| Screen legend Richard Gere talks to Libby Brooks about Buddhism, parenthood Friday June 7, 2002 He still has the walk, half flouncing, half stalking, as if he's wearing high heels or being jerked from the shoulders by strings. He still has the thick mane and the wry lips and the narrow eyes. But when one's belief system infuses one's every response as it does with Gere, like a particularly heavily scented herbal tea, it is hard to gain much sense of the man himself. The world's second most famous Buddhist is currently starring in Unfaithful, directed by Adrian Lyne, who previously explored his pet theme of infidelity in Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. Playing the cuckold is a departure for Gere. From the early dazzle of American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman, to his second coming in Pretty Woman, he tends to be cast as the relentlessly sexual, obscenely vain, delectable but distant male who is eventually tamed by the love of a good woman. Gere is as ambiguous on film as he appears in life, with brutal, biting sex scenes contrasting with the trademark campy strut. Even his clothes mark a change. Gere's screen wardrobe - and the way he wears it - has always been memorable: the Armani prowl of American Gigolo, the tight bright white uniform of An Officer and a Gentleman. In Unfaithful, he plays a man who doesn't notice that his jumper is on inside out. Was it difficult to play a life more ordinary? "Who is ordinary, really? Yes, there is something unexceptional about these people: they have played by the rules of society and are relatively happy. But as you see, he's an aberrant person underneath, as we all are. You scratch any of us and we are capable of such extreme behaviour." He purrs with satisfaction. There is something a little sinister about him. Yet he is also daintily wary. Does he find himself attracted to different types of roles as he gets older? "We're all interested in what we're about at the moment. At this point I have two kids and a wife and a mortgage so of course there are going to be levels of meaning that I can bring now that I couldn't have 10 years ago." Though he insists that he doesn't think about where he'll be in another 10 years time in terms of career, he graciously accepts that there will come a point when it will be "ridiculous for me to be having a 22-year-old wife". So is he ambitious? "Not in terms of money or power or fame. Ambitious in terms of wanting to explore opportunities that always take me in the direction of wisdom." And do those opportunities present themselves within a career, or elsewhere. "Oh, it's all the same," he explains kindly. "This is an opportunity. This could be drudgery. Or it could take both of us a little closer to liberation. It's in everything you do." He's aware of the body breaking down, he says: "My eyesight gets worse, my hearing gets worse, the physical energy is not there like it was before." Yet he was still being voted World's Sexiest Man as recently as 1999. Does he find that women respond to him differently as he gets older? "I think that my antennae change. I'm aware of it much less. The situation I'm in, I'm really very happy. I'm with a terrific woman, I love the kids." Does fatherhood alter those antennae? "Sure. The marginal stuff just doesn't affect you any more when you weigh it against the real things in your life. All the cliches [about parenthood] are true." During his four-year marriage to Cindy Crawford, when pressed on whether the pair were planning to start a family, he demurred that he would "rather be able to think of all creatures as my children". A decade later, soon after Crawford gave birth to her first child with her new husband, Gere also became a father for the first time when his current partner, the former Bond girl Carey Lowell, gave birth to their son, Homer. "It was actually quite simple. I never had an issue about children one way or the other. With Carey, she had a child from a previous marriage, and it was just a natural thing, caring for this child, having our own child. It was totally spontaneous and right." Himself the second of five children, Gere grew up in Syracuse, upstate New York, and spent two years at the University of Massachusetts on a gymnastics scholarship, where he studied philosophy. After a summertime stint with the Provincetown Playhouse, he left college in 1969 to join the Seattle Repertory Theatre. He won critical acclaim as Danny Zuko in the London stage version of Grease, then worked his way around the New York theatre scene before Terrence Malick chose him to star in Days of Heaven in 1978. It was following a tour of Nepal in that same year that Gere converted to Buddhism. He has since effortfully promoted the cause of Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Would he have come to his faith if he hadn't been deeply unhappy? "No. Suffering is very important. The worst kind is alienation suffering, which is probably true of most teenagers. I was habituated into seeing the universe in a certain way, then as I got older I realised it was not that way at all, and that disconnection creates enormous tension." Was he very shy as a young man? "I still am. I have to work at that." So how did he cope with the initial attention, as this shy and alienated young man? "All of a sudden I was recognised on the street. No one's ever prepared for that. You just have to go through it. And deal with all the projections. It's not easy. Like an animal, your first impulse is to run away." Always more box-office than acting peers like De Niro and Keitel, it was his role as the shallow and duplicitous male escort Julian in American Gigolo that established him as a star. Released in 1980, the film was a prescient take on the tortured narcissism of the decade, with Gere as vanity incarnate. Was that one of the projections he is talking about? "He was extremely different from me. I sat down and created the character. I didn't know how to tie a tie. I didn't know what fashion was, or hookers or gigolos or anything. In a way it should have been flattering that people assumed that was me. But it is a heavy projection. "I suppose there was an element of truth to the young single guy who seems to be able to be with any woman he wants to be with. I never say it that way, but I suppose I was seeing a lot of women at that time. But who doesn't when they're a young man?" Did it bother you that people thought you were extremely vain? "I never quite understood that. Again it never related to me because I just know myself as a hard worker." After further stellar success in An Officer and a Gentleman (and an affectionately remembered remake of Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle, Breathless) came Gere's fallow period. His bankability plummeted, with many in Hollywood believing that his career was on an inexorable wane. For Gere, there's a simple explanation. He was concentrating his energies on his Buddhist activism. "It's a job like any other, and you've got to have continuity. I wasn't angry about it. But then I had to be a little more conscious that I had to come up with a hit movie." Which he did in 1990 with Pretty Woman, where Gere's commitment- phobic stockbroker learns to enjoy feeling the grass beneath his feet thanks to Julia Robert's tart with a heart. Does he ever worry about the dubious politics of the film? "I don't think you have to read much into it. It's someone who doesn't have much going for them - forget prostitute, it's a Disney prostitute - meets someone who's got everything going, but she ends up giving him something, they make more out of each other, they fall in love. It amazes how that movie has touched everyone, every culture, all over the world. And I don't think there's anyone who really wants to be a prostitute and run into a banker." He remains equivocal about acting. "It's not a passion in the sense that it's all encompassing, because there are so many different things in my life. At the same time it's a job that I like very much. I want a film to be meaningful, I want to be good in films, I want people to come away changed, so there's a lot of passion there, but it's not everything in my life. "There's something inherent in the job that doesn't foster maturation. You've got to have your emotions on the surface. You've got to be willing to take direction, which leaves you in a childlike position. With women especially I see it being extremely difficult and dangerous." Film-making is essentially a male-oriented industry, he says. Gere has a habit of saying things out of turn which can be interpreted either as a brave determination to speak his mind regardless of personal cost, or a mild case of autism. Most recently, at the New York benefit concert for the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks, he told the audience: "We have to learn how to forgive." He was booed and accused of being "un-American". "I feel very confident in where I'm coming from. It is very understandable to me that people are frightened, but I've never been shaken from the belief that violence gets us nowhere. Only forgiveness, only compassion can change the situation." Throughout his career, he has attracted enormous amounts of sexual innuendo. It was once said of him that he would flirt with dirt, but in person he presents his sexual status in a clinical rather than a knowing way. He is charming to look at rather than to talk to. What is it about him that generates such quantities of gossip? He says he doesn't know. Does it trouble him at all - the urban myths about his sexual proclivities, the rumours about his sexual orientation and his marriages? He laughs through his nose. "It's a really interesting thing to go through because you have to start to really look at yourself. I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. Does it change the fact of who I am what anyone says about it? If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I'd think, no, actually I'm a giraffe. Those kind of things hurt people round you more than they hurt you, because they hurt for you." But if that's indeed the case, why was it that, after huffing that to deny his rumoured homosexuality would be to denigrate the gay community, he and his then wife Cindy Crawford placed a £21,000 full page advertisement in the New York Times announcing that they were "heterosexual and monogamous and take our commitment to each other very seriously"? "Much of that was just lawyer stuff," he says a little unconvincingly. "That was passed by lawyers who said that the laws in England are such that this is the way you can protect yourself. Plus the fact was that we didn't have the perfect marriage - it wasn't happening as well as either of us wanted - so it was all mixed up in a lot of different things."(Six months later the couple separated.) "Would I do it today? Probably not." The language and systems of Buddhist teaching suffuse Gere's conversation to such an extent that Gere the individual becomes wholly insubstantial. He universalises to the extent that one wonders whether he has any idea what he actually thinks. It is as though he has built a beautiful walled garden around himself. Are there demons on the outside? Probably. "I don't think there's any point where you go 'I'm fine' or 'I'm happy'," he says. "But I have total confidence, I have never lacked confidence, in this path that I'm on." |
