Richard Gere

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Gere had one narrow job at the 65th Academy Awards in 1993, which was to announce the nominees for best art direction. He used the moment to denounce human rights abuses by the Chinese government. The Academy responded by banning him permanently from presenting at the ceremony. That is an odd outcome for an actor who, in the early 1980s, had been established as a leading man and a sex symbol. Gere's career is full of reversals like that one. He has said that Hollywood's biggest studios no longer want him, and he has been honored in cities far from Los Angeles. What made one of the most recognizable faces in American film willing to pay that price? And what did he find on the other side?

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• 2. Roots and Stage

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  Richard Tiffany Gere was born on the 31st of August 1949 in Philadelphia, the eldest son and second child of Doris Ann and Homer George Gere. His mother, born Doris Ann Tiffany, kept the home. His father sold insurance for NMIC, though he had once intended to become a minister. The family raised Gere as a Methodist in Syracuse, New York.

  The Gere name carried a long American history. His great-grandfather, George Lane Gere, changed the spelling from "Geer". An earlier ancestor, also named George, came from Heavitree, England, and settled in the Connecticut Colony in 1638. Both parents descended from Mayflower passengers. The ancestors include John Billington, William Brewster, Francis Eaton, Francis Cooke, Degory Priest, George Soule and Richard Warren.

  At North Syracuse Central High School, Gere excelled at gymnastics and music, and he played the trumpet. He graduated in 1967. A gymnastics scholarship then took him to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied philosophy. He left after two years without a degree.

  In 1969 he worked professionally for the first time, at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod. At Provincetown he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His first major role arrived in 1971 in Soon, a rock opera by Scott Fagan and Joe Kookoolis. It opened on Broadway at the Ritz Theatre and closed after only three performances. In 1973 he appeared in the original London stage version of Grease.

  The 1979 Broadway production of Bent gave him a part of real weight. Gere played a gay Holocaust victim, which made him one of the first notable Hollywood actors to portray a homosexual character. The role earned him a Theatre World Award. Meanwhile, Hollywood had been calling since the mid-1970s, and its first offer had ended badly.

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• 3. Rise to Stardom

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  The Lords of Flatbush in 1974 should have been Gere's start in film. He was cast in a starring role and then replaced after fighting with his co-star Sylvester Stallone. Better luck followed. In 1977 he took a small but significant part in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. The next year he starred in Days of Heaven, a well-reviewed drama directed by Terrence Malick.

  American Gigolo, a crime drama from 1980, lifted his profile sharply. It established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. Two years later, An Officer and a Gentleman, with Debra Winger as his co-star, confirmed the climb. The romantic drama grossed almost $130 million and won two Academy Awards from six nominations. Gere received his first Golden Globe nomination for it. To prepare for the role, he studied karate.

  The rest of the 1980s brought films of varying critical and commercial reception. Then 1990 turned things around with two releases, Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman. The second earned Gere his second Golden Globe nomination. Pretty Woman also carried a personal signature, because Gere composed and performed its piano theme himself.

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• 4. Peak Years

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  Sommersby in 1993 put Gere opposite Jodie Foster, and Primal Fear followed in 1996. In 1999, Runaway Bride reunited him with Julia Roberts, his Pretty Woman co-star. This time his musical contribution was a guitar solo. In 1997, The Jackal handed him the part of Declan Mulqueen, a former IRA militant, and he adopted an Irish accent to play him.

  People magazine named him its Sexiest Man Alive in 1999. Three films in 2002 kept him busy: The Mothman Prophecies, Unfaithful and Chicago. The last was a musical adaptation that won the Academy Award. As the lawyer Billy Flynn, Gere won his first Golden Globe. He had studied tap for three months, all to shoot about half a day of dancing.

  Dancing returned in Shall We Dance?, a ballroom drama from 2004 that grossed $170 million worldwide. A book adaptation, Bee Season, followed in 2005 and failed commercially.

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• 5. Exile and Independence

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  In The Hunting Party in 2007, Gere played a journalist in Bosnia, alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Terrence Howard. That same year Todd Haynes cast him in I'm Not There, a semi-biographical film about Bob Dylan. Gere was one of six actors to portray a variation of Dylan, in a cast that included Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Cate Blanchett. His version was Billy the Kid.

  Nights in Rodanthe, a romantic drama opposite Diane Lane, arrived in 2008. Critics panned it, and it landed at number 74 on The Times list of the worst films of the year. It still grossed over $84 million worldwide. It remains the most recent of his films made entirely by a major studio.

  Gere has said that his politics on China made him unwelcome in Hollywood. China is an important source of money for the big studios. In 2017 he said he believed his advocacy had cost him blockbuster roles, because studios did not want to offend a Chinese audience in the world's second-largest film market. He embraced the exile and turned to independent films. Those films earned some of the best reviews of his career.

