Richard Gere

Info

Full Name: Richard Tiffany Gere
Date of birth: August 31, 1949 (77 years old)
Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Country: USA

Richard Gere has been active for 48 years, participating in 37 movies that average a 6.6/10 score.

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Biography

Before Hollywood had any idea who he was, Richard Gere was strutting around a London stage in a leather jacket. In 1973 he played Danny Zuko in the original West End production of 'Grease', a gymnast turned actor from upstate New York earning his stripes in the British theatre. Half a century later he is back on British screens as a CIA spymaster, having squeezed several careers into the years in between: sex symbol, romantic lead, character actor and, always, activist.

Richard Tiffany Gere was born in Philadelphia on 31 August 1949 and grew up in Syracuse, New York, one of five children in a Methodist family. His father sold insurance, his mother Doris ran the home, and Richard excelled at the trumpet and at gymnastics, which won him a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, and he composed music for school productions along the way. Two years into a philosophy degree there, he quit for the stage.

His boldest early move came on Broadway in 1979 with Martin Sherman's 'Bent', in which he played a gay prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, a part Ian McKellen had created in London months earlier. It was risky casting for a rising leading man at the time, and it won him a Theatre World Award.

'American Gigolo' and instant stardom

On film he announced himself in 'Looking for Mr. Goodbar' and in 'Days of Heaven', Terrence Malick's painterly wheat field tragedy, whose images won an Oscar for its cinematography. He then got an early taste of Britain shooting the romance 'Yanks' (1979) for John Schlesinger, as an American sergeant falling for a local girl in wartime Lancashire.

And in 1980 came 'American Gigolo', Paul Schrader's slick thriller about a Los Angeles escort, a role John Travolta walked away from at the last minute. Gere played it with a physical frankness no mainstream American star had risked and, dressed in suits by a then obscure Giorgio Armani, became the decade's defining sex symbol.

Two years later 'An Officer and a Gentleman', opposite Debra Winger, took nearly 130 million dollars, and its final scene, Gere in dress whites carrying Winger out of the factory, entered romantic movie folklore. The hangover was brutal: 'The Cotton Club', Francis Ford Coppola's ruinously expensive jazz epic, flopped, and Gere spent the rest of the eighties in the wilderness.

'Pretty Woman' and the nineties

Redemption arrived twice in 1990, with the cop thriller 'Internal Affairs' and with 'Pretty Woman'. Gere wasn't sure about playing the buttoned up millionaire, and during a phone call with director Garry Marshall, a young Julia Roberts slid him a note that read 'please say yes'. He did, and the film took more than 460 million dollars to become one of the biggest romantic comedies ever made. The lounge piano piece his character plays in the film is Gere's own, performed live on set.

The nineties belonged to him. He was a defiantly American accented Lancelot to Sean Connery's King Arthur in 'First Knight', romanced Jodie Foster in 'Sommersby', played a Hitchcockian psychiatrist opposite Kim Basinger in 'Final Analysis' and chased Bruce Willis's assassin in 'The Jackal', a loose remake of 'The Day of the Jackal'.

In 'Primal Fear' he played the showboating lawyer who discovers an altar boy client with a secret, launching the career of a debuting Edward Norton. He reunited with Roberts and Marshall in 'Runaway Bride' in 1999, the year People magazine crowned him Sexiest Man Alive.

'Chicago' and the Oscar that never came

In 2002 he learned to tap dance to play Billy Flynn, yet another part Travolta had let slip, in 'Chicago', alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger. The musical swept six Oscars including Best Picture, and Gere took the Golden Globe for best actor in a comedy or musical. Astonishingly, that remains his ceiling: he has never received an Oscar nomination, a fact regularly cited among the Academy's great oversights.

The same year he and Diane Lane played the unravelling couple of 'Unfaithful', a pairing they repeated in 'Nights in Rodanthe'. Todd Haynes made him one of six Bob Dylans in 'I'm Not There', and he starred in and produced the tearjerker 'Hachiko: A Dog's Story', and joined Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in the very British ensemble of 'The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel'.

Along the way he played Clifford Irving, the writer who sold publishers a fake Howard Hughes autobiography, in 'The Hoax', directed by Lasse Hallström, hunted a Serbian war criminal as a washed up reporter in 'The Hunting Party' with Terrence Howard, and romanced Winona Ryder in 'Autumn in New York'.

Later he chose smaller, sharper films: a cornered hedge fund boss in 'Arbitrage', which brought another Golden Globe nomination, a homeless man drifting through New York in 'Time Out of Mind', which he also produced, and the title hustler of 'Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall Of a New York Fixer'. While shooting Time Out of Mind in character on the street, a passing tourist handed him her leftover pizza without recognising him, a story he has told ever since.

There was still time for a maverick psychiatrist in 'Three Christs' and a wedding comedy alongside Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon, 'Maybe I do'. Television finally tempted him with 'MotherFatherSon' on BBC Two, playing a media mogul opposite Helen McCrory in his first major series role. Since 2024 he has played Bosko, the CIA's London station chief, opposite Michael Fassbender and Jeffrey Wright in the spy drama 'The Agency', filmed in London, whose second season landed in June 2026.

On the big screen, 'Oh, Canada' reunited him with Schrader 44 years after 'American Gigolo' and took him to Cannes, with Uma Thurman and Jacob Elordi playing his younger self.

Buddhism and a ban from China

Gere found Zen Buddhism in his twenties, an interest a 1978 trip to Nepal turned into something deeper, and he later became a devoted student of the Dalai Lama. He helped found Tibet House in New York in 1987 and has fronted the Tibetan cause for decades. Presenting at the 1993 Oscars, he tore up the script to denounce China's occupation of Tibet: the Academy banned him from its ceremonies for years, and China barred him from the country outright.

The Academy's ban quietly lapsed, and he was back on the Oscars stage with his 'Chicago' castmates in 2013. China's never did: he maintains the activism has cost him studio roles, and 'Red Corner', in which he played an American framed for murder in Beijing, only deepened the rift.

The commitment runs wider than Tibet. He chairs the board of the International Campaign for Tibet, has funded AIDS care in India, campaigns for homeless people, and in 2024 produced 'Wisdom of Happiness', a documentary distilling the Dalai Lama's teachings.

Three marriages and a move to Madrid

His love life has generated as much ink as his films. In 1991 he eloped to Las Vegas with supermodel Cindy Crawford, 16 years his junior. The tabloid pressure grew so intense that in 1994 the couple spent 30,000 dollars on a full page advert in The Times declaring themselves heterosexual, monogamous and happily married. The idea, Crawford later admitted, was her husband's. They announced their separation months later and divorced in 1995.

In 2002 he married actress Carey Lowell, mother of his eldest son Homer, born in 2000 and named after Gere's father; the marriage ended in 2016 after a drawn out split. In 2018 he wed Alejandra Silva, a Galician publicist more than three decades his junior and a homelessness campaigner after his own heart, and they have two sons, Alexander and James, born in 2019 and 2020.

In November 2024 the family left the United States and settled in Madrid, his wife's home country, where Spain promptly adopted him: the Spanish film academy handed him an honorary Goya within months, and he joked as he collected it that he really owed the award to having married a Galician, before turning serious with a speech blunt enough to make headlines worldwide, and in 2026 he popped up in a documentary celebrating a century of Barcelona's Verdi cinemas.

Now nearing 77, the man once sold as Hollywood's ultimate heartthrob raises his young sons in the Spanish capital and flies to London to play spymasters. He has rarely seemed happier.