| Wearing it Well He may look suave in a suit, but Richard Gere's definition of style stretches far beyond his closet to the core of his being. Story by Mark Seal "Really? Why?" I asked, surprised. "Because I don't have any," he says. "C'mon!" I insist. Gere, 55, has been the epitome of a clotheshorse for three decades now, introducing the world to Giorgio Armani in American Gigolo, giving the business suit a second coming in Pretty Woman, bringing back 1920s double-breasted pinstripes in Chicago - not to mention looking immaculate in a tux with first wife Cindy Crawford and present wife Carey Lowell. "Well, that's because they always have me, like, at an opening, when I put a tuxedo on, and I look good in a tuxedo," he says. "But I have no style. I have jeans and a T-shirt. It's been that way forever: a black T-shirt and jeans." I try a different tack: "When you were growing up on a farm, it was T-shirts and jeans, too?" "Well, I didn't grow up on a farm," he says. "It's one of those apocryphal stories. No. My father grew up on a farm. I grew up in a small town, very normal, normal, normal America." I have a stack of magazine stories all swearing that Richard Gere grew up on a farm. "Every time I tell them [the truth], they don't print it because they like the story, so they just keep printing it over and over again," he says. "Okay, no style, no farm," I say. "But this is the style issue, and we've got to" He senses me struggling. "Well, I could tell the story of one movie in particular, Breathless," he says. "I liked this character. I was sneaking up on how to play him and I didn't have the costume. It was a few days before we started shooting, and the costume designer and I couldn't find a thing. Then we found these green-checkered golf pants, cut tight, and a kind of '50s jack shirt, and it just was this guy. It was just clearly him. And the character clicked because of that [costume]." Clothing informs character. That 's a good place to start, and something that Richard Gere cannot deny. We run through a quick list of his movies, where clothes made the man. Ironically enough, the man in T-shirts and jeans has done some of his finest work while wearing a suit, from Pretty Woman -where he says, "There were suits all over the place; I said, 'You don't need an actor for this; you just need a suit'"- to Chicago - "That was a 1920s suit; I had to lose seven pounds to fit into it, but when I put it on, it made me feel that I was in the '20s"- to, of course, wearing Armani in the seminal 1980s film American Gigolo. He made the character so convincing that men still confront him, ready to fight for their wives, including a trucker who literally ran him off the road to threaten him. "I'd never heard of Giorgio, and I never knew anything about specific designers," he says. "I didn't care." Those Armani tuxes he wears to premières and special events are annual gifts from the designer, now a friend, says Gere. "But, again, I'm not a style horse," he insists. "I hate to go shopping." I ask what his wife, Carey Lowell, who starred in the James Bond film Licence to Kill before becoming a regular on Law and Order, thinks about all of this. "She hates what I wear," he says. "I'll go out wearing sweat pants all the time. She just thinks I don't care, which basically I don't." In his new film, Shall We Dance, he plays a businessman who discovers another side of himself when he begins dance lessons with an instructor played by Jennifer Lopez. He is once again "a suit, a business guy" - a role that will surely perpetuate his stylish persona. But Gere's own take on style? "If people just do something that makes them feel good, that's their style. That's what you respond to in anyone you tend to like: Are they comfortable in their own skin?" There are different ways to showcase style, of course - the style of a great home, a sleek automobile, a well-lived life. But Gere is stylish in a different way, a deeper way, and he found his style through struggle. One of five kids born to Homer, now 80, a retired insurance salesman (who did grow up on a Pennsylvania dairy farm), and Doris, a homemaker, Richard Gere was, as he says, "Normal, normal, normal." He won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. But he left after two years to pursue acting and embark upon a new life. "[I] hitchhiked to Boston and did some auditions, one of them for the Provincetown Playhouse," he recalls. "And I was very joyously accepted there." A bell rang deep inside of him. He says he knew that he had found his place in the world. He still remembers the phone call from the producer of the playhouse. "I could feel the blood rush to my head, that, yeah, this is the next part of my life." But he wasn't stylish, he insists, not when he performed in New York rock bands or landed a role in a post-Hair rock musical, moonlighting as a waiter so shy he could barely take orders. Gere says he wasn't stylish in leather as an understudy for the role of Danny Zuko in a Broadway production of Grease, or when he began appearing in a steady succession of films. No, Gere found his style, his place in the world, in one of the darkest periods of his life, as a struggling actor early in his career, when a mild case of depression led him from his tiny New York apartment into the streets, searching for something. "I was searching like anyone hopefully searches," he says. "When you leave home and the world is not exactly what you've been led to believe it is. There's a certain dissonance, I call it, between what we're told the world is, what reality is, and what our heart tells us it is. And the surface is highly suspect." His search led him to a 24-hour bookstore where "there were a lot of night owls," he says. Most of them, Gere included, gravitated to the Eastern religion section. "At that point, it was fairly limited as to how many translations there were of Sufi books, Buddhist books, Hindu books, but this store had most of the ones that were available," he says. After he'd read the books, he began the practice. "I saw teachers, I went to centers, did retreats, and it started to resonate throughout almost everything in my life." From there, he dove into the depths, instead of staying on the surface. In the early 1980s, he made his first pilgrimage to Tibet. He did this by "instinct," he says. But the trip took on a deeper meaning when he was introduced to the Dalai Lama, who asked Gere what he did for a living. "I'm an actor," Gere told him. "So he asked me this question about emotions," Gere says. "If they were real when I cried, when I laughed, when I was angry. I gave him a very actory answer: that it's more believable from really doing it. And he looked very deeply into my eyes and started laughing. "It was a key teaching," Gere continues. "Even though I was a magician conjuring these emotions to make them work for the scene, I, on some level, had a belief in them as if they were real. If you transport that to real life, it's the same thing. When we get angry, or what we take as anger in real life, the root of it is really an illusion. It's just a conjuring trick." The thought was liberating for Gere, and it launched him into an even deeper level. I mention a line I have read, attributed to the Dalai Lama: Anything that's motivated by personal enrichment leads to suffering for me, while anything that enriches the happiness of others makes me happy. "Well, that comes from, I believe, a ninth-century Indian teacher, but certainly it's a keystone of Buddhism. We're all interconnected, and if I myopically see myself as the center of the universe, it's always going to lead to suffering because it leads to separation, and it leads to the enrichment of this illusion of the ego, of the self," he says. He relates this teaching to his work as an actor. "Any creative act that is not an offering probably isn't worth very much," he says. "I think any creative artist instinctively knows that, whether they're religious or not." Gere not only became a student of the Dalai Lama, he also began taking up the cause of the Tibetan people for independence, traveling so extensively throughout India, Nepal, Zanskar, Tibet, Mongolia, and China that he produced a book, Pilgrim (Bulfinch Press, 1997), a collection of his photographs from his 25-year journey into Buddhism. I ask him about meditation, and he relates another story about the Dalai Lama, who explained meditation in a radio interview. "He said, 'My practice is, I get up in the morning and I set my motivation for the day and then I live my day.' That's a pretty simple outline. But it's also pretty profound. Setting one's motivation for the day is not an easy thing, and it can be extremely complex and intense and all-inclusive. But if you set your motivation properly, which is to be of service, to make your life an offering, to make it meaningful, then every opportunity to be of service that arises, you're ready to do it." Gere's service, of course, is not only spiritual and political; it's also theatrical. But he says that, when it comes to movie roles, he does not plan, manipulate, or search. His longtime agent, Ed Limato, once said that Gere has never given the public exactly what it wants, and he has turned down many roles, including the original script of Pretty Woman. "Life brings so much, and it's better when you're not looking for it," Gere says. "The universe is a very rich place if you just leave yourself open. So much comes." I suggest that most people couldn't abide by that, and instead try to force things to happen. "Look, if you want to play the piano, you've got to practice," he explains. "If I want to be an actor, I've got to learn to be an actor. But in terms of what movie I'm doing next, or what role I want to play, I never think of it that way - ever. I mean, the times I've gone out and said, 'Well, I want to make a political movie about Tibet, or about a musician,' I'll never find that script. But something else will come along that is equally stimulating, and that's what I'm supposed to be doing at that time. "It's like falling in love," he continues. "Someone is there, and your heart moves, and that's the way it is with a script, a project, whatever. If it touches your heart, you act on it." In 1995, Richard Gere met actress Carey Lowell, a "very attractive, fun, funny, intelligent woman," and they married in 2002. Gere was 50 when his now-4-year-old son, Homer, named for Gere's father, was born. He says that he spent the first 50 years of his life "doing me." Now he prefers "doing him," serving his son. "I can't think of a way that [my son's birth] didn't change me," he says. "There's nothing that remains the same." He's still "doing Richard Gere, of course, and he rattles off the traits, the acquired talents learned from making movies: perfecting his golf swing to play a Dallas physician in Dr. T and the Women; reuniting with his childhood instrument, the trumpet, in The Cotton Club, thanks to legendary musicians who prepared him for the role; months of dance lessons to prepare him for his role in Chicago and, later, in Shall We Dance. But nobody taught Gere about style. That comes from a well deep within him, and even Gere, a "conjurer" of characters, of "temporary constructs," which he wears and then discards like so many suits in his closet, cannot deny that it bubbles to the surface and makes us believe. "You're really stretching here, man," he tells me when I bring up the "s" word again. So, okay, Richard Gere is not stylish. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have style. |
Various Articles and Information!
