Like everyone Ford has also faced real difficulties that, despite his will and resources, he can't make better. The death of his 92-year-old father, former advertising executive Christopher Ford, of a blood ailment in February 1999 had a marked effect on the star (his mother, Dorothy, 82, lives in Laguna Beach, Calif.). "Movie grief is easy," he told the Chicago Sun-Times last October. "Real life is not." Says Pollack: "It was difficult for him. He handled it with his usual grace and aplomb, but he was struggling. It's not something you end up talking about with him."

Stoic for sure, Ford also can be sentimental. While filming The Fugitive in his native Chicago in 1992, he made a point of driving past (but not stopping at) the homes in suburban Morton Grove and Park Ridge in which he was raised -- along with his brother Terence, now 55. "I didn't realize," he says, "the houses were so small."

Says girls didn't like him in high school

Back then, of course, no one knew that young Harry, as he was known, would be so big. His dream was to become a forest ranger, and -- by his own estimation -- his sex appeal was just this side of roadkill. "I wasn't appealing to girls in the normal way," he says. "I was like a beaten dog or something." Progressing inauspiciously, he left school two classes shy of graduating from Wisconsin's Ripon College (despite having taken acting courses to boost his GPA), wed college sweetheart Mary Marquardt in 1964 and set off for Hollywood, where for years he made ends meet working as a carpenter. It wasn't for lack of opportunity. In 1966, Columbia Pictures exec Walter Beakel won Ford an audition for 1967's The Graduate. "He didn't cut it," says Beakel. Surly, particular, and by then a father-to Benjamin, now 33, a chef (he later had son Willard, 31, a teacher and the father of Eliel, 7, with wife Aisha) -- Ford didn't do himself any favors. "I would send him out on an interview," recalls his manager of 30 years, Patricia McQueeney, "and the casting director would call me up and say, 'Why did you send that guy? I thought he was going to punch me in the nose!' "