Harrison Ford

• 1. Introduction

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  Harrison Ford was born on the 13th of July, 1942, at the Swedish Covenant Hospital in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of Chicago. He spent years as a self-taught carpenter, building shelves and cabinets for Hollywood writers, before anyone thought to put him in front of a camera in a serious way. The head of Columbia Pictures once told a French director that Ford had "no future" in the film business. That same director had just tried to cast Ford as the lead of his first American film.

  How does a man who was fired from his first studio job, was once at the very bottom of the hiring list, and had to fix up other people's kitchens to pay his rent become one of the most commercially successful actors in the history of cinema? And how did he turn that improbable ascent into something stranger still: a second life as a licensed helicopter pilot conducting mountain rescues, a sitting vice chair of a major environmental nonprofit, and a late-career television star collecting Emmy nominations in his eighties?

  Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Carpenter to Leading Man

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  In 1964, Ford traveled to Los Angeles after a season of summer stock with the Belfry Players in Wisconsin, eventually signing on with Columbia Pictures' new talent program. His first known role was as an uncredited bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round in 1966. The producer Jerry Tokofsky placed him at the bottom of the hiring list after Ford reportedly offended him. The anecdote that survived has Ford telling Tokofsky that if Tony Curtis were truly a talented actor, he would have delivered those groceries like a bellhop rather than a movie star.

  Ford accumulated small, often uncredited television appearances through the late 1960s and early 1970s, including turns on Gunsmoke, Ironside, The Virginian, The F.B.I., and Kung Fu. He was credited as "Harrison J. Ford" in a 1967 Western called A Time for Killing, the "J" a purely invented middle initial inserted to avoid confusion with a silent-film actor named Harrison Ford who had appeared in more than 80 films between 1915 and 1932. Ford later discovered that earlier actor's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before he had his own.

  Frustrated with the quality of what he was being offered, Ford took up carpentry as a professional trade. Among his clients were the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, who lived on the beach at Malibu. Ford appears in the documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold as a result of that friendship. Casting director Fred Roos spotted Ford and arranged an audition with George Lucas for a small part in American Graffiti, and that relationship would prove to be the hinge point of everything that followed.

• 3. Han Solo and the Audition Room

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  George Lucas brought Ford in not to audition for Star Wars himself, but to read lines while other actors tried out for the film's major roles. Lucas, watching Ford help other performers find their footing, gradually became convinced that Ford was the one he wanted. The character of Han Solo made Ford a global star alongside co-stars Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, and the 1977 film became one of the most successful of all time.

  Ford returned for the sequels The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 and Return of the Jedi in 1983, though not without friction. He pushed Lucas to kill off Han Solo at the end of Return of the Jedi, arguing that Solo's death would have given the film what he called "a bottom." Lucas declined. Ford's feelings about Solo's arc were firm enough that he raised them repeatedly over the years before the character was eventually killed off in Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015.

  Both Lucas and Spielberg were initially reluctant to cast Ford as Indiana Jones, partly because Lucas had already used him on two productions. According to producer Howard Kazanjian in his book A Producer's Life, the matter was settled when Tom Selleck was unable to accept the role. Raiders of the Lost Ark, released in 1981, became the highest-grossing film of that year and gave Ford his second franchise identity. During the June 1983 filming of the follow-up, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in London, Ford herniated a disc in his back. The 40-year-old actor flew to Los Angeles for surgery and returned to the production six weeks later.

• 4. The Dramatic Actor

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  Witness in 1985 gave Ford a role that worked entirely against the kinetic action of his franchise work, and his performance earned him his sole Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, at the 58th Academy Awards in 1986. He also received BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for the same film. The Mosquito Coast followed in 1986, another collaboration with director Peter Weir. Ford later said working with Weir on both pictures was among the best experiences of his career.

  Blade Runner in 1982, directed by Ridley Scott, occupied a different register entirely. Ford recalled to Vanity Fair: "It was a long slog. I didn't really find it that physically difficult, I thought it was mentally difficult." He and Scott maintained differing views on the nature of Ford's character, Rick Deckard, for decades. The film was not initially a commercial success but became a cult classic. Thirty-five years later, Ford reprised Deckard in Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049, which opened in October 2017 to strong critical reception; the film grossed $259.3 million worldwide, short of the estimated $400 million threshold to break even.

