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Actress Jill Hennessy is the firt
to admit that the time she spent filming Autumn in New York
this fall didn't exactly constitute hard labor. Sure, she had to
scramble down a ladder while dressed in heels and a full length
evening gown. But this one was a gig with great
benefits-and we're not talking 401(k). Richard Gere, as her
playboy ex-boyfriend, was positioned directly above her.
"There was a moment where I'm looking up at him from a
rather low perspective," says Hennessy. "And I had,
shall we say, an exceptional view. I'm thinking I really
hve to thank God for this moment. How lucky am I? I would have
paid them to work in this movie."
Who wouldn't? Certainly not his devoted fans who mob the set
daily. "He was being filmed inside a taxi," marvels
Joan Chen, who is directing the romance, due out next fall,
"and all at once these women began to yell, 'It's Richard
Gere!' Some were just squeezing their hands and holding their
heads and trying to get a better look. You see it
everyday."
Actually, gere has seen it for decades. From his career-making
role as the brooding stud-for-hire who showed us his buff stuff
in 1980's American Gigolo to his crowd-pleasing
performance as the rakish reporter who had us screaming
"Wrong way!" at a fleeing Julia Roberts in last
summer's Runaway Bride, the 5'10" actor has had a
hypnotic efect on women. "It happens everywhere," says
his close friend and 1986 Power costar Cate Capshaw.
"At restaraunts, walking down the street, they're passing
notes to the table, they're sending flowers."
A remarkably fit 50, Gere appeals to females who wren't even born
when he launched his career in 1969. Whats more: He knows it.
"It's not that far fetched," he told Women's Wear
Daily with characteristic cockiness when asked about the
22-year age distance between him and his Autumn costar
Winona Ryder, 28. "No one would say anything if I were
involved with a woman that age."
It is exactly that swaggering confidence that has kept fans in
his thrall for more then 20 years. It's true that the tresses
have silvered. And the once angry young man is now a devout
Buddhist who meditates regularly and campaigns tirelessly to
free Tibet from China. His close relationship with the Dalai
Lama, whom he reportedly met through his friend, Rolling
Stone publisher Jann Wenner, in 1983, has added another
dimension to his character.
But within this mellow fellow is the soul of a rebel.
Free-spirited and dangerously charming, Gere is the bad boy
woman love to love-even though he's bound to break a few hearts.
"Richard is kind of a Persian cat," says his 1995 First
Knight costar Julia Ormond. "You want the cat to give
you its attention, and the cat is very independent. But when the
cat wants it from you, it's irresistible."
Just ask Gere's ex-wife Cindy Crawford, who, on the brink of her
betrothel to Rande Gerber, admitted that she still couldn't
imagine talking to Gere on the phone. "It's hard," she
told Redbook in August 1997. "It's kind of like, I
don't want to fall back in love with him."
Crawford's loss has been Carey Lowell's gain. The 38-year-old
former Law & Order actress is expecting Gere's baby
early next year. "[It's] one of the real joys in my life
right now," the actor told Larry King in August. But if
Gere has found his soulmate, he is also holding on to his
freedom. The relationship succeeds, says pal Sharon Simonaire, a
New York City interior designer, because "Carey lets him be
who he is and loves him for it. She doesn't want him to
change."The fact that Gere can't be tamed is what drives
women wild. When actress Brooke Adams, who would later work with
him in Days of Heaven, first encountered Gere at a downtown
Manhatten party in the early 1970's, "he was surely,
mysterious, angry," she recalls. "He was my friend's
boyfriend, but I thought he was the sexiest man alive. When he
puts his attention on you, you feel like you're in this huge
spotlight."
Time has not diminished his charms. "He listens to
you," says Laura Linney, his costar in 1996's Primal
Fear. "Right off, he is interested in who you are and
how you got there."
Bai Ling, who starred with Gere in 1997's Red Corner, was
taken by "the light that comes out of his smile."
At their first meeting, "Richard gave me a very tight, warm
hug that took all my stress away," she recalls. Later he
subjected her to tickling attacks that ruined at least a few
takes. He even introduced her to his folks. On the evening of Red
Corner's Manhatten premiere, Ling satat the piano in the
actor's Greenwich Village pad and accompanied them on a chorus
of "Home on the Range."
It was only 200 miles away in Syracuse that Homer Gere, 77, a
retired insurance salesman, and Doris, 75, a homemaker, raised
their five children. Second born Richard was on North Syracuse
Central High School's gymnastics, lacrosse and ski teams and
played trumpet in the band. "He was a phenomenal gymanast,
but you wouldn't call him a jock; he had a lot of friends, but
he wasn't into being superpopular," recalls classmate Chuck
Perry, now a Syracuse minister, who used to play Bob Dylan songs
on his guitar with Gere after school. Girls were drawn to the
self-assured idealist who favored jeans and Army surplus
jackets. Gere dated only the brightest ones, like steady Diane
Fredricks. "We went to the movies a lot," Fredricks,
now married and living in New Hampshire, told PEOPLE in 1984.
"It was always old fims and monster movies. People tend to
think of him as a sex object. I never thought of him that way.
He was too intelligent for that." After graduating in 1967,
Gere accepted a gymnastics scholarship to the University of
Massachusetts Amherst, where he majored in philosophy. But he
fell in love with acting and dropped out in 1969 to pursue the
profession full time. Though he spent a few years in New York
City as the proverbial starving artist, he was never starved for
attention. When actress Penelope Milford met Gere on the set of
an Off-Broadway musical in 1971, she says, "he had already
dated all the girls in the cast," including costar and
future disco diva Vicki Sue Robinson. "Vicki Sue said to
me, 'Watch out. He'll love you and leave you," recalls
Milford, who dated Gere for seven years. "I was like, 'not
me.' But he was real nice to me, then all of a sudden he started
acting aloof, and that was the hook."
The women kept coming. Actress Sally Kirkland recalls the
still-unknown Gere crashing a star-studded party she was
throwing for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in the mid 1970's.
"Joni Mitchell was there, and Donovan. Mick Jagger crashed
too. But as Richard walked in, I just stopped. I was supposed to
be greeting people but I couldn't. I was just mesmerized."
So was fashion designer Dian Von Furstenberg when she met Gere
at a Thanksgiving party a few years later. "He walked like
a biker, and that attracted me," she says. "I knew I
was going to get my hands on him. I seduced him."
Brazilian artist Sylvia Martins, who came under Gere's spell in
the 1980's, says their romance thrived for seven years because
"we're both very independent and we loved to explore."
Together they traveled to exotic locales as the jungles of
Borneo, where they crash-landed in a helicopter among native
tribes, and the island of Bali, where Gere went off to meditate
alone on a volcano. NEXT
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