THE first surprise of the day is that my interview with Richard Gere has been delayed by two hours. Quite why I can't fathom. At 59, he is unlikely to be sleeping off a hangover after partying all night. Holed up in Berlin's Regent Hotel to promote his latest effort, Nights In Rodanthe, it's more likely that he is throwing around what little star power he has left. After all, for an actor who has traded on leading-man looks to get Romeo roles for the bulk of his career, it must be remarkably difficult when your star is on the wane.
Not that he looks too shabby when he walks into the hotel room, carrying a china cup full of coffee. He wears a charcoal-grey jacket, light blue shirt and dark jeans, and his thick head of perfectly groomed white hair and wire-rimmed glasses lend him a scholarly air that, even now, is liable to send shivers down the backs of housewives over a certain age. It is, lest we forget, less than 10 years since US magazine People voted him Sexiest Man Alive, after 1999's romantic drama Runaway Bride revitalised his career.
Nights In Rodanthe is yet another attempt to turn the clock back to a time when Gere still set pulses racing. Based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Sparks, it pairs him for the third time with Diane Lane, with whom he acted in Francis Coppola's 1984 gangster film The Cotton Club and the adult drama Unfaithful (2002). Set primarily around a remote beachside guesthouse in North Carolina, it features Gere as the only guest, a doctor on his way to Central America to visit his estranged son. Lane plays the hotel's acting manager, whose own personal life - faltering marriage, unruly teenage daughter - is little better. No prizes for guessing that sparks soon begin to fly between these two lost souls.
Even Gere admits that being cast in a romantic drama at his age is pushing it. "I'm just amazed that they still want me to be in them," he says. "Look, I've been doing this for a long time and I'm still learning. I'm still a beginner at doing all of this stuff." A curious answer, considering his first hit was 1978's Days Of Heaven. Does he no longer consider himself suitable for such a role? "It's not that I can't do it," he replies. "It's does anyone want to see it?'" Given that Nights In Rodanthe made an uninspiring bow in the US last week, taking a relatively meagre $14 million on its opening weekend, the answer is probably "not really". While the film's tag-line runs "It's never too late for second chances", it strikes me that Gere has had his by now.
Curiously, this is my third encounter with Gere inside a year, after he went from the 2007 Venice Film Festival, where he was promoting Todd Haynes's Bob Dylan film I'm Not There, to San Sebastian, where he collected a lifetime achievement award. "It feels a bit bizarre," he told a packed press conference, "when I don't feel like my life is even half-way over yet." That's as may be, but such is the precarious nature of work for the ageing actor, I get the impression that Gere has been forced to change tack over the past few years to keep working. While he won a Golden Globe for his excellent performance in the 2002 musical Chicago, he has since been forced into more independent, character-driven films.
Ironically, jettisoning the long-held image of Hollywood lover, cultivated in films like American Gigolo, Breathless and An Officer And A Gentleman in the early 1980s, has meant Gere has produced some of the finest work of his career. Take 2006's The Hoax, in which he played a writer who cons a publisher into thinking he is writing an authorised biography of American aviator Howard Hughes. "It was one of the best movies I've made," says Gere. Even his mother, Doris, thought so. "My mother saw a screening and she turned to me and said, How'd you get so good all of a sudden?'" It's as if everyone - his mother included - knows Gere more as a star than an actor.
Exhibiting some false modesty, he claims otherwise. "I don't know what a star is," he says. "It's so far beyond my comprehension. It's a very small part of my life. Honestly." What about fame? Is he addicted to it? "It never mattered. I didn't really care," he says. "I like the job. It's a real nice job we have. And I like to be able to do it. The reality is, you've got to come up with a movie that people want to see once in a while or they don't let you do it any more. I never focused heavily on that. I probably should've been careful to make movies that people saw. I was always flying by the seat of my pants, whatever I felt like."
This might well account for why Gere has seen his fortunes fluctuate in Hollywood. After The Cotton Club his career languished for six years until along came 1990's Pretty Woman, introducing the world to Julia Roberts opposite Gere's suave tycoon. He gave the performance of his career in the same year, as a corrupt cop in Internal Affairs, yet after that he let it all slip again. Potboiler thrillers such as The Jackal and Red Corner nestled with corny romances like Autumn In New York, only to see Runaway Bride and then Chicago pull him out of another slump. "I never had a game plan," he says. "Maybe that's why it's worked, sort of, to whatever degree it has. I was never forcing anything."
