Celebrities Online - celebz.com

Richard Gere - Biography

Actor. Born on August 31, 1949, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Intense, dreamy star of Hollywood films. The oldest of five children of an upstate New York farm family, he was a trumpet player and a gymnast at his high school in Syracuse. He won a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, but dropped out after two years to become a musician. He played various instruments with country, blues, bluegrass and rock bands, then began acting in and composing for summer stock productions throughout New England. He performed with the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod and with the Seattle Repertory Theatre before making Broadway as an understudy for the lead in the musical "Grease" in 1972.

The following year he starred in the London production of the play, and later performed in several straight dramatic roles on both sides of the Atlantic. On screen from the mid-70's, he first attracted wide attention in "Looking for Mr. Goodbar" (1977) and achieved top stardom and sex-symbol status with "Days of Heaven" (1978) and "American Gigolo" (1979). Gere proved himself a fine, sensitive as well as attractive actor in "An Officer and a Gentleman" (1982) and other films, but later in the 80s his career took second place to his political and spiritual beliefs. Raised as a Methodist, he embraced Buddhism in the mid-70's.

Following a 1978 visit to Tibetan refugee camps in Nepal, he became a disciple of the exiled Dalai Lama and subsequently devoted much of his energy and resources to the cause of Tibetan Buddhism. With composer Philip Glass, he helped found Tibet House in Greenwich Village in 1988. He also took up the cause of Central American refugees, lobbying Congress on their behalf, after a personal fact-finding tour in 1986 of Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. A year earlier, he barely escaped with his life from a harrowing monsoon-season trip to watch canoe racing in the wilds of Borneo. He regained box-office momentum in 1990 with the blockbuster hit "Pretty Woman", and returned as an in-demand romantic lead in the early 90's.

At the 1992 Academy Awards ceremony, he made an impassioned plea for the sovereignty of Tibet, the second such personal political speech in as many years (in 1991), he spoke for AIDS awareness, for which he is a leading Hollywood spokesman). By signing on to play a gay man dying of AIDS, he resuscitated HBO's troubled production of Randy Shilts' controversial book about the AIDS crisis, "And the Band Played On". Married in 1992 to supermodel Cindy Crawford and later divorced.