Richard Gere

Richard Gere: The Movie Star Who Chose Exile

At the 65th Academy Awards in 1993, Richard Gere was handed the job of announcing nominees and used the microphone instead to denounce the Chinese government's human rights record. The Academy responded by permanently banning him from ever presenting again. China went further and banned him from the country for life. Three decades later he was still counting the cost with something close to amusement: "There are definitely movies that I can't be in because the Chinese will say 'Not with him'." Very few actors at the peak of their commercial value have deliberately traded it for a cause, and fewer still have kept paying without complaint.

Philadelphia to Amherst

Richard Tiffany Gere was born on 31 August 1949 in Philadelphia, the eldest son of Homer Gere, an insurance agent who had once studied for the ministry, and Doris Tiffany, a homemaker. Both parents descended from Mayflower passengers, among them John Billington and William Brewster — a piece of ancestry that makes the later trajectory more, not less, interesting.

He graduated from North Syracuse Central High School in 1967, where he was a gymnast and a trumpeter, and went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, studying philosophy. He left after two years without a degree. Both halves of that sentence matter: the physical discipline that would let him tap dance and fight convincingly on film, and the philosophical appetite that would eventually take him somewhere Hollywood does not usually go.

The Stage

His professional life began in the theatre in 1969, at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse, where he appeared in *Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead*. He starred in a short-lived Broadway rock opera called *Soon* in 1971, and in 1973 was cast in the original London production of *Grease*.

The decisive stage credit came in 1979, when he played a gay prisoner in the Broadway production of *Bent* — making him one of the first prominent Hollywood actors to take such a role, at a moment when the calculation was widely understood to be career suicide. He won a Theatre World Award for it. The pattern of the career was set six years before it peaked: Gere would take the thing that cost him something.

American Gigolo

*Looking for Mr. Goodbar* in 1977 and Terrence Malick's *Days of Heaven* in 1978 established him. *American Gigolo* in 1980 made him a star and, more precisely, a sex symbol — a category he occupied with a certain cool detachment that is now the film's most-studied quality. *An Officer and a Gentleman* in 1982, opposite Debra Winger, took nearly $130 million and confirmed him as one of the biggest draws of the decade. He trained in karate for it.

The 1980s cooled. Then, in 1990, *Internal Affairs* and *Pretty Woman* arrived in the same year and restored him completely; the latter brought a second Golden Globe nomination and became one of the defining romantic comedies of its era. He and Julia Roberts reunited for *Runaway Bride* in 1999.

Chicago

His single greatest performance came late. As the lawyer Billy Flynn in *Chicago* in 2002, Gere sang and tap danced his way through a role that required a fifty-three-year-old dramatic actor to become a musical performer; he studied tap for three months in order to shoot half a day of choreography. He won the Golden Globe. It was his third of four nominations — the others for *An Officer and a Gentleman*, *Pretty Woman* and *Arbitrage* — and he has still never been nominated for an Academy Award, a fact that has landed him on every serious list of the best actors the Oscars have overlooked. In 2012 he received the George Eastman Award for distinguished contribution to film.

Tibet

Gere began studying Buddhism in his twenties, first Zen under Kyozan Joshu Sasaki. A 1978 trip to Nepal with the painter Sylvia Martins brought him into contact with Tibetan monks, and a meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama in India led him into Tibetan practice within the Gelugpa school. He co-founded Tibet House US and chairs the International Campaign for Tibet, and in 2007 called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics.

The professional consequences have been documented by Gere himself, in unusually specific terms. He described how MGM shelved *Red Corner*, his 1997 thriller about an American accused of murder in China: "MGM wanted to make an overall deal with the Chinese. China told them, 'If you release this film, we're not buying it.' And so, they dumped it." He has recounted a financier declining to back a film because it "would upset the Chinese," and a Chinese director pulling out of a project two weeks before shooting, explaining on a protected line that proceeding would prevent him and his family from leaving the country. By 2017 he was acknowledging that major studio work had become closed to him because the industry could not risk the world's second-largest film market. He responded by making independent films, and drew the best reviews of his life doing it.

The activism extends beyond Tibet. He established an AIDS care home in India for women and children and founded the Gere Foundation India Trust in 1999, has campaigned for indigenous rights through Survival International, sits on the board of Healing the Divide, and works on environmental causes.

Why Richard Is Called a Genius

The claim, put honestly, is not about intellect, and it should not pretend to be. Gere's screen gift is a specific and unusual kind of stillness: he holds the camera by withholding, letting the audience lean in rather than performing at them, which is why *American Gigolo* still repays study and why a matinee idol could later play a hollowed-out financier in *Arbitrage* without adjusting his register much. Attached to that is a discipline the gymnast never lost — three months of tap for half a day's shooting on *Chicago*, karate training for *An Officer and a Gentleman* — and an unusual willingness to take roles that cost him, beginning with a gay prisoner in *Bent* in 1979.

The counter-case is substantial. No source consulted here records any authority calling him a genius. He has never been nominated for an Academy Award in a half-century career, and his four Golden Globe nominations yielded a single win. Much of his fame rests on romantic leads in commercial films whose success owed as much to his co-stars and their scripts as to him. What genuinely distinguishes him is moral rather than artistic: a sustained decision, made in public in 1993 and paid for every year since in lost studio work, to keep saying something an entire industry preferred he stop saying. That is character, and it is rarer in Hollywood than talent — but calling it genius stretches the word past its meaning.

Legacy

The private life has been conducted, unusually, in the same direction as the public one. He was married to Cindy Crawford from 1991 to 1995 and to Carey Lowell from 2002 to 2016; their son, born in 2000, was named Homer James Jigme Gere, the third name Tibetan. In 2018 he married the Spanish activist Alejandra Silva, with whom he has two more sons, and by late 2024 the family had relocated to Spain.

He is the rare American star whose obituary will have to give roughly equal weight to a filmography and a foreign policy position. Gere spent the capital that *Pretty Woman* earned him on a cause with no prospect of victory, and has never once suggested the trade was a mistake.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Cicero – North Syracuse High School
• Worked as actor, film actor and film producer