LATE last year Richard Gere was in Europe, touring film festivals and
picking up lifetime achievement awards in San Sebastián and Zurich.
It’s not as if he doesn’t appreciate the thought; it’s just that he’s a
little worried about the subtext to these decorations.
“It’s a
little premature,” he says, wryly. “These are the dinosaur awards; you
have to be a certain age and they start giving you this stuff.”
Gere
has been walking this earth for 63 years, with no sign of imminent
extinction. He’s still your mum’s favourite movie star,Bay State Cable Ties
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with an impressive shaggy head of silver fox hair that makes your dad
grit his teeth. The soft button-brown eyes are now behind steel-rimmed
bifocals, but he can still rock jeans and a casual shirt. He laughs when
you take in his dress-down Friday threads. “Early on, I used to be on
the best-dressed list because of the characters I play. I’d be in a
tuxedo movie, but a T-shirt and running pants is basically my world. I
live very simply in the country, and that’s who I am.”
He’s a great advert for yoga and vegetarianism,Source crystal mosaic
Products at Mosaics. ?although slightly humanised by the fact he also
loves a good glass of wine. Not red: that zonks him out, but he says he
can tell if a film is expected to do well by the quality of the booze
served at the premiere. At home, however, life is not all Montrachet and
Yquem.Ein innovativer und moderner Werkzeugbau
Formenbau. He has a nice story about the time he tried to ?impress his
wife with an expensive chardonnay, only to outrage her when she
discovered he’d spent £180 on one bottle. “She turned the car around and
I had to go back into the shop,” he recalls wryly. “And I had to tell
them that my wife wouldn’t let me buy the wine.”
It’s a long
time since Gere had to check the price tag on something, but he still
remembers the days when he was starting out and struggled to scrape
together enough to buy a sandwich. Yet over the past three decades, he
has watched contemporaries like Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson rise and
fall, while Gere ?remains a movie star in the real, pre-Grazia sense,
?despite never once bothering save the world from ?aliens, or rescue his
wife or daughter from Albanians like Harrison Ford or Liam Neeson.
Instead,
he’s been attracted to more chilly, complicated guys like the conman of
The Hoax, the all-singing, all-dancing shyster lawyer of Chicago and
the husband in Unfaithful who loves his wife but also bumps off her
lover. “In real life, almost nobody is all good or all bad,” he says.
“I’ve never met anyone evil beyond redemption.Totech Americas delivers a
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for applications spanning electronics. Nobody is one-sided. I’ve even
seen the Dalai Lama apologise for yelling at someone. A good script will
reflect that people are complicated.”
His latest film,
Arbitrage, is in this vein and has earned him some of the best reviews
of his life. Gere plays an über-wealthy hedge fund executive who is a
mix of wonderboy and weasel, frantically trying to juggle a complicated
life that includes a wife, a ?mistress and a ballooning debt that he has
tried to conceal with a massive fraud.
Gere had few contacts on
Wall Street so he prepared by walking the floors of the New York Stock
Exchange, quizzing high fliers about their wives, their families, what
they loved, what they worried about, what they’d had for breakfast.
Crooked types like Bernie Madoff were an influence but ultimately he
drew from politicians who failed to live up to expectations: the charm
and flexible ethics of Clinton, the magnetism of a Kennedy.
“Ted
Kennedy was one of the most responsible senators we’ve ever had,” he
says. “The best people in Washington working on human rights stuff,
health stuff and civil rights stuff were trained in his office, came
through the stuff he was pushing and working on his entire life. But he
made one horrible decision: Chappaquiddick.” Gere is by inclination a
Democrat himself, who voted for Obama in the last election and yet,
Zen-like, he tries to appreciate a spectrum of personal and political
beliefs. During the last electoral campaign he got a chance to quiz a
Republican politician about the party resistance to taxation. “We were
standing in a billionaire’s house and asked this very powerful
Republican, ‘Do you think giving up $10 million in taxes will change his
life’. And this Republican said, ‘No, it wouldn’t, but I think his
concern was that the money would be squandered.’ I agree with some of
that vigilance, even in terms of entitlements.”
