(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
When you think of Richard Gere, a few films likely come to mind—most of them pure Hollywood. Pretty Woman is the most obvious. Playing a suave businessman who hires a sex worker played by Julia Roberts for a week, Gere is at his most debonair and glamorous, even if the character feels a little questionable in retrospect.
American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman helped forge his smooth playboy persona in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which has stuck with him ever since. Now in his 70s, he has been in his silver fox era for decades, and no matter how many offbeat indie roles he takes, he will always be the definition of a charismatic Hollywood leading man.
Early in his career, though, Gere wasn’t thrilled with this trajectory. He hadn’t tried to make it as a movie star in the first place. In fact, he’d been perfectly content as a theatre actor until Richard Brooks and Terrence Malick came knocking on his door. When he agreed to play a young sex worker in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, he had never worn a suit in his life, which made the role a particularly challenging one given the character’s obsession with sartorial luxury. Like it or not, the film was his breakthrough, and he became synonymous with that impossibly suave, elegant persona.
Between An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982 and the double hit of Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman in 1990, however, Gere’s career seemed to take a downturn. He still appeared in nearly one film a year, but none of them were particularly large productions or box office successes. The British movie Honorary Consul, the 1983 remake of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, and Sidney Lumet’s political drama Power were all interesting choices, but they were far more modest in scale than Gere’s previous work.
In an interview last year on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, the actor revealed that the slowing of his career in the ‘80s wasn’t a matter of poor decision-making; it was deliberate. “I think it was a subconscious choice on my part to take a step back,” he said. “I’d just had enough. I don’t really like all this attention, and I reacted like a wild animal – ‘I don’t want to be looked at.’”
As a result, he sought out films that he knew would not feed into his glitzy, suited persona. “I made some choices – not that I’m ashamed of, but they were choices not to be in the big game,” he said. “They were to be in the smaller game.”
By the time the ‘90s rolled around, however, he had dived straight back into typecasting. It wasn’t a conscious choice, necessarily, but both the erotic thriller Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman were right in his 1970s and ‘80s wheelhouse as an actor. He hadn’t wanted to take Pretty Woman, saying that the character seemed like nothing more than a suit. However, with extensive rewrites and a well-timed meeting with the overwhelmingly charming Julia Roberts, he agreed to make it, marking his return to mainstream Hollywood.
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