  Roger Ebert's assessment of Ford's work in The Fugitive in 1993 captured what many critics felt distinguished him from his contemporaries. Ebert wrote that "Ford is once again the great modern movie everyman. As an actor, nothing he does seems merely for show and in the face of this melodramatic material he deliberately plays down, lays low, gets on with business instead of trying to exploit the drama in meaningless acting flourishes." Ford went on to earn some of the most detailed critical praise of his career for his portrayal of Branch Rickey in 42, released in 2013, for which he wore a fat suit, prosthetics, and worked with a voice coach to capture Rickey's speech. He described Rickey as one of the roles he is most proud of.

• 5. The Pilot

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  Ford began flight training in the 1960s at Wild Rose Idlewild Airport in Wild Rose, Wisconsin, flying a Piper PA-22 Tri-Pacer. At $15 an hour, the lessons were more than he could afford to sustain. He resumed in the mid-1990s, buying a used Gulfstream II and learning from one of his own pilots, Terry Bender, starting with a Cessna 182 Skylane out of Jackson, Wyoming.

  Over the years Ford acquired a fleet that includes a Bell 407 helicopter, an Aviat Husky, and a de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver, which he has said is his favorite aircraft. He has described the sound of its Pratt & Whitney R-985 radial engine with particular affection. According to Ford, the Beaver had been flown in the CIA's Air America operations and was riddled with bullet holes that had been patched up before he acquired it.

  Ford has used his helicopter in real search-and-rescue operations at the request of local authorities in Wyoming. In 2000, he airlifted an EMT to a 20-year-old hiker suffering from dehydration on Table Mountain. The following year, a 13-year-old Boy Scout who got lost near Yellowstone National Park flagged him down from his helicopter. One rescued hiker only realized who had flown her out when she was safely back and said, "I can't believe I barfed in Harrison Ford's helicopter."

  In March 2004, Ford became chairman of the Experimental Aircraft Association's Young Eagles program, taking over from General Chuck Yeager. He had flown over 280 children in his DHC-2 Beaver as part of the program before stepping down in 2009, when he was replaced by Captain Chesley Sullenberger and First Officer Jeff Skiles. On the 28th of July, 2016, Ford flew the two millionth Young Eagle at the EAA AirVenture convention.

• 6. Environmental Advocacy

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  Ford has served as vice chair of Conservation International since 1991, the year before he began lending his voice to public service messages for EarthShare. Conservation International is an American nonprofit headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, with a mandate to protect nature. The entomologist Edward O. Wilson named an ant species Pheidole harrisonfordi in 2002 in recognition of Ford's work with the organization; an arachnologist named a spider Calponia harrisonfordi in 1993, and a Peruvian snake species, Tachymenoides harrisonfordi, was named for him in 2023.

  In September 2013, Ford was filming an environmental documentary in Indonesia when he interviewed the country's Forestry Minister, Zulkifli Hasan. The Minister reportedly had no prior warning of the questions Ford would ask, and Ford and his crew were publicly threatened with deportation on accusations of harassing state institutions. Ford was subsequently granted an audience with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to whom he expressed concerns about Indonesia's environmental degradation.

  At the United Nations' Climate Action Summit in New York in 2019, Ford gave a speech on behalf of Conservation International about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Addressing calls for younger generations to take action, he told his audience: "The most important thing we can do for them is to get the hell out of their way."

  In 2025, the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation gave Ford its inaugural E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership. The award honored the same work that had led Wilson to name an ant after him more than two decades earlier.

• 7. Late Career and Legacy

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  In 2022, Ford was cast alongside Helen Mirren in the Paramount+ western series 1923. The two had previously appeared together 36 years earlier in The Mosquito Coast. That same year he signed on to the Apple TV+ comedy-drama Shrinking, which premiered in January 2023. Ford later told The Hollywood Reporter that he accepted both roles before scripts existed. For Shrinking, he received nominations for a Golden Globe, a Critics' Choice Television Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Primetime Emmy Award.

  Ford reprised Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023 and stated afterward that it would be his last appearance in that role. In February 2025, he joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Brave New World, replacing William Hurt following Hurt's death. That same month, Ford spoke out against the use of artificial intelligence in voice acting, publicly expressing support for Troy Baker, who had voiced Indiana Jones in the video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.

  In March 2026, Ford received the SAG-AFTRA Life Achievement Award. In his acceptance speech, he described himself as not having been an "overnight success," noting that he had spent 15 years moving between acting and carpentry before his career took hold. He specifically thanked George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the two directors whose confidence in him changed the course of everything. From 1977 to 1997, Ford appeared in 14 films that ranked in the top 15 of the yearly domestic box office, and six films he appeared in during that period earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, among them Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Witness, Working Girl, and The Fugitive.