  Arbitrage in 2012 cast him as the businessman Robert Miller and brought his fourth Golden Globe nomination. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone called the performance "too good to ignore" and "an implosive tour de force". Honors piled up abroad and at home. In 1995 he had presided over the jury at the 19th Moscow International Film Festival. In December 2010 the 34th Cairo International Film Festival gave him an award. In 2012 the Hamptons International Film Festival gave him its Golden Starfish Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Hollywood Film Awards gave him a Career Achievement Award.

  The George Eastman Museum presented him with the George Eastman Award on the 16th of February 2012, for distinguished contribution to the art of film. On the 17th of May 2012, Albania's president, Bamir Topi, awarded him the Medal of Gratitude. The citation praised him as a humanist and a rights activist, and it referred to crimes against Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999.

  In 2016, Joseph Cedar's political drama Norman broke sharply from his usual screen image. Gere played Norman Oppenheimer, a small-time Jewish fixer. He described the character as an embodiment of the "sides of us we know are annoying and needy". RogerEbert.com called the portrayal "consistently, completely fascinating", and Variety singled it out as a worthy Academy Award contender. Yet several film critics and media outlets have named Gere among the best actors never nominated for an Academy Award.

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• 6. Faith and Tibet

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  Gere's interest in Buddhism began when he was in his 20s. He first studied Zen under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, and he kept at it for five or six years. In 1978 he traveled to Nepal with the Brazilian painter Sylvia Martins. There he met many Tibetan monks and lamas. He later met the 14th Dalai Lama in India and became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist of the Gelugpa school, as well as an active supporter of the Dalai Lama.

  Gere now visits Dharamshala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, on a regular basis. He is a co-founder of Tibet House US and the creator of the Gere Foundation. He also chairs the board of directors of the International Campaign for Tibet. His support for the Tibetan independence movement has earned him a permanent ban from entering China.

  In September 2007, Gere called for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, hoping to pressure China over Tibet. He also starred in a Free Tibet-themed commercial for the Lancia Delta. His practice goes with him on his travels. On the 27th of June 2011 he meditated at Borobudur Temple in Indonesia.

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• 7. Causes and Controversy

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  Survival International, an organization that protects the rights and lands of tribal peoples, counts Gere as an active supporter. In October 2009 the book We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples appeared with some of his writing. He used it to highlight the persecution of the Jumma people and their loss of land. He saw their story as one that repeats on different continents. The royalties go to Survival International.

  His concerns reach into health and ecology. He sits on the board of Healing the Divide, which backs global efforts for peace, justice and understanding. He helped establish the AIDS Care Home in India, a residential facility for women and children with AIDS. In 1999 he created the Gere Foundation India Trust to fund a range of humanitarian programs there.

  On the 15th of April 2007, Gere attended an AIDS awareness rally in Jaipur. At a live news conference promoting condom use among truck drivers, he embraced the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty, dipped her and kissed her cheek several times. A local court ordered the arrest of both under public obscenity laws. Gere said the controversy was "manufactured by a small hard-line political party". About a month later, a two-judge bench led by Chief Justice K. G. Balakrishnan called the case "frivolous". The judges said such complaints against celebrities were filed for "cheap publicity", and they ruled that Gere could enter India freely.

  His views on world politics have been equally direct. In 2010 he said the American people had not supported the war in Iraq and that George W. Bush had "bullied" them into it. He called Bush a "very poor president". At the Cairo festival he added, "I'm very sorry about what the U.S. has done in Iraq. This war has been a tragedy for everyone. I hope that the people of Iraq can rebuild their country."

  In 2016 he endorsed Hillary Clinton and donated $2,700 to her campaign. In 2017 he criticized Benjamin Netanyahu's policies, saying, "Settlements are such an absurd provocation and, certainly in the international sense, completely illegal". In February 2023 he was one of 480 global figures who signed a Freedom House statement backing the protesters who rallied after the death of Mahsa Amini. The statement urged sanctions on Iranian officials and called for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to be proscribed as a terror group.

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• 8. Private Life

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  Gere's early romantic life was long and unsettled. He had an on-again, off-again relationship with the actress Penelope Milford from 1971 to 1978. From 1978 to 1986 the same pattern held with the painter Sylvia Martins. In 1991 he married the model Cindy Crawford, and they stayed married until 1995.

  In 2002 he married the model and actress Carey Lowell. Their son, Homer James Jigme Gere, had been born in February 2000. The name honors both of his grandfathers and adds the Tibetan name Jigme. The couple separated in 2013 and then spent three years in highly contested divorce proceedings in New York County Supreme Court. The case was settled in October 2016.

  In April 2018 Gere married the Spanish activist Alejandra Silva. That August they announced they were expecting their first child together, and a son was born in February 2019. The birth of their second son was reported in April 2020.

  Lists of famous vegetarians often include Gere, but his status as a vegetarian is disputed. In February 2023 he was hospitalized with pneumonia on a family vacation in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico. His wife said he had fully recovered. Work continued to arrive. His filmography lists two 2024 projects, Oh, Canada, in which he plays Leonard Fife, and the ten-episode series The Agency, in which he plays James "Bosko" Bradley.

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