Today In History: 13 July 1942 American Actor Harrison Ford was Born
Harrison Ford was born on 13 July, 1942 in Chicago, Illinois and turns 80 today.
His films have grossed more than $5.4 billion in North America and more than $9.3 billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest-grossing actor in North America.
He was presented the AFI Life Achievement Award and the Cecil B. DeMille Award.
He was nominated once for an Academy Award and four times in the Golden Globe Awards.
He is perhaps best known for playing charismatic rogues in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones film franchises.
Ford was born in Chicago and raised in the city’s suburbs. After attending Ripon College in Wisconsin, he took minor acting roles in movies and television for Columbia and Universal studios but soon fell back on a sideline career in carpentry.
His film career began in earnest with a part in the successful American Graffiti (1973), the first major work of director George Lucas. The movie was produced by Francis Ford Coppola, who later directed Ford in The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979).
Ford achieved real success as the opportunistic Han Solo in Lucas’s Star Wars (1977). The space-fantasy film became one of the highest-grossing motion pictures of all time.
Ford’s fame was cemented with the Star Wars sequels; The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) and with the Indiana Jones series, in which he starred as an adventurer-archaeologist. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and its sequels Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) were produced by Lucas and directed by Steven Spielberg.
They featured Ford as a swashbuckling 1930s action hero whose larger-than-life qualities were tempered with a charming vulnerability.
Harrison Ford expanded his repertoire in the science-fiction classic Blade Runner (1982), the drama The Mosquito Coast (1986), the thriller Frantic (1988), and the comedy Working Girl (1988). His performance in Witness (1985)—as an urban homicide detective hiding out in an Amish community—earned him an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
In the 1990s Ford accepted dramatic leading roles in Presumed Innocent (1990) and Regarding Henry (1991) and returned to romantic comedy with Sabrina (1995), but his fame rested with action-adventure movies.
Ford portrayed CIA agent Jack Ryan in two popular films adapted from Tom Clancy novels—Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994). In The Fugitive (1993), a film based on the 1960s television show, he portrayed the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimble.
Source: Britannica, Wikipedia
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