Richard Gere

Richard Tiffany Gere is an American actor born on August 31, 1949, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the eldest son and second child of Doris Ann Gere (née Tiffany; 1924–2016) and Homer George Gere (1922–2023), an insurance agent with NMIC. Gere was raised Methodist in Syracuse, New York. His paternal great-grandfather, George Lane Gere (1848–1932), altered the family surname from the original spelling of "Geer." Both of his parents were Mayflower descendants, with ancestors including Pilgrims John Billington, William Brewster, Francis Eaton, Francis Cooke, Degory Priest, George Soule, and Richard Warren. One of his more distant ancestors, also named George, emigrated from Heavitree, England, and settled in the Connecticut Colony in 1638.

Gere graduated from North Syracuse Central High School in 1967, having excelled in gymnastics and music and played the trumpet. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, where he studied philosophy, but left after two years without completing his degree. He began his professional acting career in 1969 at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

His Broadway career spanned 1971 to 1979. His first major acting role came in the 1971 rock opera Soon, written by Scott Fagan and Joe Kookoolis, which opened at the Ritz Theatre and closed after three performances. He subsequently appeared in the original London stage production of Grease in 1973, and later took part in the Broadway production of Habeas Corpus. Gere was among the first prominent Hollywood actors to portray a homosexual character on stage, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent. That performance earned him a Theatre World Award in 1980.

Gere began appearing in Hollywood films in the mid-1970s. Originally cast in a starring role in The Lords of Flatbush (1974), he was replaced following a conflict with co-star Sylvester Stallone. He went on to play a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and starred in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978). His profile rose considerably with the crime drama American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man, and An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), co-starring Debra Winger, cemented his stardom; the film grossed nearly $130 million, received six Academy Award nominations, and won two, while Gere earned his first Golden Globe Award nomination. He also studied karate in preparation for that role.

His career continued through the 1980s with films of varying reception before rebounding with Internal Affairs (1990) and Pretty Woman (1990), the latter earning him a second Golden Globe nomination. Gere composed and performed the piano theme for Pretty Woman. The 1990s brought further successes, including Sommersby (1993) opposite Jodie Foster, Primal Fear (1996), and Runaway Bride (1999), which reunited him with his Pretty Woman co-star Julia Roberts; he performed a guitar solo in that film. He also appeared in The Jackal (1997), playing former IRA militant Declan Mulqueen, for which he adopted an Irish accent. People magazine named him its Sexiest Man Alive in 1999.

In 2002, Gere appeared in three films in the same year: The Mothman Prophecies, Unfaithful, and the Academy Award-winning musical Chicago, in which he portrayed lawyer Billy Flynn. He studied tap dancing for three months to prepare for the role and won a Golden Globe Award for the performance. His ballroom dancing drama Shall We Dance? (2004) grossed $170 million worldwide. He later co-starred with Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, and Cate Blanchett in Todd Haynes' semi-biographical Bob Dylan film I'm Not There (2007), in which he was one of six actors each portraying a variation of Dylan. He co-starred with Diane Lane in Nights in Rodanthe (2008), and appeared alongside Jesse Eisenberg and Terrence Howard in The Hunting Party (2007), playing a journalist in Bosnia.

Gere received his fourth Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of businessman Robert Miller in Arbitrage (2012). That same year, he received the Golden Starfish Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Hamptons International Film Festival and the Career Achievement Award from the Hollywood Film Awards. He had previously received an award from the 34th Cairo International Film Festival in December 2010. His later work includes Norman (2016), directed by Joseph Cedar, in which he played Norman Oppenheimer, a small-time Jewish fixer.

Beyond his screen work, Gere is a co-founder of Tibet House US, creator of the Gere Foundation, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Campaign for Tibet. He regularly visits Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. In 1993, he denounced Chinese human rights abuses while presenting at the 65th Academy Awards, after which he was permanently banned from serving as a presenter at the ceremony. Because of his support for Tibetan independence, he is also permanently banned from entering China. In September 2007, he called for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Gere has stated that his political advocacy on behalf of Tibet has affected his standing within Hollywood, as studios have been reluctant to cast him in major productions so as not to jeopardize access to the Chinese film market. He also actively supports Survival International, an organization dedicated to protecting the rights and lands of tribal peoples.