When Richard Gere threatened to sue the talk show host that called him a sex symbol
If you’re a bloke, then someone telling you how hot you are is usually followed by ‘Do you have any other direct debits set up to charities at the moment?’, but not Richard Gere, who once got so fed up with people telling him how sexy he was led him to properly throw his toys out the pram.
Back in the 1980s and early ‘90s, he was as wanted as they come as the star of An Officer and a Gentleman, the film which made millions of women around the globe pray that a man dressed up as a US Naval officer would wander into their place of work and scoop them off their feet while their colleagues wildly applauded. He then followed it up with the blockbuster Pretty Woman, which showed anyone that it doesn’t matter if you’re a prostitute as long as you can find a multi-millionaire to give you a credit card to shop.
It was around this time that Gere came over to the UK and made an appearance on Aspel & Co, the chat show which was like Parkinson but less cut-throat, if you can imagine such a thing, and he was there, sat in between, of all people, Lauren Bacall and Dame Edna Everage.
He seemed to be enjoying himself and gamefully laughed along at Dame Edna salivating all over him, but one thing he categorically did not enjoy was being described in a certain way by the host Michael Aspel, who told the Daily Mail: “When Richard Gere came on the show, I introduced him and at the end I said, ‘He’s done this, he’s done that’, and I used the phrase ‘sex symbol’. 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.”
Which, let’s face it, seems a bit touchy, especially from someone with millions in the bank, the lustful thoughts of at least half, if not more, of the globe’s population and (probably) a massive house. But as the years have passed, almost 40 of them in fact, it seems Gere has mellowed a bit and now looks a little more fondly on receiving the moniker of sex symbol.
He said back in 2017, “I have to be pleased to hear that, who wouldn’t be? I don’t take it seriously, of course. I have never actually wanted to be a celebrity, let alone a sex symbol, but it goes with the acting career if you are successful.”
These days, at 76, he doesn’t have to worry about all that quite as much, although he now has his own actor son in Homer Gere, who is filming a Bret Easton Ellis adaptation with Cindy Crawford’s daughter Kaia Gerber called The Shards. The elder man has instead been busy over the past year, appearing in the CIA thriller series The Agency, which has been renewed for a second season and is currently in production.
