For nearly two decades, Richard Gere starred in a huge number of Hollywood blockbusters, proving his acting chops in everything from romantic comedies to thrilling dramas.
In the ’80s and ’90s, roles in films like American Gigolo, An Officer and a Gentleman and Primal Fear cemented his spot as an A-list actor and leading heartthrob.
His sizzling chemistry with Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman will always be hard to beat, so much so that they reunited years later in Runaway Bride. So why did it take two decades for him to star in a big Hollywood studio film again?
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What happened to Richard Gere?
Well, according to the actor himself, it’s all because he made a very powerful enemy: China.
Considering his wildly successful film career, it would stand to reason that Gere would continue acting even as he ages – men don’t seem to have the same issue that women do in finding Hollywood roles for older actors.
But his last big-budget film role was in 2008’s Nights In Rodanthe, and even in the decade before that, his career had slowed down. But because of the actor’s choice to speak out against human rights violations in China, he says he’s been blacklisted from Hollywood.
What did Richard Gere say about China?
Richard Gere has been a practising Tibetan Buddhist since his 20s. In the 1970s he travelled to Nepal and met many Tibetan monks, and later met and became friends with the Dalai Lama.
In the 1990s, Gere was very outspoken against China’s occupation of Tibet. While presenting the award for Best Art Director at the 1993 Academy Awards, he went a little off script, condemning China’s “horrendous, horrendous human rights situation”. This got him banned from future Oscars ceremonies – 10 years later Chicago won six Oscars including Best Picture.
Gere wasn’t even nominated for Best Actor despite winning the Golden Globe.
In 2013, 20 years after the ban, Gere spoke about the incident and revealed he was no longer blacklisted from the Oscars red carpet – or so, he thinks.
“Apparently, I’ve been rehabilitated. It seems if you stay around long enough, they forget they’ve banned you,” he told Huffington Post UK.
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In the following years, Gere continued to be outspoken against China. In 2008, he called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympic Games and pressured China to allow Tibetans independence.
He continues to condemn China in many interviews, and supports the Tibetan cause with The Gere Foundation. He’s been given a lifetime ban from visiting China.
How did China ruin Richard Gere’s career?
China has a huge financial influence in Hollywood. Chinese investors are the ones writing the checks for many major American movie studios, including Paramount. Because of the sheer size of China’s population, it’s essential for a film to do well at the Chinese box office to make any money. Plenty of films are written with a Chinese audience in mind.
For example, the 2015 film Pixels was supposed to have a scene where the Great Wall Of China was blown up. Studio executives were worried that would get the film barred in China, so the script was rewritten to blow up India’s Taj Mahal instead.
In multiple interviews, Gere has claimed that Chinese influence has prevented him from landing roles in any Hollywood studio movies.
“There are definitely movies that I can’t be in because the Chinese will say, ‘Not with him,'” Gere told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “I recently had an episode where someone said they could not finance a film with me because it would upset the Chinese.”
“There was something I was going do with a Chinese director, and two weeks before we were going to shoot, he called saying, ‘Sorry, I can’t do it,'” explained Gere. “We had a secret phone call on a protected line. If I had worked with this director, he, his family would never have been allowed to leave the country ever again, and he would never work.”
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But just because his name is absent from blockbuster movie posters, it doesn’t mean that Gere is no longer working.
Instead, he’s focusing his attention on smaller, independent projects, which he claims that he enjoys even more. “I was successful enough in the last three decades that I can afford to do these [smaller films] now,” he told THR.
“I’m not interested in playing the wizened Jedi in your tentpole,” he said. That sounds suspiciously like a Harrison Ford burn to us.
What is the last movie Richard Gere was in?
This year, Gere starred in the 2023 romantic-comedy Maybe I Do, starring alongside Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon. It marked the actor’s first major return to his rom-com acting roots since Shall We Dance in 2004.
In 2017, Gere starred in two small-budget films Norman and The Dinner and In 2019, he had his first major television role on the BBC show MotherFatherSon.
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How old is Richard Gere now?
Richard Gere is now 73 years old, he was born in August 1949.
What is Richard Gere’s net worth?
When Gere says that he can afford to not star in big-budget films, he means it. In 2016, during his drawn-out divorce settlement with ex-wife Carey Lowell one newspaper estimated the actor’s net worth to be around US$250 million.
Some sources claim that Lowell demanded a $100 million as part of the divorce, leaving his net worth hovering around $150 million. Not too shabby.