Richard Gere
| Excerpts from the book: "Besides His Holiness the Dalai Lama, my father was and is the most spontaneously generous, responsible, and committed person I've known. I didn't quite understand what that meant when I was a kid, and I certainly didn't understand the special quality of spontaneity that my father embodied. I found it a bit confusing that he would respond to anyone who would call the house with a problem. He was gone a lot doing that. I probably was a bit jealous that he was off helping almost anyone who would call. Later in life I've come to value and understand it more. " "...I am continually amazed that the simplest thought, the simplest action has waves that, when motivated properly, resonate with joy and creativity throughout the universe. I see this when I get a card or a letter or meet someone on the street who was deeply moved by something that I had been involved in. We have a photograph here by Nicky Vreeland of a monk from Rato Monastery. I knew we were helping a lot of people by starting a health insurance plan in the Tibetan refugee community, but for some reason I never personalized it. Then Nicky gave me this photograph of this young monk who had not been able to walk properly his whole life. He was able to have an operation through the insurance plan that we put together and he's walking now and able to sit properly in meditation without pain, and now we have this photograph of this wonderfully happy, joyous, young monk. I didn't do it specifically for him, but these are the waves that go out. As soon as any well-motivated thought or action begins, those waves do have a positive effect on the world. " -Richard Gere, Actor, Humanitarian and Activist} |
Me To We, Finding Meaning In A Material World,
| Richard Gere Stalker Pleads Guilty May 2002 A woman accused of stalking Richard Gere avoided jail Thursday when she pleaded guilty to aggravated harassment, agreed to return home to Germany, and promised to leave the actor alone. Ursula Reichert-Habbishaw, 51, of Kassell, Germany, left the Manhattan courthouse in tears and collapsed on the sidewalk when she was confronted by news cameras. Her Legal Aid Society lawyer, Peggy Bennett, and an unidentified man took her back into the courthouse and out a rear exit to a waiting auto. Reichert-Habbishaw, a divorced mother of four children ages 16 to 22, allegedly called or faxed Gere as many as 1,000 times and appeared at his Greenwich Village office at least six times during the past 14 months. A misdemeanor complaint said she left messages on Gere's voice mail or fax machine, including: "I want to be with you and share your life," "Death seems to be the best," "I can take a pistol and kill myself," "I will stay with you for all time," and "I will follow you." Gere's personal assistant, Karen Klose, repeatedly told the woman to stop calling, the complaint said. Police arrested the woman when she went to the "Unfaithful" star's office on April 30. After Reichert-Habbishaw admitted making the calls, Criminal Court Judge Gregory Carro sentenced her to a conditional discharge, meaning she was free to go if she agreed to leave the country and leave the 52-year-old actor alone. Carro warned her that any violation would result in a one-year jail term. |
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| December 2, 2005 When producers of the new film "Bee Season" asked members of SFSU's Alexander String Quartet to recommend a violin instructor who could teach Richard Gere how to play for his role, Assistant Professor Jassen Todorov was the first name that came up. Todorov, a colleague and friend of SFSU's quartet in residence, is a master violinist who has performed the complete works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg and Schubert at SFSU. He is considered one of the most prized young musicians in his native Bulgaria and one of the most prominent violinists of his generation. From January to April, for up to three two-hour sessions per week, Todorov taught Gere to play -- or to look as if he is playing -- a passage from Bach's Chaconne for Solo Violin for a scene in the film. The film, based on Myla Golderg's novel, was shot in and around Oakland. It opened in November in the Bay Area, with credit to Todorov for teaching Gere the violin for the dramatic role. "I watched his face and hands in the movie, and I was very happy and very proud, to say the least," Todorov said. "He did very well in those scenes. He was a great student. I was there all the way, during shooting. We practiced very hard, and we accomplished a very difficult task together." Gere was different from Todorov's typical student in that he was practically a beginner. Luckily, Gere had taken a few violin lessons and plays piano and guitar. Having learned to dance for his Golden Globe-winning role in the film "Chicago" was also a bonus. "[Gere] was determined to play well," Todorov said. "He wanted to succeed, not just to look as if he played well, but go several steps farther. He practiced a lot. His wife was sometimes unhappy with his practicing so much in the very beginning, but he is very talented. He has a good ear and plays other instruments. All of this contributed to him being a fast learner." Todorov continued to teach music classes and conduct the symphony orchestra at SFSU while giving evening lessons at the Geres' temporary Oakland Hills home. Todorov isn't expecting an acceptance speech nod by Gere, should the actor receive an Oscar for his performance, but Todorov does consider Gere a friend. "We worked on a one-on-one basis, so you develop a bond," Todorov said. "We spent time together and shared stories. We talked about families, life experiences and funny experiences. After all, with two hours together, and lots of breaks in between playing, I was able to get to know him. We became friends." Todorov instructs all of SF State's undergraduate and graduate violin students. He teaches courses in chamber music literature, career management in music, music theory and string methods. Some of his former students now play as orchestra soloists in the Bay Area and beyond, including the Manila Philharmonic. Sophia Yurima, a senior studying under Todorov, said Gere was lucky to learn from her teacher. "[Todorov] is passionate about music, that's for sure," Yurima said. "He's an excellent player and a patient teacher. He gives little details about technique and shows you how things work." Todorov has spent time in front of the camera, too. As a child he played the violin for television commercials and performed recitals on Bulgarian television. He is also a bit of a movie buff, claiming such films as "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," "Life is Beautiful," "The Cider House Rules" and "Forrest Gump" as favorites. Will he ever teach another actor to play violin? "I would love to do it again and could do it even better next time," he said. -- Student Writer Gary Moskowitz with Matt Itelson |
Hollywood Star Richard Gere take the house of TOP-SHOP real estate agency - Zagreb Famous actor is arriving to capital on the 3rd of September and will stay for two months. Grand piano and garden are expecting Gere in his villa in Zagreb. Grand piano and a big garden were the only two wishes from Richard Gere, the 57 years old Hollywood star, who is moving into a villa in Remete in the beginning of September. Spacious house in elite part of Zagreb will be his home in which he will get ready for shooting a new movie "Spring break in Bosnia" about two journalists and a cameraman who are searching for a war criminal Radovan Karadžić in Croatia and Bosnia. Unlike his fellow colleagues, the big star turned out to be a very modest guest. Excursions for the star All of his wishes were fulfilled by the Top Shop agency. The photos of several properties were emailed to the actor, form which he chose beautiful 350 square meter house with large garden and surroundings where he can enjoy his peace. It was our agency that rented a house to the actor. After two and a half months of screening, Gere chose a villa owned by Rihard Klasnic, businessman from Zagreb. For years now our company has been dealing with renting elite facilities in the country and organizing trips and excursions to the most known tourist destinations. We also do private jets and yacht rental, organize seminars, cater and organize dinners and receptions, as well as golf tournaments , said Vladimir Valković, who owns the agency along with his wife Sanja. Along with the house, a short tour of our country as well as excursions to Dubrovnik, Opatija and to islands Kornati will be offered to the famous actor. |
| Richard Gere was a guest at The 20 th Annual Rock N Roll Hall of Fame Induction Dinner, as was Paul Allen and his friend Dan Aykroyd. March 14, 2005 |
| INTERROGATION: RICHARD GERE: 'Sex is just an animal function' Sunday Mirror, Feb 6, 2005 by Words: Ethan Harry. What makes a woman irresistible? Richard Gere: That's like asking, 'How do you make a hit movie?' If you knew, you'd make one every time. There are many things. When you first meet someone it helps if they're not looking at you thinking: 'My God, where the f**k is he from?' One premise I go on, is that we're all the same on the surface - we have the same issues, same problems, needs, desires, hopes, fears, and all of that. Get past that surface and you find out if you really have something in common. Do you believe in monogamy? RG: It depends on what you want. There's certainly nothing wrong with sex. It's an animal function and almost everyone has it, but life is about choices. I don't give marriage advice to people. Have you ever been tempted to have an affair? RG: No. But many marriages are frustrated and having an affair is just a reflection of other problems within the relationship. What sacrifices did you make when you became a father? RG: I learned you can't be nearly as selfish. I certainly have tendencies to selfishness. I like to dream and I just like my own space to play music when I want to. Play the guitar or piano when I want to, ride a horse when I want to. It was all about me - and you just can't be like that. Do you ever regret the change in your lifestyle? RG: My wife (actress Carey Lowell, 43) takes the brunt of it while I'm off working. Being a mother, and even being a working dad, there's a lot to give up, but you gladly give it up, it's not a big deal. I don't go, 'Boy, I really resent this kid, I can't play my guitar now.' Oh my God, you look at this little human being who is filled with joy and love, and all the possibilities. The miracle of that is so extreme. Would you like to have more children? RG: I think we're done. Two is enough - Homer is five and my stepdaughter Hannah, is 14. Any kid is a handful. My parents had five. I was laughing with my mother about it the other day. She told me my father would work 18 hours a day, which monopolised all his time. We suffered a bit, because they were working and weren't around, but my mother didn't have maids or nannies and she cooked all our meals, took us to music lessons and waited in the car, and fought with us, because we didn't want to go. I can't imagine. Is your son Homer like you? RG: He's into very hyper Japanese cartoons, computer things and chess. He's flipping me out because he's playing chess. We played chess the other day and I think a lot of it has to do with him having a computer brain. I can't even turn a computer on. One time, he clicked on the 'buy' section of one of the games and he was ready to press the button to purchase all these things. 