Richard Gere (born Richard Tiffany Gere; born 31 August 1949)

Biography

Richard Gere was born on 31 August 1949 in Philadelphia, and raised in North Syracuse, New York, the son of Homer George Gere, an insurance agent, and Doris Ann Gere, a homemaker. 

He graduated high school in 1967 and won a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied philosophy and drama, before leaving after two years to pursue acting.

He built an early stage career with the Provincetown Players and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, and drew real notice in a 1979 Broadway production of Bent, playing a gay man imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. 

His film career had already begun by then, with supporting and starring roles in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and Days of Heaven (1978), both parts originally intended for John Travolta, who passed on each in turn.

In 1980, Richard starred in American Gigolo as a male escort whose entire identity is built around his wardrobe, dressed almost exclusively by a then largely unknown Italian designer named Giorgio Armani. 

The film made Richard an international star and made Armani's name in America nearly overnight; Travolta, again, had been the studio's first choice for the role.

Two years later, An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) brought Richard his first Golden Globe nomination, and in 1990 Pretty Woman, opposite Julia Roberts, became one of the defining romantic comedies of its era and cemented him as one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men. 

Further acclaim followed for Primal Fear (1996) and Chicago (2002), the latter earning him a Golden Globe for Best Actor.

Richard's interest in Buddhism took root in his twenties, drawn first to Zen practice under the teacher Sasaki Roshi. In 1978, traveling in Nepal with the Brazilian painter Sylvia Martins, he encountered Tibetan monks for the first time, and soon after met the 14th Dalai Lama in exile in Dharamsala, India. "That meeting changed my life," Richard later said. He became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist of the Gelugpa school and one of the Dalai Lama's most visible Western students, co-founding Tibet House in New York in 1987 to preserve Tibetan culture, and later serving as chairman of the International Campaign for Tibet.

His advocacy carried real professional cost. At the 1993 Academy Awards, Richard departed from his script as a presenter to criticize China's occupation of Tibet and its human rights record on live television; the show's producer barred him from ever presenting or serving as a voting juror at the Oscars again. China has restricted his films from release there ever since.

Richard married the supermodel Cindy Crawford in 1991; the couple divorced in 1995. 

In 2002 he married the actress Carey Lowell, with whom he had a son, Homer James Jigme Gere, born in 2000 before the marriage; Richard and Lowell separated in 2013, and their divorce, contested for three years, was finalized in 2016. 

In 2018, Richard married the Spanish activist and humanitarian Alejandra Silva, who runs a foundation devoted to ending homelessness in Spain. The couple had two more sons together, Alexander, born in 2019, and James, born in 2020, and in recent years have divided their time between the United States and Silva's native Spain.

Now in his seventies, Richard has increasingly favored smaller, independent films over studio blockbusters, a choice he has directly credited to the path his activism set him on decades earlier. He remains active in humanitarian causes well beyond Tibet, including HIV and AIDS awareness and refugee support, and continues to describe his decades of Buddhist practice not as a departure from his acting career but as the framework that has quietly shaped all of it.