Harrison Ford

Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor. Ford is best known for his performances as the tough, wisecracking space pilot Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy and as the adventurous archaeologist and action hero Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones Jr. in the Indiana Jones film series. He is also known for his role as the haunted android tracker Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's sci-fi cult film Blade Runner (1982), but his four-decade career also included roles in other Hollywood blockbusters such as Air Force One and The Fugitive. At one point, Ford had roles in the top five box-office hits of all time, though his role in 1982's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (as Elliot's school principal) was deleted from the final cut of the film. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry.

He was ranked #1 in Empire magazine's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. As of May 2007, the domestic box office grosses of Ford's films total about US$3.10 billion,[1] with worldwide grosses approaching $6 billion, making Ford the No. 3 domestic box-office star behind Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks.

Ford was born on Monday, July 13, 1942, at 11:41 AM Central Time in Chicago, Illinois, at the Swedish Covenant Hospital. His mother, Dorothy (née Dora Nidelman; October 17, 1917–February 10, 2004), was a homemaker and former radio actress, and his father, Christopher Ford (né John William Ford; November 20, 1906–February 10, 1999), was an advertising executive and former actor.[2][3] Harrison Ford's maternal grandparents, Anna Lifschutz and Harry Nidelman, were Jewish immigrants from Minsk.[2] His paternal grandparents, Florence Veronica Niehaus and John Fitzgerald Ford, were of German and Irish Catholic descent, respectively.[2] When asked in which religion he was raised, Ford jokingly responded, "Democrat";[4] he has also said that he feels "Irish as a person but I feel Jewish as an actor".[5]

Ford was active in the Boy Scouts of America, in which he achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout, and worked at a Scout Camp as a Reptile Study merit badge counselor. Because of this, he and director Steven Spielberg later decided that the character of young Indiana Jones would be depicted as a Life Scout in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They also jokingly reversed Ford's knowledge of reptiles into Jones's fear of snakes.

In 1960, Ford graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois, where he claims he was picked on by bullies and ignored by girls and also voted "Boy Least Likely to Succeed".[citation needed] He was the first student voice broadcast on his high school's new radio station, WMTH-FM, and was its first sportscaster during his senior year, 1959–1960. The radio room still bears his graffiti. He attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he was a member of the Sigma Nu Fraternity. He took a drama class in his junior year, chiefly as a way to meet women. Ford, a self-described "late bloomer", became fascinated with acting. Toward the end of his college freshman year, he was a member of a folk band called The Brothers Gross, in which he played gutbucket. He did not graduate from Ripon.

[edit] Career

In 1964, Ford travelled to Los Angeles, California, to pursue a job in radio voice-overs. He did not get the job, but stayed in California, and eventually signed a $150/week contract with Columbia Pictures's New Talent program, playing bit roles in films. His first known speaking part was an uncredited role as a bellhop in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966). His speaking roles continued next with Luv (1967) though he was again uncredited. In his next film, he was credited as "Harrison J. Ford" in the 1967 Western film A Time For Killing, but the "J" didn't stand for anything because he does not have a middle name. It was added to avoid confusion with the silent film actor named Harrison Ford,[citation needed] who appeared in more than eighty films between 1915 and 1932, and who died in 1957. Ford later said that he was unaware of the existence of the earlier Harrison Ford (who is no relation) until he stumbled across a star with his own name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[citation needed]

Ford soon dropped the "J" from his name and worked for Universal Studios playing minor roles in many television series throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s including Gunsmoke, Ironside, The Virginian, The F.B.I., Love, American Style, and Kung Fu. Then, he played in the western Journey to Shiloh (1968) and had an uncredited role in Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film Zabriskie Point as an airport worker. Not happy with the acting jobs being offered to him, Ford became a self-taught professional carpenter to better support his then-wife and two small sons. Some of Ford's carpentry work remains in the Hollywood Hills area. While working as a carpenter, he became a stagehand for the popular rock band The Doors. He also built a sun deck for ­­­Sally Kellerman and a recording studio for Sergio Mendes.

He turned to acting again when George Lucas, who had hired him to build cabinets in his home, cast him in a pivotal supporting role for his film American Graffiti (1973). The relation he forged with Lucas was to have a profound effect on Ford's career. After director Francis Ford Coppola's film The Godfather was a success, he hired Ford to do expansions of his office and Harrison was given a small role in his next two films, The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979).