The 1989 TV show Richard Gere threatened to sue for calling him a sex symbol: “It was very odd”
Anyone who was around and cognisant in the 1980s will recall there were often some pretty scurrilous rumours flying around in the tabloids about Richard Gere, none of which were ever substantiated, but then he was, at the time, pretty much the most famous film star on the planet.
So perhaps it wasn’t a surprise that people were levelling all kinds of accusations at him, usually sex related, but even still, he would bristle if anyone tried to suggest he might be in any way comfortable about being top of a great deal of lust lists.
An example of that was when he ventured this side of the pond back in February of 1989, the year before he released two of the films for which he would become even more stratospherically famous; firstly, Internal Affairs with Andy Garcia, and then Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts, one of the most popular rom-coms of all time.
Gere appeared on the primetime chat show Aspel and Company next to Lauren Bacall and Dame Edna Everage, and clips from his appearance show that he seemed to be having a very good time and didn’t mind joining in with the humorous banter one bit. But the host, Michael Aspel, would later tell a different story, recalling, “When Richard Gere came on the show, I introduced him and at the end I said, ‘And he’s done this, he’s done that’, and I used the phrase ‘sex symbol’”.
He added, “After the interview, we had a phone call from his agent saying if I didn’t remove the sex symbol thing, they were going to take it up with their lawyer. He would not be known as a sex symbol. It was very odd. But he took himself very seriously, because he did a lot of stuff for the people of Tibet.”
You may well think that being described as a sex symbol could never really be a bad thing, especially if you made your name and riches in movies like 1980’s American Gigolo and 1982’s An Officer and a Gentleman, which is literally a Magic Mike scene stretched out to two hours.
But Gere had indeed focused a lot of his time on Tibetan independence, more than 40 years and counting now in fact, and so possibly wanted to be seen as more of a humanitarian than someone thousands of married women would list as a hall pass. Regardless, he has been taken very seriously in that part of the world and still pushes for the ‘cultural preservation of the Tibetan people’ mostly through his humbly-named Gere Foundation.
He still does a spot of acting too, although nowhere near as much as he did back in the days of huge shoulder pads and sparkly chat show sets. Most recently, he’s been working on The Agency, the political drama co-starring Michael Fassbender about life in the CIA, which is produced by George Clooney and was created by the British former Bond and Indiana Jones writer Jez Butterworth.
Gere has also finished filming a thriller called Left Seat, which is not about a Labour majority local election, but is in fact a movie about a woman on board a passenger flight when the captain blacks out and she has to land it while a mysterious voice talks her down over the radio. Let’s be honest, you don’t have to watch it to know that nobody involved should be too optimistic about booking hotel rooms come Oscar season.
