Born in Chicago, Harrison Ford spent his youth in the Midwest, obtaining his first serious taste of acting in theater productions at Ripon College in Wisconsin. After a short stint playing in stock, he decided to break into the movie business. He had a promising beginning, signing contracts with Columbia and (later) Universal, but the STUDIO SYSTEM in the 1960s was no longer capable of grooming new stars.
His first significant film role was a small part in the JAMES COBURN film Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966), but with his square-jawed, raw-boned good looks, Harrison Ford was a natural for westerns. Though cowboy roles were fast becoming a thing of the past, he managed to land guest-starring roles on TV shows such as Gunsmoke and The Virginian and small parts in films such as Journey to Shiloh (1968), but his career was floundering.
After a modest role in the Elliott Gould film Getting Straight (1970), Harrison Ford quit acting to become a professional carpenter. Then George Lucas turned Harrison Ford's career around by giving him a small part in the sleeper hit of 1973, American Graffiti. The film yielded a bumper crop of new stars, but Harrison Ford was not immediately one of them. Lucas remembered the actor, though, and gave him the plum role of Han Solo in Star Wars (1977) after the actor had been struggling for several years. The film was a smash hit, and Harrison Ford became an instant star. He moved quickly to solidify his position in the industry, but his follow-up films, Heroes (1977), Force 10 from Navarone (1978), and Hanover Street (1979), received a tepid response at the box office. The latter film, however, received good reviews, particularly for Harrison Ford. He costarred with Gene Wilder in his next film, the western comedy The Frisco Kid (1979), which also received favorable notices. His reputation as an actor was growing.
Harrison Ford once again played Han Solo in the George Lucas production of the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The film's gargantuan success revitalized Harrison Ford's box-office appeal. Lucas then produced the Steven Spielberg movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) with Harrison Ford in the lead as the archaeologist/adventurer Indiana Jones. By this time, Harrison Ford had starred in three blockbusters in a period of just five years. After playing a futuristic Bogart type in the visually stunning box-office flop Blade Runner (1982), he got back on track again with the 1983 Return of the Jedi (Star Wars III, his fourth top-10 grosser) and 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, eventually starring in yet another monster hit, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
Since the mid-1980s, however, Harrison Ford has starred in several films that have displayed the wide range of his talents, most notably Witness (1985), for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nomination. His performances in films such as Mosquito Coast (1986), Frantic (1988), and Working Girl (1988) continued to add to his stature as an actor. Propelled to superstardom by Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series, Harrison Ford became more selective in his choice of films. He played, for example, the American president in Air Force One (1997), the popular Jack Ryan in adaptations of Tom Clancy's novels Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), and Richard Kimble, the man on the run in The Fugitive (1993), a film spawned by the popular 1960s television series.
Harrison Ford was nominated for a Golden Globe Best Actor award for The Fugitive in 1993 and again in 1995 for the remake of the classic Sabrina. Usually seen as a protagonist intent upon protecting his family, Harrison Ford played a different role in What Lies Beneath (2000), a Hitchcockian suspense film in which Harrison Ford is willing to murder his wife to protect his reputation and career. The film, directed by hitmaker Robert Zemeckis, grossed more than $150 million. In Random Hearts (1999), an excellent melodrama involving the effects of grief, loss, and survival, Harrison Ford starred with Kristin Scott Thomas as spouses who discover that their mates, killed in an airplane accident, were having an affair.
A major departure for Harrison Ford was the humanizing role he played in Regarding Henry (1991), in which his character, a hard-nosed businessman, assumes a different persona under the influence of amnesia after suffering a gunshot wound. Another casting departure for Harrison Ford was his chilly portrayal of a Soviet submarine captain in K-19: The Widowmaker (2002, based on a cold-war naval incident). At the age of 56 in 1998, Harrison Ford was proclaimed People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive," a tribute to his charisma and ability to pack fans into movie houses.
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