The movie that saved Richard Gere from the Hollywood scrapheap: “I fucked up my career”
These days, Richard Gere seems fairly content with his position of being outside mainstream Hollywood looking in. Obviously, things weren’t the same when he was trying to cling onto the last vestiges of A-list stardom that were slipping away from him, leaving him in serious danger of early-onset irrelevancy.
After being fired from Lords of Flatbush after an altercation with co-star Sylvester Stallone, who denied he used their falling out to start the rumour that Gere shoved a gerbil up his arse, the latter finally made his feature debut the following year in the 1975 crime drama Report to the Commissioner.
Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven first brought him widespread attention before American Gigolo elevated him to the next level, turning him into an object of desire in the process. It wasn’t a status Gere was particularly comfortable with, but plenty of actors would kill to be five years into their big-screen careers and be known as a household name and heartthrob.
An Officer and a Gentleman continued his hot streak, getting him on the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘Best Actor – Drama’ in a movie that recouped its budget almost 25 times over at the box office and won two Academy Awards from six nominations. After that, though, inconsistency began to set in.
The Honorary Consul, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club, the biblical epic King David, the action thriller No Mercy, Sidney Lumet’s political potboiler Power, and another action thriller in Miles from Home all bombed at the box office, knocking Gere down several rungs of the industry ladder.
He started the 1980s with a bang, only to end the decade with a whimper. Fortunately, salvation was lurking right around the corner, even if it was as part of a film his instincts told him he should be turning his nose up at. “Pretty Woman is something I never would have done,” he admitted to Movieline. “I had no interest in these scripts whatsoever.”
He may not have been sold on diving back into the world of romance, but Gere knew he desperately needed a hit after headlining a string of flops. “I had been kind of out of things for a while,” he admitted. “I consciously just said, ‘I’m going off to do other things’, and I fucked up my career to the point where people were saying, ‘Well, let’s get Gere to do that.'”
No longer in control of his own destiny, the actor was left at the whims of studio executives to decide his fate. Pretty Woman didn’t interest him, but it certainly interested an awful lot of paying customers after it became the highest-grossing romantic comedy in history, turned Julia Roberts into a global superstar, and dragged Gere back from the brink to reestablish himself as a viable commodity.
