RICHARD GERE & THE TIBETAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Richard Gere, the American actor who was born on a day like today in 1949, and his struggle in a favour of the Tibetan Independence Movement.

Richard Tiffany Gere (born August 31, 1949) is an American actor.

He began in films in the 1970s, playing a supporting role in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and a starring role in Days of Heaven (1978). He came to prominence with his role in the film American Gigolo (1980), which established him as a leading man and a sex symbol. He has starred in many films, including An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), Pretty Woman (1990), Sommersby (1993), Primal Fear (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), I'm Not There (2007), Nights in Rodanthe (2008), Arbitrage (2012) and Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer (2016). For portraying Billy Flynn in the musical Chicago (2002), he won a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast.

Richard Tiffany Gere was born in Philadelphia on August 31, 1949. The eldest son and second child of housewife Doris Ann and NMIC insurance agent Homer George Gere.

Gere was raised Methodist in Syracuse, New York. His paternal great-grandfather, George Lane Gere (1848-1932), changed the spelling of his surname from Geer. One of his ancestors, also named George, was an Englishman who came from Heavitree and settled in the Connecticut Colony in 1638. Both of Gere's parents were Mayflower descendants, and his ancestors include Pilgrims such as John Billington, William Brewster, Francis Eaton, Francis Cooke, Degory Priest, George Soule, and Richard Warren.

In 1967, he graduated from North Syracuse Central High School, where he excelled at gymnastics and music and played the trumpet. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, majoring in philosophy; after two years, he left and did not graduate.

Gere first worked professionally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1969, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. His first major acting role was in the original London stage version of Grease, in 1973. He was one of the first notable Hollywood actors to play a homosexual character, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent, for which he earned a Theatre World Award.

Gere began appearing in Hollywood films in the mid-1970s. Originally cast in a starring role in The Lords of Flatbush (1974), he was replaced after fighting with his co-star Sylvester Stallone.

Gere regularly visits Dharamshala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. He is an advocate for human rights in Tibet and is a co-founder of the Tibet House US, creator of the Gere Foundation, and Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Campaign for Tibet. Because he supports the Tibetan Independence Movement, he is permanently banned from entering China.

More information: Gere Foundation

Maybe the Dalai Lama is the only person 

who is totally honest,and even with him, 

he's skillful not to hurt anybody. He's skillful.

 

Richard Gere