Can Harrison Ford help and motivate you?

Now in his 60s, actor Harrison Ford reflects on a life that grew from modest expectation to unexpected stardom and a new sense of responsibility

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 then 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, earning more than $3 billion in ticket sales alone. His new movie, K-19: The Widowmaker, is a gripping thriller based on a real event--the disastrous near meltdown 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, ecause 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 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 Township High School in Park Ridge, Ill., in 1960 and entered Ripon College in Wisconsin, where his academic performance was less than sparkling. He sometimes spent days in bed, sleeping between meals, depressed. When he was asked about his underachievement, he had this to say.

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 people. 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 himself 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.

Director George Lucas did find value in Ford and he later 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.

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 a sense of stewardship about the place, because the majesty of nature is so apparent there. It helped sensitize me to the greater 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 environmen-
tal 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.

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