Harrison Ford

From Philosopedia

Harrison Ford (13 July 1942 - )

Ford was born in Chicago. His father was Irish-American and his mother's ancestry was Russian Jewish. Ford dropped out of Ripon College, Wisconsin, to act. He had found acting jobs by the late 1960s, but his career was slow to take off, so he worked as a carpenter in Hollywood.

His big break came as the swash-buckling Han Solo in Star Wars (1977), which would be followed by many other heroic leading roles. Some of his many other films include American Graffit (1973), The Conversation (1974), Hanover Street (1979), Apocalypse Now (1979), Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (1984), Witness (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, 1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Presumed Innocent (1990), Patriot Games - his first movie cast as Jack Ryan (1992), The Fugitive (1993), Clear & Present Danger (1994), and Sabrina (1995).

His former wife, Melissa Mathison, wrote the screenplay for the movie, E.T.

A pilot, the actor in 2000 rescued a stranded hiker near his Wyoming ranch by air.

Ford has called The Mosquito Coast, in which he plays an unraveling back-to-nature character, one of his favorite roles. Costarring with him in that movie was fellow freetjomler Butterfly McQueen.

In a Parade (7 July 2002) article, Ford told a reporter,

• My parents did not practice any organized religion, although my father was raised Roman Catholic and my mother was Jewish. But there was always an ethical context to our lives, a very strong notion of individual moral responsibility.

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