Harrison takes a stab at romance

1995
Toronto Sun
by Jim Slotek

I don't know anybody like Linus. I know they're out there, there's reality to the story." - Harrison Ford on his character in the film Sabrina

NEW YORK - It's understood that Harrison Ford comes off best playing ordinary men who find themselves in wildly unusual circumstances. And today he's looking ordinary indeed. Dressed down in jeans, he's sporting a police-issue moustache that makes him look like a thin version of the character actor Richard Masur. (My wife, who saw Ford later in one of those two-minute canned TV interviews plugging the movie Sabrina, opening Friday, impulsively shouted at the screen "Shave it off!")

"I'm playing a New York City police sergeant in my next film," says the 49-year-old Ford in a tone that's half apology/half lethargy. "Brad Pitt's in it with me, Alan Pakula's directing. It's called The Devil's Own.

"Anyway, you can't play a New York policeman without this moustache. They give you a gun, they give you the moustache, and they give you a badge." And donuts, don't forget donuts.

Like any working actor, Ford's been engaging in research - which in this case involves cruising around with the NYPD. It's a problematic bit of business, in which he hides behind his moustache and tries not to look like Han Solo or Indiana Jones. "Kids spot you pretty quick," he says of his unsuccessful attempts to be inconspicuous in the cruiser.

He relates his problems with a shrug. "(Being famous) is intrusive," he says. "But compared to being poor, it's not bad."

It's a common-sensical attitude - the kind you like to think a level-headed person like yourself might retain if you were lucky enough to become one of the biggest-grossing movie stars of all time and be paid $10 million-plus a movie.

And "common sense" is what Sydney Pollack - who directs Ford as a romantic lead in the upcoming remake of the classic Sabrina - sees as the man's over-riding quality. "Common sense, decency, modesty, a kind of simplicity... honesty really. You sense it in his work and you sense it when you talk to him. He's just not caught up in the movie star business."

It means he'll bite the bullet and sign autographs, or politely suffer small talk - whether by people on the street or journalists. But, actor he may be, he won't act as if he's enjoying himself. With the microphone on, he becomes painfully uncomfortable, soft-spoken and guarded, his dry sense of humor coming out in murmured quips.

By his own account, Ford has settled on his one-movie-a-year pace because "it leaves me six months a year to be with my family (in Jackson Hole, Wyoming)." And what does he do the rest of the year? "Publicity!" he blurts. "No, really, that only amounts to about three days," he adds, leaving unsaid the `it only seems like six months' part.

But then it's hard to imagine any of Ford's strong-silent screen characters - from Han Solo to Indiana Jones to CIA analyst Jack Ryan - sitting down comfortably for an up-close-and-personal Q&A. "Can a person hide who he is in movies?" says Pollack, repeating a question. "No, I think it shows through. Certainly it does over a period of time. It's like a Rorschach test."

Not the most verbal of characters onscreen or off, Ford finds himself in an unusual place in Sabrina. Normally, by his injuries, you know his films (Clear & Pre. Danger was marked by a nearly-debilitating knee injury). Any injuries this time? "Bruised lips," he quips with a half-smile.

Yes folks, it's a romance, and a role that doesn't require Ford to leap so much as a curb. The 1954 Billy Wilder original starred Audrey Hepburn as a chauffeur's daughter who returns from schooling in France with a sophistication that turns heads. William Holden played the young playboy millionaire she's briefly infatuated with. Humphrey Bogart played the sobersided older brother who falls hopelessly in love with the young gamine.

This time around, the lineup reads Gamine: Julia Ormond; Playboy Brother: Greg Kinnear (host of the talk show Later); and Repressed Older Brother: Harrison Ford.

Ford gets visibly irked at the observation that the call "Action!" is less literal in Sabrina than in most of his other films.

"Some day," he intones, "I'm going to sit and write down the names of the action films I've done as opposed to other films - thrillers and romances and comedies, and see whether I actually do as many action films as people seem to think I do.

"I don't think I do. I think in today's climate, action films may make more money and more splash." He mentions Working Girl as one of his proudest achievements as a stationary object. "Anyway, I approach it the same way every time, it's all about telling a story. It's always the same job."

Certainly the role of brother Linus - a modern corporate wheeler-dealer in an old-money family - is not informed by Ford's own experience. "It must be different to be born with money," says the onetime carpenter. "I don't know anybody like Linus. I know they're out there, there's reality to the story."

Indeed, his offscreen neighbors and friends in Wyoming - in the heart of the Grand Teton Mountains - are anything but to-the-manor-born. "It really is a nicer place to live. Everybody grows up with kind of a vision of what the ideal place is, their own little vision of paradise. And I had the good fortune to be able to do that, to move out of L.A. and follow that vision. It was the picture I'd been imagining all my life."

And has Harrison Ford changed Jackson, Wyoming? "I don't know," he says with a grin. "I might have driven up the real estate prices a little."

The Harrison Ford File

BORN: Chicago, Ill. Attended Ripon College, flunked out 1964, when he and first wife Mary Marquardt drove to L.A.

SIGNED: A $150-a-week development deal with Columbia Pictures, was cast as a bellhop in the James Coburn film Dead Heat On A Merry Go Round (1966). First line: "Paging Mr. Jones, Paging Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones? Telegram, sir."

"I was in college and I'd done a couple of plays and I decided I was going to be an actor. Everybody else in my class was going to be in an office doing some kind of real work. I wanted a different kind of life. I had an imagining of what it was like to be an actor, and I had that figured right. But I'd forgotten to calculate how difficult it was to get a job as an actor. I was 21 years old and maybe it's natural to underestimate those things.

"I never made a living at this business until I was 35 years old. It was a long apprenticeship."

BIG BREAK: American Graffiti. (1973.)

OTHER FILMS: Star Wars trilogy, Raiders Of The Lost Ark trilogy, Witness, Patriot Games, Clear & Pre. Danger, Blade Runner, Regarding Henry, The Mosquito Coast, Presumed Innocent, The Fugitive.

SECOND MARRIAGE: To screenwriter Melissa Mathison (E.T., Indian In The Cupboard). Two children, ages 8 and 5.

ON HIS EIGHT-FIGURE FEE: "I am well-off, but I'm not motivated by money. I'm motivated by the pleasure of the work I do. It's an intellectual puzzle, a game, a team effort. Movies are a complicated business and I enjoy the process.

"But (the money) brings pressure. I care how the movie does. You don't want to take people's money and go out and make a film people don't want to see. I'm interested in audience films."

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