Biography of Richard Gere

Richard Tiffany Gere is an American actor and producer. He began in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and a starring role in Days of Heaven. He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo, which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. He went on to star in many well-received films, including An Officer and a Gentleman , The Cotton Club, Pretty Woman, Sommersby, Primal Fear, Runaway Bride, I'm Not There, Arbitrage and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer. For portraying Billy Flynn in the Academy Award-winning musical Chicago, he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.

Gere was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; he grew up in Syracuse, New York. His mother, Doris Ann, was a housewife. His father, Homer George Gere , was an insurance agent for the Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and had originally intended to become a minister. Gere is their eldest son and second child.

His paternal great-grandfather George Lane Gere had changed the spelling of the surname from "Geer". The direct paternal ancestor is George Geer along with his brother Thomas from Heavitree, Devon, England who settled in Connecticut Colony in 1638. Both of his parents were Mayflower descendants; Gere's ancestors include Pilgrims Francis Eaton, John Billington, George Soule, Richard Warren, Degory Priest, Francis Cooke, and William Brewster.

In 1967, Gere graduated from North Syracuse Central High School, where he excelled at gymnastics and music and played the trumpet. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, majoring in philosophy; after two years, he left and did not graduate.

Gere first worked professionally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1969, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His first major acting role was in the original London stage version of Grease, in 1973. Gere was one of the first notable Hollywood actors to play a homosexual character, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent; Gere's performance earned him a Theatre World Award.