Harrison Ford became world famous as «Han Solo» and «Indy». The hobby pilot survived crash landings and quickly recovered from fractures while filming. At 80, “Indiana Jones” is unstoppable.
A few months before his 80th birthday, Harrison Ford embarked on a completely new task. The screen star promised his first major series role in April.
For the streaming service Apple TV + Ford will play in the comedy series “Shrinking”. In it, Jason Segel plays a psychotherapist who suddenly freely tells his patients what he thinks and thus stirs up their lives. Ford plays his mentor, a behavioral therapy pioneer who is forced to rebuild his own life after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
“Indy” for around 40 years
The Hollywood star, who is celebrating his milestone birthday this Wednesday (July 13), is unstoppable at the age of 80. On the contrary: with a leather jacket, whip and fedora hat, he transforms into the daring archeology professor Henry Walton Jones for the fifth time. Ford has played the screen hero “Indy” since 1981, first in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, most recently in 2008 in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”.
Mads Mikkelsen, one of his co-stars in “Indiana Jones 5”, recently attested to Ford’s enormous physical fitness. “Harrison is a monster, a very nice monster,” said the Dane in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. On the first day of shooting, a night shoot, they worked until five in the morning. “And then he (Ford) got on his mountain bike and cycled 50 kilometers,” said Mikkelsen.
Ford is known for performing many of his own stunts on film. The actor injured his shoulder while rehearsing for a fight scene last June, but he was soon back in front of the camera.
The sequel is scheduled for June 2023
If the plans of producer Steven Spielberg and director James Mangold (“Walk the Line”, “Wolverine: Way of the Warrior”) work out, then the sequel should start in June 2023. In 2016, the Disney group had announced the fifth “epic adventure” for July 2019, but there were umpteen postponements, most recently because of the corona pandemic.
Good genes, healthy lifestyle, hard training? At the side of his wife, actress Calista Flockhart, who is 22 years his junior, Ford hardly seems to be aging. The grizzled star is constantly in front of the camera.
As seasoned warhorse Han Solo, he roared through space at the speed of light in 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. He recovered quickly from a broken foot on the set during filming in London – a hydraulic door on the “Star Wars” spaceship “Millennium Falcon” was to blame for the accident.
A crash landing with his vintage single-engine plane on a golf course in Southern California in 2015 also had a minor impact. The passionate amateur pilot quickly recovered from the fractures and cuts.
In Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the dark science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), he returned to an apocalyptic world in his legendary role as ex-cop Rick Deckard. In the film adaptation of the Jack London classic «The Call of the Wild» (2020), he played a gray-bearded prospector who makes his way with a dog in the Alaskan wilderness.
A carpenter in Hollywood
The man with the noticeable scar on his chin – it comes from a car accident in the 1960s – was a late bloomer in Hollywood. At the age of 30 he was still working as a carpenter, because the fees for small supporting roles and TV guest appearances were not enough to provide for his wife and two children. The then unknown George Lucas hired Ford for his low-budget film “American Graffiti”. The actor was 35 when he played the role of smuggler Han Solo in Star Wars.
The space saga and “Indiana Jones” made Ford a celebrated blockbuster star, but he also got involved in many genres. He received an Oscar nomination for his role as a police officer in the crime drama “The Only Witness” (1985). Roman Polanski made him the focus of his 1988 psychological thriller «Frantic». Ford proved his comedic talent in “The Weapons of Women”. The German director Wolfgang Petersen made him the fictional US President in the action film “Air Force One” in 1997.
commitment to climate protection
Ford is an outspoken climate activist. At the “Global Climate Action” summit in San Francisco in 2018, he campaigned for the protection of nature and indigenous peoples in a combative speech. “Stop denigrating science for heaven’s sake,” the actor ranted in an obvious dig at Donald Trump, without naming the then US President. “Stop empowering people who don’t believe in science.”
In December 2019, the actor traveled to the world climate conference in Madrid. If the world community does not take courageous initiatives now, “then the earth will become uninhabitable and then nothing else will matter,” said Ford in a speech.
The father of five keeps his private life largely under wraps. However, the expensive divorce from his second wife, the screenwriter Melissa Mathison, and the liaison with the much younger Flockhart (“Ally McBeal”) made headlines. They met at the Golden Globe Gala in 2002, and the couple married eight years later. They have an adult adopted son.