Alive. The following year, the actor enjoyed some of his best reviews to date as a gynaecologist at once devoted to and bewildered by all of the women in his life in the aptly titled Dr. T & the Women (Robert Altman, 2000). Critics noted that Gere seemed to have finally come into his own as an actor, having matured amiably with years and experience. After his divorce from Cindy Crawford, Gere started dating actress Carey Lowell. In 2000, they had a son, Homer James Jigme Gere. Jigme means 'fearless' in Tibetan. Gere and Lowell married in 2002. His later films include the thriller Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002), in which he reunited with Diane Lane; the Oscar-winning musical Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002) with Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones; and the ballroom dancing drama Shall We Dance? (Peter Chelsom, 2004), which grossed $170 million worldwide. In the comedy-drama The Hoax (Lasse Hallström, 2006), he played Clifford Irving, who sold his bogus biography of Howard Hughes to a premiere publishing house in the early 1970s. Gere was one of the characters who embodied a different aspect of Bob Dylan's life and work in I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007). Other interesting films are the crime drama Brooklyn's Finest (Antoine Fuqua, 2009) with Don Cheadle, the British comedy-drama The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (John Madden, 2015) with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, and Three Christs (Jon Avnet, 2017) with Peter Dinklage. He was notably singled out for portraying businessman Robert Miller opposite Susan Sarandon in Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki, 2012), earning his fourth Golden Globe Award nomination. Gere is also an accomplished pianist, music writer, and above all, a humanitarian. He's a founding member of Tibet House, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation of Tibetan culture. He has been an active supporter of Survival International, which supports tribal people, including the natives of the Amazon, the Maasai of East Africa, and the Wichi of Argentina. After 11 years of marriage, Gere and Lowell separated. Since April 2018, Richard Gere has been married to Spanish activist Alejandra Silva.
Source: Sandra Brennan (AllMovie), K.D. Haisch (IMDb), AllMovie, Wikipedia and IMDb.
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