'Dad, can I have it?' and I was like, 'No, no, no. Don't press that button!' How do you keep the romance alive in your marriage? RG: My wife and I are crazy about each other, but you can fall into patterns of not paying attention and it's important to keep romance alive. Let that person know every day they are special and you care about them. Like doing what? RG: Anything. Just take that moment to look into their eyes and say, 'I notice you. I'm really happy you're here.' What scares you in life? RG: These interviews used to terrify me. All the press stuff. Terrified me. To go on television was like, 'Oh my God!' When you get older, it doesn't matter that much. It's the repetition, doing it over and over again, you get used to it. OK, you feel like an old hooker after a while - another one, come on then, I can take it... Who was the last person you called on the phone today? RG: Bearing in mind, the day has only just began, it will probably be my wife after I've finished our chat, to see where she is. What was the most difficult dance for you to learn for Shall We Dance? RG: The waltz, without a doubt. Even for the professional dancers the slow waltz is the most difficult one. It's all about this incredible control, because your neck is in a weird position all the time. You dance with Jennifer Lopez. Did you ever step on her toes? RG: We had a couple of moments which weren't great! The rest of us felt like a family, because we had been working together for four months before Jennifer joined us. When she arrived, she was like this interloper who had come into the family and the first day was a bit strange. Did you like her? RG: I like her a lot, but still, it was like a new kid coming into the club who hadn't gone through boot camp with us. We had all watched each other go from really horrible to OK, and we hadn't seen her go through the process, but she's a real dancer so I was very lucky to be in good hands. She made me look good. Jennifer broke up with Ben Affleck while you were filming. Did you give her any advice? RG: No, she's smart enough not to just blab about everything. She has her own private life and private emotions. I just gave her hugs. She appreciated that more than anything I think. Do you think your character is going through a mid-life crisis in this film? RG: It's a story about the dilemma of a man who gets off the train at a different stop. He sees this exotic woman (Lopez), staring out of a window, and an infatuation with this girl begins. She looks melancholy, sad, yearning for something - and men place an enormous amount on women who look like that. He turns all of his internal turmoil into this quest for her, but we find out that it's not really this woman who he wants after all. Have you had a mid-life crisis? RG: No, but my wife did buy me a black sports car recently... RICHARD'S REALITY CHECK What was the last domestic thing you did? I'm very domesticated! I do the washing up from time to time. Who wrote the Harry Potter books? J. K. Rowling. Do I get a prize for knowing that? When was the last time you hurt yourself? Last year, I broke a carpal- something bone in my hand in a horse riding accident. Have you ever worn sunglasses inside? No. I don't believe I have - or will do in the future. Copyright 2005 MGN LTD Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved. |
| Even Richard Gere Gets Dumped They said his marriage to Cindy Crawford wouldn’t last. They were right–but for all the wrong reasons. BY MICHAEL GROSS Originally published in the July, 1995 issue of Esquire Magazine. He grimaces as he shrugs off his coat and sits down for lunch at Il Cantinori, a Tuscan restaurant he favors a few blocks from his Greenwich Village penthouse. It is three days before Christmas, but Richard Gere isn’t feeling festive. For one thing, his back is killing him. A month before, he’d finished work on First Knight, a period romance shot in England in which he plays Lancelot to Sean Connery’s King Arthur and Julia Ormond’s Guinevere; all that horseback riding and broadsword fighting sent the forty-fiveyear-old actor to a chiropractor. But his back isn’t all that aches. A week after Gere returned to New York, he and his wife, Cindy Crawford, issued a joint statement admitting they’d split up during the previous summer. Their relationship, long the subject of an inquisition by the media, has now become carrion. And unlike Lancelot, Gere can’t fight his way back to Camelot. He has invited me to lunch, ostensibly to decide whether he will be interviewed by Esquire. The deal is, no tape recorder, no notebook, no quotes. To ease the tension, I repeat something that Gere’s costar in American Gigolo, Lauren Hutton, had said to me a few days before. “You can only be the sexiest couple alive for so long,” she mused. “It tends to bring out the worst in people.” Gere flares. He’s a regular guy, he insists, his marriage normal, the stresses and strains the same as anyone else’s. Implicit is his belief that everyday notions of privacy also apply to him. But that, of course, is not the case, as recent events have shown. After a dinner with Uma Thurman, paparazzi besieged them, cutting her face with a lens. A few days later, Gere was accosted by the press at the Barcelona airport. It all comes with the sex-symbol territory, yet he still feels embattled and aggrieved. He finally agrees to an interview-but only if it’s conducted in Mundgod, a Tibetan-exile settlement in southern India, where he’s going in a few days for a teaching with the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader whom devotees call His Holiness. He seems surprised and unhappy when I agree to accompany him there. Buddhism has changed the former Methodist from a coke-snorting, skirt-chasing, reporter-baiting bad boy to a sober, socially useful grown-up. His faith speaks to him, answering the questions he asks himself “Why am I here? Why am I suffering? Did I choose this?” Though Buddhism has no easy answers, its riddles and koans soothe the actor, whose livelihood-despite all the applause and perks-has never satisfied him. So I was looking forward to seeing Gere on the one path that has brought him closer to nirvana. Sadly, he withdrew his invitation. So Gere was press-free that week in Mundgod, as he watched the Dalai Lama perform a Kalachakra Initiation, one of the most complex and beautiful Buddhist rites. In the ceremony, cadres of monks toil in eighteen-hour shifts for days to create a mandala of colored sand according to an ancient design. It represents the god Kalachakra’s palace, circumscribed by symbols of earth, water, fire, wind, space, and wisdom. The Dalai Lama then destroys the monks’ work according to yet another time-honored pattern. The point? Impermanence. The Kalachakra says that all is fleeting; illusion underlies reality. Nothing-not art nor beauty nor truth nor celebrity nor Cindy Crawford-is forever. * * * Illusion and reality. Beauty and suffering. Desire and denial. Richard Gere has been swaying between those poles ever since he was a nineteen-year-old college dropout making his pact with materialism, offering up his looks and gymnasts bearing as a sacrifice to stardom. But he has never given himself over entirely. Consciously or not, he has modeled his career on Greta Garbo’s. Like her, he prefers silence; like her, he has an image that is largely defined by sexual ambiguity. But unlike Garbo, Gere got married. And now, his marriage over, he has apparently decided to set things straight. Although he wouldn’t go on the record, he allowed dozens of friends and colleagues to speak for him. Among them is one who claims to know Gere at least as well as he knows himself. Since he demanded anonymity, I call him Hermes, after the messenger of Greek mythology who symbolized eloquence, invention, cunning, and theft. “There’s an element of self-loathing in most actors that makes them want to be someone else,” says Hermes, explaining why Gere acts. Gere grew up middle-class; that’s the self he loathes. “He hated being normal,” says an ex-girlfriend, actress Penelope Milford. So, by age twenty, he’d turned-outwardly at least-into someone else: a brooding hunk, just right for his times, the late sixties. Gere was a little bit Brando, a little bit Dean, a whiff of Clift-and everyone, male and female, wanted to take him home. A quarter century later, his calling card is still his vulnerable yet dangerous sexuality. But it is also his greatest weakness. Some think he stirs up desire on purpose. “He’d flirt with dirt,” one woman observes. Others say it’s a natural force. “Women lined up,” adds one of his costars. “They’d be ducking under caterers’ trucks, diving out of windows, falling like coconuts from the trees. I can’t name names, but you’d be surprised. It was scary and poignant and hilarious.” Straight men like the indestructible rumor that Gere is gay, because it reduces his threat. He is in fact aggressively heterosexual, but that hasn’t stopped men from hoping. “There have been probably hundreds of thousands of wishful thinkers,” says Gere’s agent, Ed Limato. In the absence of hard facts, that turns out to be the best explanation anyone has to offer for why Gere became the subject of the most pervasive, vicious, and baroque Hollywood tale in recent memory: that he not only is a closet case but also was a participant in an act of interspecies romance, requiring an emergency visit to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Though Gere was in India at the time of his supposed hospital stay, this malevolent story has trailed him ever since his back-to-back 1980 appearances as a high-class boy whore in American Gigolo and a conniving, decadent German gay in Broadway’s Bent. * * * Gere has said over and over that he’s fascinated with sex roles and how people transcend them, so it should come as no surprise that he keeps choosing characters who dance in the gray zone between the sexes. More than anything, Gere has played to the ambiguous image others had of him; he wasn’t oblivious to who was buying all those tickets, wasn’t about to dash their fantasies. After all, fantasy is what acting is all about. Gere’s relationship with Cindy Crawford coincided with the second act of his professional life. After a string of flops, he’d made himself scarce in the late 198os while he devoted his formidable celebrity to the service of Tibet. His immersion, beginning in 1987, in the suffering of its exiled people helped him look beyond himself and finally grow up. But not entirely. Though he’d made progress on the road to nirvana, he sometimes stumbled. So he returned to the movies, and when Cindy demanded that he marry her soon afterward, threatening to leave him if he didn’t, he acquiesced. That he loved her there is no doubt, tabloid speculations notwithstanding. The man everyone wanted finally wanted someone else- someone who, as it turns out, walked out on him. In retrospect, what happened seems karmic. Richard Gere got dumped. * * * They called him Dick in the middle-class suburb of Syracuse, New York, where he grew up in the same tract house that his Anglo-Irish parents live in today. His father was an insurance agent, his mother a plump housewife; both sang in the church choir. Dick was in the Key Club, the varsity club, the band, the boys’ glee club, and the choir. He was vice-president of the student council for two years. He played piano, banjo, guitar, and trumpet. He was also a star gymnast. In high school, Gere rushed a fraternity but dropped out when his brothers-to-be peed on several pledges. Says boyhood friend Chuck Parry “So to protest fraternities, we started our own, the Royal Order of the Mystic Carp.” Gere and Parry cleaned up “a whole bunch of fish bones and wore them to school on necklaces,” earning a summons to the dean’s office. Gere was cocky even then. On a dare, he arrived at auditions for a student production of The King and I and announced that he would accept only the lead. He got it, and in the process he found his calling. “He was in a shell,” says Hermes. “Acting let him out.” At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Gere tried out for the lead in a postmodern Hamlet. He wanted it desperately, pacing the halls of the theater while waiting for the cast list to be posted. “He was extremely sexual, a beautiful guy,” recalls the play’s director, Vincent Brann. “The kids in the company-both gay and straight-were much smitten with him.” But Gere had other things on his mind. The dream of every acting student was a summer-stock job with the Provincetown Players, a well-regarded company that didn’t traffic in frothy fare. The last of several hundred students to audition in the spring of 1969, Gere “riveted our attention,” says Paul Barstow, then the company’s co-artistic director. He won a spot in the troupe and then made a fast impression in performances variously dubbed “vivid,” “irresistible,” and “affecting” by local critics. He also became a favorite of the other artistic director, Bill Roberts, who, like the Amherst students before him, was “terribly smitten” with Gere, says another actor in the company. Provincetown, a community as well-known for its homosexual life as for its intellectual one, was a real education for Gere. Says Barstow, “I’ d been struggling with coming out. I don’t think Richard related at all. I shared a dressing room with that gorgeous hunk for a whole summer, but there was never the slightest indication he was gay.” Indeed, just the opposite. When Gere arrived at Barstow’s house, where he sublet a room, he showed up with a woman, who stayed with him for a few days. She was the first girl he’d slept with, but he didn’t share that fact, or much else, with the other actors. Edwin McDonough, a fellow Player, compares Gere to Orpheus, “descending into that town,” where “a significant percentage, male and female, was eager to possess him. It was very threatening.” Barstow agrees. “How do you go about your life and your career when you’re a stick of dynamite in a pyrotechnic environment?” he says. “He wore a mask of confidence. But he projected `Noli me tangere, don’t touch me.”