Ford, whose 38 feature films include 10 of the biggest moneymakers of all time, says he looks for roles that "have qualities of persistence, of vulnerability, some degree of intelligence." Beyond that, he just does what comes naturally. "For me, the process was not to follow anybody else's path," he says. "I didn't want to imitate anybody else's way of doing things."
His way is refreshingly human—lopsided smile, busted nose, scarred, chin and all. "I'm sort of irredeemably ordinary," he says. Confirms his Working Girl costar Melanie Griffith: "He's not the kind of guy who before a take has a mirror in front of his face to see if he looks good. He's the kind of guy who'd be helping the dolly grip move the dolly."
Ford, who says he feels "most comfortable, most at peace around a movie set," gained a reputation for being cranky, outspoken and suspicious during his early years in Hollywood, when he had to work as a carpenter to pay the bills. Being under contract to Columbia Pictures for $150 a week back in the '60s was painful, he says. "They had some control over me because I was young and poor. I was not very cooperative."
He has mellowed. The youthful restlessness that helped break up his first marriage, to college sweetheart Mary Marquardt (they have two sons, Benjamin, 32, a chef, and Willard, 29, a teacher), is no longer evident. Ford, his wife of 16 years, screenwriter Melissa Mathison (E.T., Kundun), 48, and their children Malcolm, 11, and Georgia, 8, divide their time between their 800-acre Wyoming ranch and an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "Obviously I have some I greater degree of maturity to bring to the table, and that helps," he says.
He also has fabulous ways to blow off steam. Almost daily he pilots one of his single-engine planes or his Bell Long Ranger helicopter. "No one deserves the kind of money I get," he says. "And let's face it, I'm really pleased to get a quiet table in a restaurant. The attention I get because of the work I do often makes it easier to pass through life." Still, he says, "It's the success of small things that makes me happy, like having good relationships with the people that I work with and good times with my family."
Jill Smolowe
Elizabeth Leonard in Washington, D.C.
- Contributors:
- Elizabeth Leonard.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
