Harrison Ford
| Harrison Ford | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
| Born | 13 July 1942 Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | ||
| Occupation | Actor | ||
| Spouse | Mary Marquardt (m. 1964; div. 1979) Melissa Mathison (m. 1983; div. 2004) Calista Flockhart (m. 2010) | ||
| Children | 5 | ||
Harrison Ford (born 13 July 1942) is a half-Jewish American actor, most known for his roles in Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, which often involve "Nazis" or allegorical Nazis as the fictional antagonists.
Contents
Life
He is famous for his performances as Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy and as the title character of the Indiana Jones film series. Ford is also known for his roles as Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, John Book in Witness and Jack Ryan in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. His four-decade career also includes roles in several other Hollywood blockbusters, including Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive, Air Force One, and What Lies Beneath. At one point, four of the top six box-office hits of all time included one of his roles. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry.
- Ford was born at the Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago, Illinois to Christopher Ford (born John William Ford), an advertising executive and former actor, and Dorothy (née Nidelman), a former radio actress. A younger brother, Terence, was born in 1945. His father was Catholic and his mother was Jewish. Ford's paternal grandparents, John Fitzgerald Ford and Florence Veronica Niehaus, were of Irish and German descent, respectively. Ford's maternal grandparents, Harry Nidelman and Anna Lifschutz, were Jewish emigrants from Minsk, Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). When asked in which religion he and his brother were raised, Ford jokingly responded, "Democrat," "to be liberals of every stripe". In a television interview shown in August 2000, when asked about what influence his Irish Catholic and Russian Jewish ancestry may have had on his life as a person and as an artist, Ford humorously stated, "As a man I've always felt Irish, as an actor I've always felt Jewish." Ford was active in the Boy Scouts of America, and achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout. He worked at Napowan Adventure Base Scout camp as a counselor for the Reptile Study merit badge. Because of this, he and director Steven Spielberg later decided to depict the young Indiana Jones as a Life Scout in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.[1]
In 1991, he was appointed Vice Chair of Conservation International, an American nonprofit environmental organization headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, in Arlington County, Virginia. In 1997, Ford was ranked No.1 in Empire's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. As of 2011, the United States domestic box office grosses of Ford's films total almost US$3.4 billion, with worldwide grosses surpassing $6 billion, making Ford the third highest grossing U.S. domestic box-office star.