‘. Gere quit school when Roberts offered him a job at the Seattle Repertory Theater. Roberts’s wife, Janet, a literary agent, introduced the young actor to her ex-assistant, Ed Limato. “It was a golden time for him,” says Hermes. “These people thought he was great. He didn’t quite know why. He didn’t know what he was doing.” With his patched jeans, work shirts, army jacket, shoulder-length hair, and acoustic guitar, Gere was perfect for the ongoing part of house hippie; he was hired to represent, as a member of the Seattle company puts it, “what was happening with kids.” But Seattle wasn’t Provincetown, and Gere didn’t get star treatment. Bored and distracted, he left before the season ended. He arrived in New York City in late 1970, moving into a cockroach-infested apartment on the Lower East Side with his lover from Seattle, the rep company’s stage manager-” the first real woman in his life,” Hermes says. Gere soon left her for Milford, costar of his first New York production, a folk musical. The pair shared a former plumbing-supply store flanked by gay bars near the Hudson River piers. Torn between music and acting, Gere found jobs that let him pursue both. After understudying for Barry Bostwick in Grease, Gere got Bostwick’s part, the lead, in the London production. While Gere was there, Milford, a free spirit, started dating Craig Baumgarten, an aspiring producer. “Penny, who always used to think these things were amusing, made a date with both of us when Gere returned,” Baumgarten says. “I ended up buying this sullen young actor dinner.” They became fast friends. “We had a lot of fun,” he says. “We did a lot of crazy things. Most of which I won’t talk about.” Gere had bought a motorcycle in England, and now he rode it all over New York, dressed in black leather. His behavior matched his getup. Milford says that he would often get drunk and disappear for hours. Gere has said he was also taking drugs. When he was abruptly fired from the lead role in a film about street gangs, The Lords of Flatbush, Gere took to bed with his coat on and stayed there for three days. After he emerged, he took up transcendental meditation. It must have helped. In rapid succession, Gere made Days of Heaven, Looking for Mr. Goodbar, and Bloodbrothers. Then, in 1978, he collected his last unemployment check and headed back to England to make Yanks. When Gere arrived home in October 1978, he “found out he was a movie star,” Hermes says. Everyone wanted a piece of him. Says Ed Limato, “There was a lot of attention and, frankly, Richard didn’t want it.” Gere took his agent’s advice and ended up hiring a neophyte press agent named Peggy Siegal, who interviewed reporters herself before allowing them to interview Gere. One writer who passed the audition was Ladies’ Home Journal’s Jane Lane. At the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, Lane found Gere depressed and Siegal “bouncing off the walls,” she says. “You know how some intelligent people act like fools in front of movie stars? He asked for gum. Peggy pulled this wad from her mouth and said, `Take mine.”‘ Despite such fascinating, if raw, material, Lane felt she had no story. “He was terminally small-town, with a chip on his shoulder,” she recalls. “Frankly, I was bored, so I tried to liven it up.” “Does it bother you that you’re viewed as a sex object?” she asked. “Or are you gay?” “You want to see a sex object?” Gere shot back, reaching for his zipper. “He took out his johnson,” Lane continues. “It just petered out after that, so to speak.” At the end of 1978, Gere left Penny Milford for Sylvia Martins, a gorgeous Brazilian painter-cum-party-girl whom he would be more or less involved with for seven years. “It was the Studio 54 days,” Martins says of their impulsive first assignation. “You did things without thinking because you were young and pretty. You’d see someone and go for it.” After Gere’s first Cannes Film Festival (he flew over with Jeffrey Katzenberg, then a Paramount executive, he and Martins headed to Nepal, where he had his first encounter with Tibetans. “In a makeshift refugee camp beneath the Nepalese Himalayas, I bargained shamelessly with an old Tibetan woman for a beautiful bowl, which had been in her family for a very long time,” Gere would later tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I will long remember that woman’s dignity in the face of losing not only her country but all of her belongings.” Back in America, Gere and Martins moved to Greenwich Village, and he began work on the Broadway play Bent. A rave review in TherNew York Times referred only obliquely to the show’s most infamous scene, in which Gere brings another man to orgasm by fantasizing aloud about performing oral sex on him. When American Gigolo opened two months later, offering up a brief glimpse of Gere’s penis and also hints of homoeroticism (”Richard was flirting with his sexual persona,” Gigolo director Paul Schrader would later say, Gere’s sex life took on a life of its own. In April 1980, he appeared bare-chested on the cover of People magazine. The headline called him “a reluctant new sex symbol.” The cover photograph infuriated Gere. He’d asked Peggy Siegal to withhold the topless photographs from People, but she’d given them to the magazine anyway. He fired her, but the damage was done. “Peggy Siegal pushed that so hard and wouldn’t back off from it,” says Hermes. “That creature in the press had so little to do with him.” Poor Richard. The press, the penis, and the iconic roles had created an ambisexual monster. It was then that the rumors about Gere’s secret gay life started. They would persist and recur with a vengeance in 19go, when Pretty Woman was released. “But it was old hat by then,” says Bent’s director, Robert Allan Ackerman. (Some around Gere believe that the revival of the talk in iggo was part of a campaign by the Chinese government to discredit its enemies in the Tibetan-liberation movement by discrediting Tibet’s most conspicuous friend. Gere has rarely acknowledged or discussed the rumor, except to say that denying it would denigrate homosexuals. He has also contributed to it by acting in contradictory ways that suggest he has experienced homosexual twinges. When an attractive gay man bummed a cigarette from Sylvia Martins one night in a restaurant, Gere caught his eye. “I’ll give you something to put in your mouth,” he said, fingering his zipper. . Though Gere is willing to play gay parts-on- and offstage-his friends all insist he’s resolutely heterosexual. “Hollywood’s favorite game is starting rumors about who’s gay and who’s not,” says Craig Baumgarten, now a producer. “If young actors like Richard didn’t put out or they wouldn’t play ball with certain powerful people in this business who were gay, the rumors started in order to spite them.” Jeffrey Katzenberg seems to agree. “The fact is, Richard plays the game by his rules, not by everybody else’s,” he says. “Richard is not beholden to very many people, and maybe there are people that are threatened by that-they feel compelled to try and hurt him.” Following Gigolo and Bent, Gere signed on to play Zack Mayo in Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman. The story of a rebel who is humbled in naval-pilot training and harnessed by a good woman’s love, Officer was a huge hit. It grossed more than $ioo million, becoming one of the top films that year. But the higher his hunk profile grew, the more Gere tried to downplay it-without success. “We’d have interesting philosophical conversations in restaurants,” says artist Joseph Kosuth, who met Gere through Martins. “Richard would be quoting Heidegger or Nietzsche and a woman would reach over, squeeze his muscles, and say, `Oooooh, Richard Gere!’” Those encounters were merely annoying; others were downright dangerous. Once, a truck driverwho didn’t like the idea of a handsome gigolo sleeping with somebody’s wife-literally ran Gere off the road. “Post-Gigolo, he was getting hounded and he hated it,” says Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, one of Gere’s close friends. . Although Gere had stopped taking drugs and drinking, his aggressive, exhibitionistic side still dominated. “He could be obnoxious, a show- off, screaming, loud,” Martins says. “When you’re shy and insecure, like all actors are, you need to do something. He used to take his pants down because it was a good way to end a conversation.” Gere did enjoy some of the perks of fame. In 1982, he helped cast Breathless, spending three days in bed nude screen-testing various French actresses before deciding on nineteen-year-old Valerie Kaprisk~; who cried when Gere left her at filming’s end. “He had things, yeah, on the side, always,” says Martins. “I was not always there. We didn’t have a real committed relationship.” Neither was Gere committed to his career. Indeed, in the next few years, it often seemed he was trying to kill it. “He wanted to play in movies that wouldn’t be big hits,” Martins says. “He chose parts people didn’t want him to play.” To hear Ed Limato list Gere’s films of the early eighties is to hear a litany of disappointment: “Breathless . . . pretty fucking daring, but the audience from Officer didn’t want to see Richard Gere playing a nihilist . . . . `The Honorary Counsel . . . interesting film . . . . Cotton Club . . . unfortunately, there was never a script . . . . King David . . . that took a long time to recover from …. Power . . . good film, commercial failure …. No Mercy . . . not successful …. Miles from Home . . . really the lowest point. His acting was terrific, but it only played a week.” Like his career, Gere’s relationship with Martins fizzled out in the mid-eighties. He dated a series of women, including fashion icon Tina Chow. Her friends felt he took advantage of her, but when she later developed AIDS, Gere lent her his Westchester house as a retreat. She died in 1992, and at her memorial service, he signed the guest book, “I loved ….” Says another mourner, “I’m sure it was well-meant, but it had nothing to do with anyone except Richard Gere.” There was one thing he cared about more than himself. Buddhism “was the most exciting thing in his life,” says Hermes. In the early eighties, Jann Wenner set in motion a train of introductions that led Gere to Dharmsala, the seat of Tibet’s government in exile, and the Dalai Lama. “The whole idea of being famous took on a new meaning then,” Hermes adds. Gem decided to exploit himself for Buddhism. His great achievement was New York’s Tibet House, a cultural center he started in 1987. “He was the first president, hands-on, worked all the time,” says Tibet House’s current head, Robert Thurman, who happens to be Uma’s father. Gere raised and gave money, planned events, and even worked on brochures, profoundly altering the profile of his pet cause. “Whenever people speak of Tibet, they mention Richard Gere,” says Rinchen Dharlo, the Dalai Lama’s American representative. The old, angry Gere still made cameo appearances, though. As Tibet House began to attract other powerful supporters, there were clashes. “Richard has a very strong personality” says writer John Avedon, who’d hooked Gere up with the Dalai Lama. “Others on the board do, too.” Gere finally stepped down as president, but he remains on the board and continues to donate time and money. He was replaced by Elsie Walker (a cousin of George Bush’s), and then by Thurman-who, at the end of our interview, abruptly changed the subject to his actress daughter. “I want to say that it is not true that they are having an affair,” he declared. “Absolutely not.” Photographer Herb Ritts has been a close friend of Gere’s since they first met in Los Angeles in the late seventies. Ritts worked for his family, selling acrylic furniture, until the day that he, Penny Milford, and Gere, fresh from the Days of Heaven set, drove to the desert in Milford’s Buick LeSabre and got a flat tire. At a gas station, Ritts pulled out a camera and started taking pictures. Peggy Siegal sent some of those shots out to magazines, and Ritts had a lucrative new line of work. By 1988, Ritts was arguably more important in Hollywood than Gere, whose career was plummeting. “There was nothing out there for him,” says Hermes. But in fact there was: Cindy Crawford. Gere was staying with Ritts when the photographer’s mother, Shirley, “pushed them together,” Ritts recalls. “He fell in love, and it was very deep and very true,” says Hermes soulfully. * * * Love seemed to revitalize his career. Within a few months, Gere was back before the cameras. Internal Affairs was released in January 1ggo, followed by the enormously successful Pretty Woman in March. That month, Gere and Crawford went public with their romance, appearing together at the Academy Awards. Unquestionably, their linkup helped both of them. “Richard and Cindy together in public didn’t just double the hysteria-it magnified it a hundred times over,” says Maggie Wilde, Gere’s partner in his production company. “But it really, really, really wasn’t calculated. Certainly not on his part.” Wilde isn’t the only person close to Gere who seems to suggest that the marriage amounted to a career move for Crawford. Gere’s next film, Mr. Jones, was in production when he and Crawford decided to get married. Or, rather, she decided and he agreed. “Richard had always evaded the altar,” says Limato. “There came a night when I got a call saying, `Cindy’s very upset and just told me either I marry her or she’s walking out on me. What should I do?’ He called [Katzenberg], and Jeffrey arranged a Disney jet to take us to Vegas, and they got married that night.” After a ceremony in a tacky chapel, they flew back to Los Angeles; Gere had a 5:00 A. M. call. As it happens, in Mr. Jones he played a manicdepressive who talks his way into a construction job in order to take a tightrope walk on a roof beam and then threaten to leap off. Gere had just taken a flying leap himself. Mixed signals abounded. Cindy and Richard went to India; it wasn’t her dream vacation. Then they began house hunting in L. A., revisiting one place three timesseparately. “Separate is the operative word,” the Chicago SunTimes wrote. “The Geres have never looked at the place together.” Finally, in May 1993, they bought a ten-thousand-square-foot Georgian-style estate in Bel-Air for just under $5 million. By the time the house was decorated, their marriage was disintegrating. Nonetheless, that October, People ran a cover story on Gere and Crawford, headlined, SOMETIMES LOVE IS JUST WHAT IT SEEMS. Unfortunately, in their case, it wasn’t. A month later, Gere got on an airplane and headed to Beijing and Tibet-alone. “They were in a lot of trouble,” Hermes says. And so 1994 began for Gere and Crawford with rumors that their marriage was breaking up and ended with its doing just that. In between came increasingly unbelievable denials-particularly a $30,000 ad in the London Times in which the couple professed their love, their heterosexuality, their monogamy. The idea for the ad came from Gere’s advisers. “He was talked into it,” says Limato. “She agreed to it. He had turned the other cheek for too long.” In hindsight, that ad was a challenge the gods couldn’t resist and one their shaky marriage couldn’t survive. Gere flew to London for sword training for First Knight. Then, just before the start of filming in July, something happened. Says a source on the set, “He got blindsided. When they took out the ad, he didn’t know what was going on. He thought they were working on their marriage. And then he discovered something he didn’t know, and that spun him around.” Cindy was seeing a former flame-ex-model and Whiskey Bar co-owner Rande Gerber. When Gere found out, he “told Cindy he was going to start seeing other people,” says Hermes. “He said, `I gotta have a life.”‘ Soon Gere met Laura Bailey, a twenty-two-year-old British model, at a London party for the Dalai Lama. In August, they were spotted lying on blankets in a hotel garden, and later, dallying over dinner at La Colombe d’Or in St.Paul-de-Vence. Despite Cindy’s presence at Gere’s fortyfifth-birthday party and at the British premiere of Mr. Jones, and despite Bailey’s calling reports of their romance “complete rubbish,” rumors of an impending breakup flourished. Indeed, the rumors grew more squirrelly by the day. When model Gail Elliott briefly moved into Cindy’s apartment in New York after the failure of her own marriage in September, speculation began that she and Crawford were an item. In October, Gere took the stage at a fundraising event for a gay-and-lesbian lobbying group in London and said, “You’ve all heard some rumors about me over the years. I guess this is the moment to do it. My name is Richard Gere . . . and I am a lesbian.” That same month, several tabloids noted that Cindy was no longer wearing her wedding ring. The Bel-Air house quietly went on the market. Meanwhile, Gere’s rented house in London was under siege. Laura Bailey was photographed leaving on several consecutive mornings in November. The British tabloids had a field day with that. Bailey’s father, an Oxford don, grumbled that when his daughter gave up academics for modeling, it was “the saddest day of my life.” On the First Knight set, Gere kept his cool. “He’s a guy who has volatility and anger inside him, which is part of what makes him a great screen presence,” director Jerry Zucker says. “But he moderates it, he sublimates.” Becoming a character-especially Lancelot-was a great escape; Gere’s turmoil reflected the central theme of Zucker’s movie, the tug-of-war between obligations and emotions. But Gere’s behavior off the set wasn’t exactly Zen. He went to a party for Katzenberg at Elton John’s home that was also attended by the Princess of Wales and Sylvester Stallone, who years before had starred in the gang film Gere was fired from, The Lords of Flatbush. Depending on which account you heard, the evening either ended with Sly and Gere giving Diana “fits of giggles” or with the two macho model hounds snarling over Cindy C. “I hear you’re sleeping with my wife,” Gere supposedly said. Stallone later called the incident “bizarre,” the accusation “completely out of line-and totally untrue,” and Gere “a coward” and “a confused man” who was “having delusions.” Gere supposedly responded by calling Stallone “a lowlife” while imitating his ‘dese-’dem-’dose accent. So it was almost a relief-and certainly an explanation-when it finally emerged that the Richard-Cindy union really was experiencing meltdown. Inexplicably, Cindy chose that moment to hold a televised press conference and complain, “All these things they write are just lies. It is really bad gossip that is not based in truth at all.” What was she thinking? “Cindy is secretive,” says an executive of her agency, Elite Models. “She tells you nothing.” Crawford’s friends have stayed mum, too. “A lot of people are asking, offering payments,” Elliott reports. “Only Richard and Cindy know what happened. People can say what they want.” One friend of Cindy’s, a man on the model scene, defends her. “Gere’s a boring fucking Buddhist,” he says. “He’s done it all. He meditates all day. She wants to run around and drink tequila and have fun all night. She’s only twentyeight, for chrissake!” . In the face of the press storm about Gere’s affair with Laura Bailey, his friends felt the need to defend him, too. “Richard is no angel,” says one, “but he tried to do the right thing. It’s ridiculous to say he broke this up.” Some of Gere’s friends have started calling Cindy cynical. “None of this has hurt her,” one snipes bitterly. “She said all she wanted was to be married and have children and not a career. Turned out the opposite. No kids, lots of career.” Now Gere even has to worry about going marquee-a-marquee with Crawford, since she is about to make her movie debut next month opposite Billy Baldwin in the Joel Silverproduced action film Fair Game. But while others are choosing sides, matchmaker Herb Ritts takes a no-fault view toward the breakup of their marriage. “They’re two different kinds of people, but they honestly do love each other,” he says. “They went to a counselor, they took vacations-they really tried to make it work.” Ritts adds that the relationship was over before either of them strayed. “Someone had an affair first, but it wasn’t out of disrespect, it was out of need. It didn’t mean anything. It was a sideshow.” But Ritts adds there’s a lesson in all of this for Crawford. “As professional and terrific as she is,” he says, “inwardly she has a lot to work out. She was never a teenager-she’s still a girl. In terms of life experience, she’s very different from where Richard is. He’s spiritual. Cindy gave it a try, but she’s not into eating yak butter. I’ve been on the phone with both of them in tears.” Ritts sighs. “It’s really sad.” First Knight wrapped the day before last Thanksgiving, and Gere flew home to the U. S. On December i, he and Cindy announced that they were “trying to work things out” and had “no present plans for divorce.” Laura Bailey, although described by friends as hurt and upset, was still seeing Gere in the spring. Cindy changed her private phone number and, other than a brief appearance at a benefit (”I’m okay” was all she said, dropped from sight Women’s Wear Daily reported that she’d moved in with Rande Gerber. He won’t comment, except to say, “Just, please, don’t hurt her.” What of Gere? Frank Dunlop, who once hired him for England’s prestigious Young Vic company, hopes he will return to live theater. “He should have played Hamlet,” Dunlop says. Power director Sidney Lumet thinks Gere is poised for greatness. “He’s a really, really fine and underused actor,” Lumet says. `As he gets older, the parts will be more interesting and he’ll stop being the sex symbol.” Just after the breakup of his marriage was announced, Gere met with producer Frank Mancuso Jr. in Hollywood, and the two men talked about divorce. Gere was hanging on to the idea that his marriage could be saved. “How much of yourself are you willing to give up in order to hold on to something?” Mancuso asked him. “One day, you wake up and say, ‘I don’t like myself anymore.’” For a moment, Gere seemed sad, but then he brightened. “Richard saw the opportunities in front of him, and he started to like the idea of being single again,” Mancuso says. After a pause, he continues, “You never learn things the way you want to.” |
| Ron Bucknam ... ...Then, in 1970, he and a couple of musicians, keyboardist Bob Lindberg and guitarist Richard Gere (yes, that Richard Gere), threw their hippie lots together in rural Peacham, Vermont. The three soon caught the attention of shotgun-toting rednecks from the area, who would deliver dead flowers to their door or invite them to go "hunting." They passed. Playing in the sound and spirit of the Band, Bucknam, Lindberg and Gere stayed together long enough to write and perform the music for a rock version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Provincetown Playhouse. But upon the completion of the project, Gere, the future Tibetan gigolo, took off with the tapes. "I never heard from him again," Bucknam says. "Next time I saw him was on TV getting shot by Kojak." |
| Published: July 1, 1999 |
Richard Gere
Has the ''Pretty Woman'' star outgrown playing romantic leads?
By Gregory Kirschling
''I shouldn't get that close to you,'' he says by way of introduction. Richard Gere's got the flu. It didn't stop Hollywood's most famous
Buddhist from testifying on behalf of Tibet in front of the House Foreign Relations Committee yesterday in Washington, D.C. And it won't get
in the way of this afternoon's interview at his offices in downtown Manhattan. He is smiling as he heads back to an expansive lounge area, its
walls lined with books on India and Tibet and its tables stocked with Tazo teas, bowls of nuts, and an open copy of Variety.
Gere is busy, too busy to take a sick day. His life, he says, is neatly divided. ''It's a third, a third, and a third,'' he explains at a low decibel, now
tucked into a big chair. One-third of his life is being a family man. Married since 2002 to actress Carey Lowell, 46 (he divorced Cindy Crawford
in 1995), Gere is now dad to 17-year-old stepdaughter Hannah and 7-year-old son Homer (who, he says, may be the one who got him sick).
