Harrison Ford

A Hollywood superstar with a remarkable lack of pretense and vanity, this individualistic former carpenter has located his real life in a ruggedly beautiful corner of the West

AN ACTION HERO with intellect to boot, Harrison Ford has laid his claim on stardom by headlining in seven of the 20 top-grossing films of all time. He would never brag about this. He would tell you, “I'm just a simple guy who doesn't have that much to say. I'm not that interested in hearing it back. What I do for a living is the most interesting thing about me.”

What he has done is to establish himself in a way that no other actors - no the macho musclers like Arnold and Sly, nor the witty rogues like Mel and Tommy Lee - have been able to.

You can imagine Ford's face on the famous statue of Rodin's The Thinker, with its slab-like construction and broody brow. Picture Ford's broken, off-center nose superimposed there. His scarred chin, the slightly worried eyes that give the impression of a man who must think before he acts, but once considered, will not hesitate short of getting what he wants.

You can call him the cowboy as thinker.

And although you have to look hard to find Ford on-screen wearing a cowboy hat - he wore a white one in his first major success, 1973's American Graffiti - Ford, who has lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, since 1983, seems made for the West. It's the only place that allows him the room he needs to forget about Hollywood, to focus on his family, to keep his own counsel, and to neutralize the fame that would otherwise control him.

Ford would never allow that. He has always been inclined to crave control for himself. Which is why, when he was a young actor in the 1970s - really, still a college dropout kid from Illinois with a maybe-he'll-make-it-maybe-he-won't kind of acting resume, he decided to get himself a day job.

“I became a carpenter in order not to have to take every acting job that came along. I wanted a second income. It allowed me to pick and choose roles from what little was offered to me at that time. I began to feel a sense of control over my career,” he said.

Things improved. After years of unhappiness trying to fit into the studio system ("They tried to make me into Elvis Presley. They sent me down to the studio barber shop with a photo of Elvis and instrnctions to come back with a haircut like that," he recalled), Ford found he could make a living with his own hands.

This newfound resourcefulness helped him to blast through to fame at age 35 as space pilot Han Solo in 1977's Star Wars. Costar Carrie Fisher commented, “I knew he was going to be a star. I mean, you look at Harrison and you listen; he looks like he's carrying a gun, even if he isn't.”

Between Star Wars and his role as the bullwhip-cracking archaeologist Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark plus its subsequent chronicles, Ford starred in two of the most profitable movie series of the 1970s and 1980s. It didn't swell his head; instead he took a pragmatic view.

“I persisted. And other people gave up,” Ford said. “Acting is basically like carpentry - if you know your craft, you figure out the logic of a particular job and submit yourself to it.”

Often playing an intelligent man of action, Ford has not only piloted the Star Wars movies and starred in the Indiana Jones series, he has played cops in Witness, Blade Runner, and The Devil's Own; a persecuted lawyer in Presumed Innocent and a brain-damaged one in Regarding Henry; executives in Working Girl and Sabrina; an inventor in The Mosquito Coast; and a surgeon on the run in The Fugitive.

This summer, he portrays the ultimate intelligent man of action: the president of the United States. Ford stars with “Vice President” Glenn Close in the suspensful Air Force One, in which terrorists overtake the first family on their top-security jet, holding them hostage. Ford's Commander-in-Chief has got the smarts, the good looks, the principled idealism, and the physical stamina for the leader of the free world. As always, he was determined to do his own stunts, even when that meant taking a battering from the psycho terrorist played by Gary Oldman.

“Oh, man,” recalls costar William H. Macy (of Fargo fame). “Harrison is fearless. He got a fat lip. He gave himself a black eye. These guys - the terrorists led by Gary Oldman - were just pounding the hell out of him. He did it day after day and I saw him. We were going, ‘Harrison, chill out, it's OK.’ ‘No, no, I can do it.’” The way Ford views moviemaking, you get out of it as much as you put in: “I love being part of a group of people attempting to do something rather complicated. I find my mind is engaged on a level that I rarely find anyplace else. And that's exciting and very fulfilling. I feel as though it's a process which can be endlessly improved and perfected. And it's different every time. It is, for that reason, endlessly interesting.”

When he's on a set, Ford works hard. And when he's done, he vanishes. “I like to work intensely for a period of time and then finish and go back to something resembling real life,” he says.

His brand of real life occurs on 800 acres near Wyoming's Grand Tetons, on a ranch that's a nature preserve, thick with evergreens and cottonwoods, where elks crash through the streams and the only cutthroats are the trout. Here, the movie business must seem very far away indeed. Ford's placed half this land in the eventual care of the Jackson Hole Land Trust, which means that it will never be developed - it will remain a wildlife refuge.

“It matched the vision I had of what beautiful is,” he says of his property. “I always wanted to live someplace where nature was predominant, but truthfully, we were only looking for 10 or 20 acres. When we were unable to find the kind of land we wanted, I finally bit the bullet and bought a place much larger than I had imagined because it had everything I wanted. It works very well for us.”

He walks the forested land, or cross-country skis across it in winter. He lives in a white clapboard house with his second wife, screenwriter Melissa Mathison (who wrote E.T. and The Black Stallion), and their two children, 10-year-old Malcolm and 7-year-old Georgia. He's learned to fly. He collects art. He owns - and rides - horse and motorcycles. Still a skilled carpenter, he built a bed for his son. He spends most of his time on the three-acre family compound, but the gravel road that wends back through spruce and aspen trees leads to cottages for invited visitors, and he plans to build homes for his children on some small sites. He thinks about protecting everyone and everything here - the sandhill cranes, the bald eagles, the elk.

“I have a common man's taste, though I've had more than a common man's experience. So it probably has widened my palate,” Ford mused a couple of years ago. When asked at the time to list the five most important things in life, he replied, “Kids. A good bed. Good shoes. Practical clothing. And time for yourself.”

He readjusts the furniture on the porch of his log cabin after guests have changed the placement ever so slightly. This comfort in control is part of what makes acting the perfect job for Ford: when you play a part, the parameters are set. An actor is much more in control than a regular guy living an ordinary life.

Surprisingly, for an actor of his success and standing, Ford has not been showered with praise by Hollywood. He's won no Oscars. He's been compared to everyone from John Wayne to Gary Cooper, but Ford is his own naan, and his unique combination of vulnerability, intellect, independence and physical forbearance make him a certain kind of American hero - not everyman, but any man willing to stand apart for what he is and what he is not, without worrying about who it pleases or how much it makes him one of the herd.

Now in his mid-50s, Ford looked back recently and reflected, “If you become a part of that machinery, someone the machinery thinks it can use and exploit at that particular moment, then there is sure to be a time limit on you, and you are soon going to be unfashionable. Because I have never been fashionable, I can never be unfashionable.”

- By Wolf Schneider and Pat Troise