Harrison Ford was actually considered Hollywood unfit. The fact that he made it to the top is thanks to his mouth – and his carpentry trade. On July 13 he will be 80 years old.
When Harrison Ford turns 80 this Wednesday, one of Hollywood’s most commercially successful actors will be looking back on a career spanning decades. With more than 60 films of various genres, he brought in billions.
In fact, in his early years in Hollywood, a studio manager snapped at him that he would “never make it in this business.” Ford has no pronounced star qualities. Neither looks nor acting skills of the taciturn mime are exceptional. Rather, Ford’s secret to success is that he endured a year-long dry spell in acting and then was in the right place at the right time.
Many fans know him from “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” – but the series of his successful films is much longer and also includes character roles. He never got an Oscar. Just a few nominations, that’s it. Ford mostly starred in funny, entertaining films. What’s the point of an Oscar when you have millions of fans around the world?
For many years, Harrison Ford was the prototype of the unsuccessful actor
This success was not in sight for a long time at a young age. Born in Chicago on July 13, 1942, Harrison Ford was 30 after a depressing period of mediocre roles in Hollywood. Acting courses at university had given him the idea of a film career, but it just didn’t take off. He often didn’t even appear in the credits.
His talent for carpentry was more pronounced, and after several unsuccessful years as an actor, this finally brought him enough money to support his then wife and two children.
It was a coincidence that he finally became world famous: the talented carpenter and little-known actor met filmmaker George Lucas on a construction site at Goldwyn Studios. Ford later said that encounter was the source “from which my whole career sprang”.
Filmmaker Lucas probably had a hunch that this Harrison Ford could do more than just assemble boards: In 1973, Ford got a small role in Lucas’ second film “American Graffiti”, a low-budget production. The two became friends, and Lucas brought Ford together with director Francis Ford Coppola, who hired Ford for the thriller The Dialogue (1974) and later the anti-war film Apocalypse Now (1979).
He aped the “Star Wars” contestants – and then got the role himself
However, the big breakthrough came by accident: when Harrison Ford was building a library for Lucas, he imitated the actors who had auditioned for Lucas’ space adventure “Star Wars”. Lucas was amazed: Now he had found his Han Solo, the cynical space smuggler in the “Star Wars” adventure. Ford became a world star in 1977 at the age of 35. “It’s a silly movie, but it’s beautifully done,” Ford once told the New York Times.
The success opened up new possibilities for Ford. Steven Spielberg cast him as the whip-wielding archaeologist Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). This embodies a new type of action hero who also shows weaknesses – for example fear of snakes.
Ford was kept busy for a long time with his big roles Han Solo and Indiana Jones alone. In 1980, 1983 and 2015 he starred in three other “Star Wars” films. He made four Indiana Jones films by 2008, and a sequel is due to hit the cinemas next year. Ford also made a sequel to Ridley Scott’s cult film “Blade Runner”: In 2017 “Blade Runner 2049” was released, starring Ford and Ryan Gosling.
Star hype isn’t Ford’s thing. He described the “loss of anonymity” caused by his film successes as a “nightmare”. The father of five children has always tried to seal off his private life as much as possible. However, the expensive divorce from his second wife, the screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and the liaison with the much younger actress Calista Flockhart (“Ally McBeal”) made headlines. They met at the Golden Globe Gala in 2002, and the couple married eight years later. They have an adopted adult son and live part-time on a ranch in the Wyoming mountains.
Harrison Ford is a fitness freak and adventurer
At the same time, as in many of his films, Ford is an adventurer. As a hobby pilot, he repeatedly made headlines with his flying accidents. But the actor, with the prominent scar on his chin from an early car accident, has always bounced back from crash landings.
Mads Mikkelsen, one of his co-stars in “Indiana Jones 5”, recently attested to Ford’s enormous physical fitness. “Harrison is a monster, a very nice monster,” said the Dane in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter in April. On the first day of shooting, a night shoot, they worked until five in the morning. “And then he (Ford) got on his mountain bike and cycled 50 kilometers,” said Mikkelsen.
Ford is known for performing many of his own stunts on film. The actor sustained a shoulder injury while rehearsing for a fight scene last June. But soon he was back in front of the camera.
Source: Stern
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