The next third is dedicated to his activism. From these offices he runs the Gere Foundation to aid the Tibetan people, which regularly sends
him all over the world. The final portion is devoted to films. Gere is still a movie star, with four movies planned for this year, and another — a
Nicholas Sparks adaptation called Nights in Rodanthe, opposite his Unfaithful costar Diane Lane — set to roll in May.
His latest film, The Hoax (April 6), a larky biopic about a real-life con man, was supposed to come out last year, but Gere was too booked
making the upcoming Spring Break in Bosnia to promote it. Had it been released in the fall, it is not inconceivable that his performance would
have generated Oscar talk. He plays Clifford Irving, now 76, an inscrutable writer who faked an entire ''autobiography'' of reclusive billionaire
Howard Hughes in 1971, and almost got away with it. In what might be a first for Gere, it's a Serious Actor's kind of part. Never before has he
played a contemporary historical figure, or had to watch and rewatch old footage to get a real guy's voice down, or even significantly altered
his appearance — he cut back his hairline and got a perm (!) for the part.
The actor doesn't buy that Irving is any harder to portray than more movie-star-ish roles like the ballroom dancer he played in 2004's Shall We
Dance?: ''To keep a normal guy interesting for two hours, that's extremely difficult!'' But Gere, now 57, does concede that his choice in roles
began to shift around the time he started his family. ''I always liked playing romantic leads, because they're more interesting characters, in a
way,'' says the star of 1990's Pretty Woman. ''I found them interesting because they related to my own life, and my own searches for a way to
make this man-woman thing look right and feel good.
''But now,'' he continues, as he sucks on a cough drop, ''certainly young-romantic-man roles are not appropriate for me. I need to pick parts
that I can bring my thing to, and it's a different thing available to me than I had when I was 26 or 27.''
Instead, this year Gere is playing a wide array of older guys. In Spring Break in Bosnia, a black comedy, he's a journalist hunting a real-life
Serbian war criminal. In the dark thriller The Flock, opposite Claire Danes, he's a cop ''who has a sixth sense about sex offenders.'' And he
chuckles at the mention of Todd Haynes' ''peculiar'' I'm Not There, which he says finds him and several actors (including Christian Bale and
Cate Blanchett) ''expressionistically'' playing Bob Dylan. His character, he says cryptically, is a mix of Dylan and Billy the Kid.
A scarf looped around his neck, black sweater zipped all the way up, Gere is a calm presence with an intent gaze. But ask him if he still gets
called ''gorgeous,'' and he lets loose a rare belly laugh. That leads to a story about a recent press conference at which a reporter told him that
three generations of women in her family are in love with him. ''I got very embarrassed,'' he admits, grinning. Ask him if he feels underrated as
an actor, and he won't bite. ''No interest!'' he says. ''You just do the work.'' He does cop to feeling a moment's disappointment that ''everyone''
in Chicago was nominated for an Oscar except him, but ''I processed that and it was fine.'' It must be nice to be a Buddhist in Hollywood.
''Richard doesn't seem to require the typical validation,'' says Diane Lane. ''It's one step in front of the other for him, without any fanfare. I
don't think he's interested in the greyhound-race mentality of Hollywood.'' Does he think about retiring to devote more time to family and
Tibet? ''Every day!'' he practically blurts. ''Every day, sure!'' But he has a good thing going, and the Buddhist in him knows it. ''Everything is
so connected,'' he says, thick Mala beads wrapped around one wrist, ''and certainly your life, however you define that, has no separations —
this part of my life, that part of my life. It all flows in and out.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gere's Must List
Shalimar the Clown 2005
''I like [Salman] Rushdie. I remember a reading he did once, and I liked him even better after I heard him read his own stuff.''
Letters From Iwo Jima 2006
''Of the movies I thought I was going to like [last year], it was one of the few that was a great film.''
The Lives of Others 2006
''This very German film reminded me of the great period of German films, especially [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.''
The Beatles 1 2000
''I'm kind of a throwback. We listen to this [hits album] in the car. My son, who's 7, perks up whenever we put [it on].''
Old Rockers
''Almost any of the deep blues guys, whether it's Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King; that's where I'm coming from. I'm a
dinosaur.''
Has the ''Pretty Woman'' star outgrown playing romantic leads?
By Gregory Kirschling
''I shouldn't get that close to you,'' he says by way of introduction. Richard Gere's got the flu. It didn't stop Hollywood's most famous
Buddhist from testifying on behalf of Tibet in front of the House Foreign Relations Committee yesterday in Washington, D.C. And it won't get
in the way of this afternoon's interview at his offices in downtown Manhattan. He is smiling as he heads back to an expansive lounge area, its
walls lined with books on India and Tibet and its tables stocked with Tazo teas, bowls of nuts, and an open copy of Variety.
Gere is busy, too busy to take a sick day. His life, he says, is neatly divided. ''It's a third, a third, and a third,'' he explains at a low decibel, now
tucked into a big chair. One-third of his life is being a family man. Married since 2002 to actress Carey Lowell, 46 (he divorced Cindy Crawford
in 1995), Gere is now dad to 17-year-old stepdaughter Hannah and 7-year-old son Homer (who, he says, may be the one who got him sick).
The next third is dedicated to his activism. From these offices he runs the Gere Foundation to aid the Tibetan people, which regularly sends
him all over the world. The final portion is devoted to films. Gere is still a movie star, with four movies planned for this year, and another — a
Nicholas Sparks adaptation called Nights in Rodanthe, opposite his Unfaithful costar Diane Lane — set to roll in May.
His latest film, The Hoax (April 6), a larky biopic about a real-life con man, was supposed to come out last year, but Gere was too booked
making the upcoming Spring Break in Bosnia to promote it. Had it been released in the fall, it is not inconceivable that his performance would
have generated Oscar talk. He plays Clifford Irving, now 76, an inscrutable writer who faked an entire ''autobiography'' of reclusive billionaire
Howard Hughes in 1971, and almost got away with it. In what might be a first for Gere, it's a Serious Actor's kind of part. Never before has he
played a contemporary historical figure, or had to watch and rewatch old footage to get a real guy's voice down, or even significantly altered
his appearance — he cut back his hairline and got a perm (!) for the part.
The actor doesn't buy that Irving is any harder to portray than more movie-star-ish roles like the ballroom dancer he played in 2004's Shall We
Dance?: ''To keep a normal guy interesting for two hours, that's extremely difficult!'' But Gere, now 57, does concede that his choice in roles
began to shift around the time he started his family. ''I always liked playing romantic leads, because they're more interesting characters, in a
way,'' says the star of 1990's Pretty Woman. ''I found them interesting because they related to my own life, and my own searches for a way to
make this man-woman thing look right and feel good.
''But now,'' he continues, as he sucks on a cough drop, ''certainly young-romantic-man roles are not appropriate for me. I need to pick parts
that I can bring my thing to, and it's a different thing available to me than I had when I was 26 or 27.''
Instead, this year Gere is playing a wide array of older guys. In Spring Break in Bosnia, a black comedy, he's a journalist hunting a real-life
Serbian war criminal. In the dark thriller The Flock, opposite Claire Danes, he's a cop ''who has a sixth sense about sex offenders.'' And he
chuckles at the mention of Todd Haynes' ''peculiar'' I'm Not There, which he says finds him and several actors (including Christian Bale and
Cate Blanchett) ''expressionistically'' playing Bob Dylan. His character, he says cryptically, is a mix of Dylan and Billy the Kid.
A scarf looped around his neck, black sweater zipped all the way up, Gere is a calm presence with an intent gaze. But ask him if he still gets
called ''gorgeous,'' and he lets loose a rare belly laugh. That leads to a story about a recent press conference at which a reporter told him that
three generations of women in her family are in love with him. ''I got very embarrassed,'' he admits, grinning. Ask him if he feels underrated as
an actor, and he won't bite. ''No interest!'' he says. ''You just do the work.'' He does cop to feeling a moment's disappointment that ''everyone''
in Chicago was nominated for an Oscar except him, but ''I processed that and it was fine.'' It must be nice to be a Buddhist in Hollywood.
''Richard doesn't seem to require the typical validation,'' says Diane Lane. ''It's one step in front of the other for him, without any fanfare. I
don't think he's interested in the greyhound-race mentality of Hollywood.'' Does he think about retiring to devote more time to family and
Tibet? ''Every day!'' he practically blurts. ''Every day, sure!'' But he has a good thing going, and the Buddhist in him knows it. ''Everything is
so connected,'' he says, thick Mala beads wrapped around one wrist, ''and certainly your life, however you define that, has no separations —
this part of my life, that part of my life. It all flows in and out.''
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gere's Must List
Shalimar the Clown 2005
''I like [Salman] Rushdie. I remember a reading he did once, and I liked him even better after I heard him read his own stuff.''
Letters From Iwo Jima 2006
''Of the movies I thought I was going to like [last year], it was one of the few that was a great film.''
The Lives of Others 2006
''This very German film reminded me of the great period of German films, especially [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.''
The Beatles 1 2000
''I'm kind of a throwback. We listen to this [hits album] in the car. My son, who's 7, perks up whenever we put [it on].''
Old Rockers
''Almost any of the deep blues guys, whether it's Muddy Waters, Albert King, Freddie King, B.B. King; that's where I'm coming from. I'm a
dinosaur.''
| March 2007 |
RICHARD GERE: THE LOST TRANSCRIPT
In the May issue of GQ, Andrew Corsello talks to Richard Gere, who, since his first big role as Mr. Goodbar
thirty years ago, has served two masters: the Dalai Lama and the false gods of Hollywood. Here, we uncover
the script Gere was supposed to read at the 1993 Oscars—and revisit the controversial words that put him in
Oscar’s doghouse
By Cole Louison; Photograph by Terry Richardson
Pamela Anderson boycotts the Kentucky Derby. Madonna shops for orphans in Malawi. Yup, everyone’s got a
feel-good social cause these days. There’s a time and place for taking a stand. And for Richard Gere, well, that
time was live at the Academy Awards. It was 1993 (Best Picture: Unforgiven) when Gere stepped out to present
the trophy for art direction. Rather than read from the teleprompter, he used his thirty seconds to make a sober,
intelligent appeal for the human-rights campaign in China. It’s worth noting that Gere hasn’t been invited back
to present since, though the Oscar folks insist there’s no bad blood. “We don’t ban presenters,” the Academy’s
press office told GQ. “There’s no such thing as a ban.”