If Gere is best known for anything now, it's not his acting. Rather, it's as the Hollywood envoy for the Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama, with whom he forged a relationship in the early 1980s. Discovering Buddhism in 1978 after taking a trip to Nepal with Brazilian painter Sylvia Martins, he went on to become one of the founders of Tibet House, a non-profit organisation that works to preserve Tibetan culture. At one point, there was even talk that he would quit acting to become a monk, though he waves this away. What about entering politics? "No interest," he replies. "I'd be very bad at it. I don't have the muscle for it. I really don't."
He could have been a musician, though. Raised on a farm in Syracuse in upstate New York as the second of five children, Gere wrote music for high-school productions. An accomplished piano and guitar player, he became a session musician when he moved to New York before heading to London to star in a 1973 stage production of Grease. By this point, he had quit reading philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, a time when he first became politically active. "It was the height of the war in Vietnam," he recalls. "We had a group called SDS - Students for a Democratic Society. It was very left-leaning, fearless and very organised. The march on the Pentagon, which I was at ... things were accomplished that, for whatever reason, don't happen now. There was a sense that together we could change the world."
Gere evidently still thinks he can. He says he talks to all corporations that do business in China, the country that has occupied Tibet since 1950. He recently did a commercial for Lancia cars, but his involvement forced parent company Fiat (which trades in China) to apologise to the Chinese. How did he feel about the recent Beijing Olympics? "It was what I expected," he sighs. "We knew the Chinese would make a spectacle of it. And because it's a totalitarian country they focused an enormous amount of energy on it. They moved all the problem people very far away. They put them in jail or moved them to the other end of the country."
For all his humanitarian work, Gere has never managed to win over a cynical press corps, perhaps because his Hollywood lifestyle seems at odds with the minimalist existence of the Buddhists. This is, after all, the man who spent nearly £20,000 in 1994 on an advertisem*nt in The Times, claiming his marriage to supermodel Cindy Crawford was not, as reports had it, on the rocks. It ended months later, after they had spent three years together. A relationship that seemed to reflect Gere's vanity more than anything else, it also served to counter rumours that he was gay, started after he starred in a 1980 Broadway production of Bent as a hom*osexual concentration camp prisoner.
Last year Gere entered into fresh scandal with Shilpa Shetty, the Indian star who came to prominence in the UK on Celebrity Big Brother. On stage with her in New Delhi to promote Aids awareness, in a moment of madness he swept her off her feet and kissed her on the cheek. The public display of affection outraged the nation and a warrant was issued for his arrest. "You have to understand India," says Gere. "It happens all the time. That extreme conservative political party starts up a process in the courts - it's like courts anywhere - and once it starts, you have to play it out. But it was thrown out."
Gere is on safer ground with his family. He has been married to former Bond girl Carey Lowell for almost six years. They have an eight year-old son, Homer, while Lowell has an 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, from a previous marriage. He cites his forthcoming film Amelia, which co-stars Hilary Swank and Ewan McGregor, as an example of how he puts family first. "I ended up finishing the movie in South Africa," he says, "but the only way I would do it was if we had an agreement that my family would come over at the end of that shoot and we'd go on safari."
It makes you wonder why Gere doesn't just give up acting entirely. It's not that he has fallen from favour with audiences - but he's hardly beloved. He has never been nominated for an Oscar, and it's hard to imagine the recent tributes pouring in for the late Paul Newman being repeated for Gere. Think of those in the generation above him, such as Warren Beatty, who simply drifted away from acting without ever officially announcing his retirement after 2001's disastrous Town And Country. An illustrious career ending in such an ignominious way seems to symbolise the fate of many ageing actors.
While Gere is not quite at that stage yet, he admits he has thought about retirement. "Last year, I was ready to do some other things," he says. "I wasn't out looking for anything particularly. I was happy pottering around the house." Then all of a sudden, a glut of good scripts landed on his doormat - including police drama Brooklyn's Finest and his first family film, Hachiko: A Dog's Story. "Will that happen next year?" he ponders. "Probably not."
He doesn't sound too bothered. But perhaps that is the secret of Richard Gere's success.
Nights In Rodanthe opens on Friday. An Officer And A Gentleman is on Film4, Thursday, 9pm, followed by Pretty Woman at 11.30pm on ITV2.
