• April 16, 2007
• Vol. 67
• No. 15

My Life in Pictures ... Richard Gere

A decade before he romanced adorable call girl Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, her costar had already been one sexy call guy. A relatively unknown Richard Gere—taut, tanned, and definitely trouble—strutted across the screen in American Gigolo, sending hearts aflutter (and Armani suit sales booming). Today, Gere, 57—silver-haired and bespectacled—sips a cup of jasmine tea and shakes his head at a picture of himself from Gigolo. "I don't think the slightest bit of me imagined this would be my life," he says. A philosophy major at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a Buddhist since his early 20s, Gere is outspoken about humanitarian issues but very private about his life out of the spotlight. He wed actress Carey Lowell, 46, in 2002 (he and first wife Cindy Crawford were divorced in 1995), and the couple live in New York with their son Homer, 7, and Lowell's daughter Hannah, 17.

"Acting," Gere says, "is still joyful to me." In his new film The Hoax, he plays con man Clifford Irving, a writer who convinced the publishing world in 1971 he was writing an autobiography with reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. For the role Gere shaved his hairline back and thickened his nose with putty. Not so sexy? He's glad to hear it. He's more interested in explaining Zen and the art of child maintenance to NATASHA STOYNOFF. "Any time a child does something and you applaud, you see them light up," he says. "You can see their hearts expand."

1978
This photo, shot by his friend Herb Ritts, helped make Gere famous. "We just drove off into the desert and said, 'Let's go shoot some stuff,'" recalls Gere. The car? "I think it belonged to a girlfriend of mine."

1980
"That was a hundred years ago," sighs Gere, who gave gravity boots sex appeal in American Gigolo. "I never saw the boots again, but people come up to me and say they actually use them," he says.

1982
"I never thought it would be in the movie ... it didn't work!" he says of the sweep-her-off-her-feet finale of An Officer and a Gentleman (with Debra Winger). As he watched the scene in a theater with the soundtrack added and an audience on hand, "the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I was like, Wow!"

2007
He relished playing a con artist in his new movie The Hoax. "You want him to get away with it," says Gere, who de-glammed for the role by coloring his hair a drab brown and getting a frizzy perm. "We're vicariously sticking it to authority figures."

1996
The Dalai Lama "isn't exactly a moviegoer," says Gere, a Buddhist and longtime friend of the Tibetan leader (with Gere in Italy). When they first met, the Dalai Lama told Gere, "Laughter, sadness, jealousy, hatred ... all our emotions are in a sense acting."

1967
"My mother made that costume!" Starring in his high school production of The King and I, "I felt a sense of self-worth being onstage."

2007
Most nights he and wife Carey Lowell (at The Hoax's New York City premiere April 1) stay home with the kids. "There's nothing better than [being] with them," he says. "Nothing."

1999
"Oh, it's just silly!" he says of snagging PEOPLE's Sexiest Man Alive title. "It's fun in some sense." His family and friends kept teasing to a minimum: "They were pretty easy on me, now that I think of it."