Having uncovered the bit Gere was supposed to read, we’re pretty sure he did the right thing.
What Gere was supposed to say at the Sixty-Fifth Annual Academy Awards on March 29, 1993:
Rubens and Rembrandt. Michelangelo and Monet. Da Vinci and Degas. If they were around today, they would
be art directors for films—if their agents could get them work. Art direction demands taste, talent, and the
diplomacy to convince producers they also have taste and talent. Five widely different imaginative examples of
their work are these nominees for best achievement in art direction.
What Gere did say at the Sixty-Fifth Annual Academy Awards on March 29, 1993:
To my friends, I want to say hello up in Vancouver—right now we are doing Intersection up there. Hi, guys. I’ll
see you later tonight. I had a thought about something, actually, before I came out. I want to share it with you. It’
s going to be short. I was really struck by this idea that there were one billion people watching this thing. It’s
astonishing—one billion people watching. And I was curious about what countries this was actually going to.
And it is in fact being seen in China right now. And the first thought that came to me was, I wondered if Deng
Xiaoping is actually watching this right now, with his children and his grandchildren, and with the knowledge
that—that—that—what a horrendous, horrendous human-rights situation there is in China, not only towards
their own people but to Tibet as well. And when it was this kind of…if something miraculous, really kind of
movielike, could happen here, where we could all kind of send love and truth and a kind of sanity to Deng
Xiaoping right now in Beijing, that he will take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow
people to live as free independent people again. So, thought… We send this thought—we send this thought
out. Send this thought. Anyhow…art direction demands taste…
In the May issue of GQ, Andrew Corsello talks to Richard Gere, who, since his first big role as Mr. Goodbar
thirty years ago, has served two masters: the Dalai Lama and the false gods of Hollywood. Here, we uncover
the script Gere was supposed to read at the 1993 Oscars—and revisit the controversial words that put him in
Oscar’s doghouse
By Cole Louison; Photograph by Terry Richardson
Pamela Anderson boycotts the Kentucky Derby. Madonna shops for orphans in Malawi. Yup, everyone’s got a
feel-good social cause these days. There’s a time and place for taking a stand. And for Richard Gere, well, that
time was live at the Academy Awards. It was 1993 (Best Picture: Unforgiven) when Gere stepped out to present
the trophy for art direction. Rather than read from the teleprompter, he used his thirty seconds to make a sober,
intelligent appeal for the human-rights campaign in China. It’s worth noting that Gere hasn’t been invited back
to present since, though the Oscar folks insist there’s no bad blood. “We don’t ban presenters,” the Academy’s
press office told GQ. “There’s no such thing as a ban.”
Having uncovered the bit Gere was supposed to read, we’re pretty sure he did the right thing.
What Gere was supposed to say at the Sixty-Fifth Annual Academy Awards on March 29, 1993:
Rubens and Rembrandt. Michelangelo and Monet. Da Vinci and Degas. If they were around today, they would
be art directors for films—if their agents could get them work. Art direction demands taste, talent, and the
diplomacy to convince producers they also have taste and talent. Five widely different imaginative examples of
their work are these nominees for best achievement in art direction.
What Gere did say at the Sixty-Fifth Annual Academy Awards on March 29, 1993:
To my friends, I want to say hello up in Vancouver—right now we are doing Intersection up there. Hi, guys. I’ll
see you later tonight. I had a thought about something, actually, before I came out. I want to share it with you. It’
s going to be short. I was really struck by this idea that there were one billion people watching this thing. It’s
astonishing—one billion people watching. And I was curious about what countries this was actually going to.
And it is in fact being seen in China right now. And the first thought that came to me was, I wondered if Deng
Xiaoping is actually watching this right now, with his children and his grandchildren, and with the knowledge
that—that—that—what a horrendous, horrendous human-rights situation there is in China, not only towards
their own people but to Tibet as well. And when it was this kind of…if something miraculous, really kind of
movielike, could happen here, where we could all kind of send love and truth and a kind of sanity to Deng
Xiaoping right now in Beijing, that he will take his troops and take the Chinese away from Tibet and allow
people to live as free independent people again. So, thought… We send this thought—we send this thought
out. Send this thought. Anyhow…art direction demands taste…
| Nov. 13, 2007 Mention Richard Gere and romantics get starry-eyed about An Officer and a Gentleman, cynics relish his tap-dancing lawyer in Chicago and pretty much everyone remembers him fondly as Prince Charming to Julia Roberts' Cinderella in Pretty Woman. In his professional career the actor famously played the American Gigolo. But in his humanitarian career Gere, 59, is the American bodhisattva, Sanskrit for the compassionate soul who helps others. For his tireless efforts on behalf of human rights, prison reform, HIV/AIDS awareness and Tibetan refugees, Gere received the ninth annual Marian Anderson Award last night at the Kimmel Center, where he was saluted by friends and colleagues, including his frequent costar Diane Lane. Named for the Philadelphia-born contralto who used her celebrity to effect social change, the award has previously been bestowed upon actor/activists including Elizabeth Taylor, Gregory Peck and SidneyPoitier. Let the record show that the actor, a practicing Buddhist since the early '70s, cringes at hearing gigolo and bodhisattva in the same sentence. But he's nothing if not philosophical. "As an actor, I'm playing at being characters; there's something childlike, not mature about it," he said over tea yesterday, hours before the awards ceremony. With his nimbus of platinum hair and rimless glasses, the dressed-down guy in jeans resembles a hippie with a halo. "In this life, I am an actor," he says with a shrug. "I'm coming to a point of acceptance about that. "I've been around long enough to know that I have the access to speak up and speak out because of my job, so it's important to have a strong career going." When the American public discovered Gere in the role of the sexy hustler who terrorizes Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, it couldn't get enough of his moody, broody intensity. Like many sensible actors, he feared being gobbled up by the hype machine. "Publicity is marketing and I'm not a tomato," he told interviewer Rex Reed in 1979. Gere's star-making turns in American Gigolo and Officer and a Gentleman - roles turned down by John Travolta - reflected his inner turmoil. The camera loved him, but the man with the sculpted cheekbones and deep-set eyes didn't always love it back. As Gere tells it, it was in 1978 that he literally and figuratively found his humanitarian path. "After [the film festival at] Cannes I went to India and Nepal," he recalls. "It was outside of Pokhara, at the edge of the Himalayas, I took a walk through a village. There were no vehicles. "I saw a hand-lettered sign that said, 'Tibetan refugees.' I walked up the path and it was otherworldly - it had a Brigadoon or Lost Horizons quality. Their minds and hearts were different from anything else I had previously encountered. They thought and spoke in terms of community, not of self," he remembers. "When they spoke of 'our minds,' they pointed to their hearts." He doesn't describe the encounter as a kensho, or conversion experience, but as an affirmation that he was in the right place. "There are times when you come through a door or a mountain valley, or when you meet your wife, and you think, 'I'm home.' That's what it felt like." The experience inspired Gere to advocate on behalf of the Tibetan refugees. Then in the '80s, he thought, "I've got to be systematic about this." Which begot the founding of Tibet House in New York. Which begot human-rights advocacy in Central America and Kosovo. Which begot his creation of the Gere Foundation, his personal philanthropy, and Healing the Divide, a nonprofit dedicated to helping communities at home and abroad address social and cultural challenges such as HIV/AIDS awareness. He has given millions, raised millions more. "The thing I most love about Richard is that he's a man of his word and he follows through," says Lane, in speaking before last night's ceremony. "So often, humanitarian causes benefit the celebrity. But with Richard, it's selfless." Gere has been at this for 25 years. Where he was flinty with Rex Reed in 1979, a decade later he had struck a balance between the "surface life" of acting and the "inner life" of the spirit and philanthropy. In 1988 he told The Inquirer, "As soon as you commit yourself to film, you forfeit your life as a private person. But the upside is that being a public figure enables you to more powerfully express your personal interests in the kind of activities you pursue." A Philadelphia native, Gere was born at Presbyterian Hospital when his father was studying business at the Gere was an all-America kid, a guitar-playing, Boy Scout grandson of Pennsylvania dairy farmers. He got a gymnastics scholarship to Amherst but after two years left college to act. And live. After a distinguished career on and off Broadway, Gere became an overnight sensation in movies, beloved by fans but not always of critics who chastised him for Brandoesque mumblings. "He may yet become a Somebody in movies," critic Frank Rich chided in Time, "but not until he stops acting like Everybody else." "I screwed up my career," Gere admits of the mid-'80s between King David and Pretty Woman. "Young men are unsettled." Since 1989, unlike many of his peers, who demand their parts get pumped up, Gere has actually grooved on sharing the screen. Which is why he enjoys most favored costar status with Diane Lane (Unfaithful, the upcoming Nights in Rodanthe), Laura Linney (Primal Fear, Mothman Prophecies) and Julia Roberts (Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride.) He settled down on-screen at roughly the same time he settled down in life. After his first marriage, to model Cindy Crawford, ended in divorce, Gere married actress Carey Lowell (Law & Order), becoming a stepfather (of Hannah) at 50 and father (of Homer, named for his own dad) at 51. Gere's beaming parents, Homer and Doris, and a traffic-stoppingly gorgeous Lowell accompanied him to the ceremony last night. Recently Gere's father showed him an essay Gere wrote at 18. It was about nonviolence. He reckons that the seeds of his humanitarian work were planted well before he traveled to Nepal. |
| Richard Gere Bets On His 5 Month Old Son To Win An Oscar 7 July 2000 (WENN) Richard Gere has become the first celebrity to gamble on his son's future via a new internet site called superstarprize.com. The star bet $15 that Homer Gere, his child with Law & Order stunner Carey Lowell - will one day win an Academy Award. If he does, the site will pay out $100, 000. Billed as the perfect gift for kids, a prediction can be registered for any child under 10 in sports, politics or entertainment on the site which is the brainchild of Irish entrepreneurs. |