Gere’s emphasis
on care with money and self-sufficiency seems to come from his
81-year-old father, who grew up poor but managed to put himself through
university. Gere was born in 1949 and raised in New York. By then his
father, Homer, worked in insurance and his mother, Doris, raised their
five children. “I was a shy kid,wind turbine” he says, and his first ambition wasn’t acting but to become an Olympic gymnast.
Watching
the London 2012 Olympics, his son marvelled at an athlete’s dexterity
on a pommel horse, prompting Gere to fetch a picture of himself twisting
through a routine more than 50 years earlier.
At university, he
finally abandoned the horizontal bars for a vertical ascent through
acting. In 1973, ?he played Danny Zuko in Grease in New York, then
London.
By the 1980s he was a movie star, in spite of himself.
When he made An Officer and a Gentleman, it was because he needed the
money, and he fought against the final sequence where he arrives in full
uniform and scoops up Debra Winger from the production line and carries
her off. “I knew it was the wrong ending,” he says. But he gave it a go
anyway. “And when I saw it on film, the hairs on the back of my neck
stood up.”
Films like Yanks and American Gigolo confirmed him as
a pin-up, and becoming a sex symbol is something he admits he may never
understand. His agent was furious when Gere smouldered topless on the
cover of Rolling Stone. For 40 years, this was the ?legendary Ed Limato,
whose other discoveries ?included Mel Gibson and Michelle Pfeiffer, and
apparently he gave Gere hell, telling him he was “a better actor than a
hunk”.
The hunkiness aspect to Gere’s career has lasted far
longer than either of them estimated, rooted in a time before celebrity
image became an obsession. Gere ?admits that as one of the first of the
movie mega-stars, he struggled. “I don’t know any actor who goes through
this in order to be famous,” he offers. “To make money, and meet girls –
that would be the top of the list.” He grins. “Actually it would be
girls, above money. I did find the attention very difficult and it took
me a while to figure it out.”
Gere has evolved into a bankable
global film star, but nowadays that means his presence helps get a movie
made – not that he will make serious money. Arbitrage’s modest budget
had to be pulled together, piecemeal. “You used to make movies like this
and get paid very well,” he says, lightly. “Now you make ?movies like
this but you don’t get paid very well.”
The other surprise is
that he has never been nominated for an Oscar. He didn’t get a
nomination this time either, but he says this only got to him once, for
Chicago. “Everyone else got nominated,” he says. And they did: Catherine
Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, Renée Zellweger and John C Reilly all landed
nominations in the run-up to the 2003 Oscars. “It was kind of like not
getting picked on the baseball team when you’re a kid.”
This
hasn’t affected his film choices, although lately he’s been making fewer
films anyway. Arbitrage is his first in four years. “I’m very careful
about who I work with. I don’t want to spend six months with someone I
don’t respect or like.”
It’s interesting to speculate whether
Gere will still be making movies ten years hence. He could graduate to
the status of a Christopher Plummer, now a handsome éminence grise, who
got more appreciation once there was less distracting talk of key films
like the Sound of Music.
Like Plummer, Gere seems to have
staying power, although he denies being ambitious. “I don’t know that I
ever had huge goals,” he says. “I enjoy working. I like to be challenged
by roles, and working with people I respect.” He’s a little pleased
that recently ?he turned down quite a good script “with a director of
the moment” even though it was chewy and ?interesting.
He
doesn’t nurse any secret ambition to conquer the stage either and he
rarely makes films outside New York because he prefers staying at his
ranch-style home in Bedford, Connecticut. Three years ago he set up a
boutique hotel nearby, with yoga classes and meditation spaces, and has
been known to play the role of bellboy when they are short-staffed,
carrying guests’ luggage to their rooms. He draws the line at running up
breakfasts though. “I can boil an egg but that’s about it.”
Gere
and Carey Lowell, the former Bond girl of ?Licence to Kill, got
together shortly after the break-up of his four-year marriage to
supermodel Cindy Crawford in 1995. He has a stepdaughter, Hannah, and a
son, Homer, and as he says, they like a simple life.
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