Richard Tiffany Gere (born August 31, 1949) is a Golden Globe- and Screen Actors Guild Award-winning American actor. The prototypical dark, handsome leading man of romantic and dramatic films, he first became famous during the 1980s, and has since retained his status as a leading man. During the 1990s and 2000s, he starred in several well-received films, Pretty Woman, Primal Fear, and Chicago, for which he won a Golden Globe award as Best Actor.
Gere first worked professionally at the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1971 where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Gere's first major acting role was in the original London stage version of Grease in 1973. He began appearing in Hollywood films in the mid 1970s, co-starring in the thriller Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and playing the leading role in director Terrence Malick's well-reviewed 1978 film, Days of Heaven. In 1980, Gere appeared in the Broadway production of Bent. His acting career took off that year with the successful film American Gigolo, followed by the popular romantic drama An Officer and a Gentleman, which had grossed over $100 million in 1982.Subsequently, he was the first man ever to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine.
Gere's career in the 1980s alternated between box office successes and failures. After the release of both Internal Affairs and the box office hit Pretty Woman in 1990, Gere's status as a leading man was again solidified, and he continued starring in solidly performing films throughout the 1990s, including Sommersby (1993), Primal Fear (1996), and Runaway Bride (1999), which paired Gere with his Pretty Woman co-star, Julia Roberts. In Mr. Jones, Gere accurately portrayed a high-functioning, creative, and intellectual man with bipolar disorder. The movie was not a commercial success, but was well-received by the mental health community. It is frequently utilized as a training tool to acquaint students and families with the disorder.
People magazine named Gere the "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1999. In 2002, he appeared in three major releases: the horror thriller The Mothman Prophecies, the drama Unfaithful, and the Academy Award-winning film version of Chicago, for which he won a Golden Globe as "Best Actor - Comedy or Musical". Gere's 2004 ballroom dancing drama, Shall We Dance, was also a solid performer, although his next film, Bee Season, failed to find an audience amid the Oscar-contenders of November 2005.
Gere was Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Theatricals' "Man of the Year" for 2006. In July 2006, he was cast opposite Jesse Eisenberg and Terrence Howard in The Hunting Party, a comic thriller in which he played a journalist in Bosnia; the film was released in September of 2007.
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