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| reborn: Harrison Ford in the film Firewall (top); the actor with Calista Flockhart |
It is nearly three years since Harrison Ford’s last movie, the poorly received Hollywood Homicide, disappeared from the cinemas, and since then the actor, too, has dropped from the Hollywood radar. Now, with a new film, Firewall, soon to be released, he is back, and he appears to be a changed man.
It is amazing the difference three years and a pretty girlfriend have made to the once-gruff Ford, who used to shun interviews and make no secret of his dislike for personal questions. Now he laughs, cracks jokes and willingly talks about himself and his life with the former Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart, 40, who is 23 years his junior.
“I’m a kinder, gentler Harrison Ford than I once was,” he admits with a smile when we meet in Los Angeles. While his co-stars Josh Hartnett and Lou Diamond Phillips publicly commented on how difficult it was to get a smile out of him on the Hollywood Homicide set, the British actor Paul Bettany, who co-stars with him in Firewall, says: “He’s very, very funny. I have laughed more with him than almost anybody else I have ever worked with.”
There is little doubt that Flockhart is the reason. Mention her, and he says: “You mean the pretty one? She’s a wonderful human being. She’s a wonderful companion for me. She’s a great mother and a brilliant actress. Other than that,” he adds drolly, “I can’t figure out why I like her.”
Much to his horror, Ford’s personal life made news when he split up with, returned to and, in the summer of 2001, finally broke up with his wife of 17 years, the screenwriter Melissa Mathison. Their parting cost him a reported ?50 million, believed to be the largest divorce settlement in Hollywood history.
For a short time he lived a playboy bachelor’s life, then, four years ago, he met Flockhart at the Golden Globe awards; a few months later, they moved in together. Ford has two children with Mathison, Malcolm, 18, and Georgia, 15. Flockhart has a five-year-old adopted son, Liam. They divide their time between Ford’s ranch in Jackson, Wyoming, and their spacious penthouse loft in downtown New York, commuting either in his plane or his Bell Ranger helicopter, both of which he pilots himself.
Ford is in his fifth decade of making films, having made his acting debut with a one-line appearance in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round in 1966. In Firewall, he plays Jack Stanfield, a bank security specialist whose family is held hostage by a gang led by Bettany’s character, who makes Stanfield his unwilling pawn in a scheme to steal $100 million from the bank.
Although American reviewers have tended to be lukewarm towards Firewall, Ford worked for two years to get the project off the ground and seems genuinely enthusiastic about it.
“I look for a very strong dramatic structure, and then I look for something like a hook for the audience,” he says. “The hook in this case is that people are very concerned about Internet security; they are very concerned about identity theft. It is in the newspapers every day, so the film has a subject that people are interested in.”
With grey hair and sporting a hoop earring in his left ear, Ford is 63 but looks 20 years younger, yet that does not stop him taking advantage of his advancing years.
When he and Flockhart go out to the cinema, he always asks for his senior citizen’s discount. “It’s partly cheapness and partly vanity,” he says with a smile. “I think it’s funny. It’s ridiculous that there is some line where you become a senior citizen. I think these arbitrary determiners of old age are nonsense ? but I’ll take the discount.”
Although Ford admits to being baffled by soccer and completely lacking the “sports gene”, he looks in tip-top physical condition. Unlike most Hollywood stars, however, he has no personal trainer and is refreshingly dismissive of keep-fit regimens. “I do not go to the gym, I do not train, and I am not that careful about what I eat,” he says. “I can’t give any advice about keeping fit. The best advice I can give is choose your parents wisely, because, in my case, it’s a lucky genetic accident.”
Ford landed early contracts at both Columbia and Universal in the 1960s, but, frustrated with his lack of progress, he gave up acting in 1968 to work as a carpenter. He returned to acting in 1973 in George Lucas’s American Graffiti and then, in 1977, had his breakthrough role as the likeable smuggler Han Solo in Lucas’s Star Wars. The film went on to break all records and suddenly Ford was a star.
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The staggering success continued with the two Star Wars sequels, the three Indiana Jones movies, and two very different cop roles in Blade Runner and Witness. Ford also played the eccentric, idealistic inventor in The Mosquito Coast, starred in Patriot Games and its sequel, Clear and Present Danger, and had a hit with the big-screen version of the 1960s television series The Fugitive.
Having appeared in seven of the 20 top box-office films of all time, he was recognised by the National Association of Theatre Owners as the Star of the Century in 1994, and he was honoured with the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2000.
“I’ve been enormously lucky,” he says with a shrug. “I just choose roles that I think will be entertaining and will make good films.”
He has grown a beard for his next role, as New York cavalryman Col Everton Conger, who led the hunt for President Lincoln's killer in April 1865. The film will be based on Lincoln scholar James Swanton’s book Manhunt: the 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer.
Then he plans to return in a fourth Indiana Jones film, despite increasing murmurs that he is too old for the role. “I’m looking forward to doing it,” he says, “and we want to get it up and running in the fairly near future.”
Ford devotes much of his spare time to Conservation International, an environmental organisation that works in 40 countries to protect biodiversity and preserve the rain forests, although he is reluctant to speak about his charitable work.
“I’ll use my celebrity to get a table at a restaurant or an appointment with the doctor,” he says. “I’m serious: these are the practical uses of celebrity. But I do not want to become a celebrity spokesman for the good causes that I may work for behind the scenes, because I don’t think that’s a good use of celebrity.”
His work for CI has taken him to Guatemala, Venezuela and Brazil, but he still has the urge to travel. “I haven’t travelled as much as I wanted,” he says. “In the movie business, we go to wonderful places, get up in the morning and go to work, and we don’t see those places as much as we would like. So I’m very anxious to see more of the world, huge parts of the world I’ve never experienced.”
?The Daily Telegraph
