American stage and screen actor, known for his gentle good looks and his devotion to Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama since the early ‘70s. He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. At age 50, with wavy silver hair and granny glasses perched on the end of his nose, he was named People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” in 1999.
Because he supports the Tibetan Independence Movement, he is permanently banned from entering China. Gere has expressed a belief that his politics regarding China, an important financial resource for major Hollywood studios, have made him unwelcome within Hollywood. He embraced his apparent exile from Hollywood and instead appeared in independent films that garnered some of the best reviews of his career. Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited Gere as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination.
He has starred in many films, including An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), Pretty Woman (1990), Sommersby (1993), Primal Fear (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), I’m Not There (2007), Arbitrage (2012) and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016). For portraying Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago (2002), he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.
Gere is an accomplished musician, composing and performing the Pretty Woman piano theme and a guitar solo in Runaway Bride. He learned tap dance for his role as lawyer Billy Flynn in Chicago, and karate for An Officer and a Gentleman.
The second of five kids, Richard Gere was raised on a farm, the son of an insurance salesman and housewife. He was socially and academically active in school, where he started acting. He moved to New York City in the ‘70s with a girlfriend and began to get small theater parts. In 1975, he made his screen debut.
He was one of the first notable Hollywood actors to play a homosexual character, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent, for which he earned a Theatre World Award.
In 1988, he met supermodel Cindy Crawford, 22 years younger than he. They dated for three years before marrying on 12 December 1991 in Las Vegas. They separated in December 1994.
He began dating fellow Buddhist Carey Lowell and in February 2000, she gave birth to their son, Homer James Jigme. Lowell had an 11-year-old son from a former marriage. They married on 9 November 2002 in the Hamptons, New York. In September 2013, the two separated after 11 years of marriage. They spent three years in highly contested divorce proceedings in New York County Supreme Court. The case was settled in October 2016.
In early April 2018, Gere married Spanish activist Alejandra Silva. Their son Alexander was born in February 2019. In April 2020, the birth of their second son was reported.
Link to Wikipedia biography