"I FOUND PURPOSE"
by Dotson Rader
Parade Magazine, July 7 2002


"I never planned on being a movie star," Harrison Ford 
said.  "I never thought I'd be anything more than a character
actor who would disappear in the roles he played.
That was my ambition." 

Although stardom was not his goal, Ford achieved it by
playing Han Solo in George Lucas' Star Wars a box
office smash in 1977. He went on to become one of the most
successful movie actors in the world. His films, including
Air Force One, The Fugitive, Patriot Games and the Star Wars
and Indiana Jones trilogies, are among the biggest box-office
draws of all time, arning more than $3 billion in ticket sales.
His new movie, K-19: The Widowmaker, is a gripping thriller based
on a real event - the disastrous near melt-down of a nuclear
reactor aboard a Soviet sub in 1961. It will be released July 19.

"I didn't think there was any potential for me to be a leading man,"
Ford said, "because I never saw acting as that kind of thing. 
I just saw it as an opportunity to portray different people 
in different kinds of stories. I wanted to play those parts 
because I wanted Harrison Ford to have many lives."

Ford, who turns 60 next Saturday, has lived alone since his 
legal separation from second wife, the scriptwriter Melissa
Mathison, last August. I met with him in his East Side Manhattan
apartment to learn how he had overcame self doubt and why, 
as he enters his seventh decade, he has become a
committed environmentalist.

I began by asking Ford, the elder of two sons of an advertising
executive and a homemaker, about his childhood in the suburbs
of Chicago. "I was raised by a couple of Lefties," he said. "My
parents did not practice any organized religion, although my 
father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. 
But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very
strong notion of individual moral responsibility."

Ford was a diffident boy, yet one who displayed a keen intelligence.
"As a child, I did not feel loneliness as much as apartness," Ford
said. A slightly built youngster, he had boyhood dreams of becoming
a forest ranger or a coal delivery man. "I didn't want to sit in a
damn office for 20 years, doing the same thing with the same people
over and over again," he said. "I was this little kid looking out the
window and seeing somebody with a shovel turn a big pile of coal
on the sidewalk into no pile at all. I thought, 'That's work! Doing
that must have felt good!' There's still something satisfying to me
about a shovel on a sidewalk."

Until he was about 16, Ford was one of the smallest kids in his 
class and was frequently picked on by bullies. "It happened every day,"
he said, then smiled. "But I didn't get hurt, and the girls developed
a certain sympathy for me."

Ford graduated from Maine Townsship High School in Park Ridge, Ill., in
1960 and entered Ripon College in Wisconsin, where his academic 
perfomance was less than sparkling. He sometimes spent days
in bed, sleeping between meals. I asked about his underachievement.

"I was the first of our family to go to college, and my parents 
worked very hard to provide it," he said ruefully. "Well, I
didn't like school! I also wasn't self-motivated enough."

Ford drifted along until his junior year, when he enrolled in a
drama course. Despite having terrible stage fright and no confidence,
he performed in student plays. It changed his life. "In college, I
found a group of people with whom I could work on a common
idea," he said. "I learned to act, painfully, in public. I overcame my
shyness. I found purpose."

Although Ford failed to graduate, he did marry an honor student
- Mary Marquardt, his college sweetheart. He worked in summer theater
before the couple moved to L.A. in 1964. Ford soon was cast in John
Brown's Body at the Laguna Beach Playhouse, where he was spotted by
a talent scout for Columbia Pictures and signed to a $150
a week contract in the studio's New Talent program, designed to 
turn young unknowns into movie stars. Ford hated it.

"They sent me to the studio barber with a photograph of Elvis
Presley and instructions that I come back with my hair styled
like his,"  he said in disgust. "They had this perception of you 
being some green Elvis or green Cary Grant, but I didn't want to
be those peopie. I thought imitating other actors was
a recipe for disaster. I wanted to develop my own way of expression."

In 18 months at Columbia, he landed bit parts in three films and 
eventually was dropped. Days later, he signed with Universal and
landed small roles on TV. In 1970, he played a minor character
in Getting Straight, a silly movie about student radicals.

Discouraged over the roles he was being offered, Ford 
stopped acting and taught bimself carpentry. "I had a mortgage,
a wife, two small sons - and no acting jobs, except work I 
didn't want to do," Ford said. "A friend suggested
that I build a recording studio for Sergio Mendes. That's 
how I fed my family."

"As an actor, I get no joy from being 'trick talking meat,'"
he continued.

"That's how I always referred to situations where people 
didn't want to hear what I had to say. Well, if you hire me,
you risk having to listen. Some people did and found value in
what I was saying." 

One of those people was the director George Lucas, for whom
Ford returned to acting after three years to appear in
American Graffiti, a small budget film in which his gifts
as an actor began to emerge. "I felt useful," Ford said,
"an active member of the process rather than a dumb meat
puppet." The 1973 film was a surprise hit.

Small but notable roles in The Conversation and Apocalypse
Now followed. Then he made Star Wars - and nothing
was ever the same again for Harrison Ford. He has starred
in 21 movies since, nine of them grossing more than $100
million each, a record for an actor. As a result, Ford 
reportedly earns $25 million a picture today plus 15% 
of the gross. What accounts for such success? "Tenacity
has a lot to do with it." said Ford, "and, more often than
not. plain old luck." 

"Acting is storytelling," he said, "and emotionally
I'm drawn to stories. Emotion is still what attracts me to 
a character."

In 1979, Ford's marriage to Mary Marquardt ended amicably.
The union had lasted 15 years and produced two
sons: Willard, now 33, a teacher, and Benjamin, 35, a chef.
Four years later Ford married Melissa Matthison, the writer
of E.T. and other films, whom he'd met 1976 while making 
Apocalypse Now. Legally separated in 2001, the couple
share custody of their two children, Malcolm, 15, and 
Georgia, 12.

When not acting, Ford divides his time between New York 
and his 800 acre ranch in Jackson, Wyo. "My great interest
in the environment came from being in Jackson." he said. 
"I'd purchased land and had sense of stewardship about the
place, because the majesty of nature is so apparent
there. It helped sensitize me to the great needs of the 
earth. I have a sense of awe, a sense that nature is so 
complex and fascinating that it's as close as I've come to
understanding the notion of divinity."

In the last 10 years, Ford has become an activist in the
conservation movement, quietly giving millions to environmental
groups, in particular Conservation International, on whose 
board he sits.

"We are suffering a cycle of extinction and losing species
at a rate that has not been seen before," he said, "and it
is all the result of human interference.

"I have four children and two grandsons," he added, smiling.
"So I feel responsible for tending to things I think I
can affect as a private person, not as a celebrity. I don't
think I can fix the world, but I do think it's our duty to 
attend to it and help in whatever way we can."