Harrison Ford seemed rock solid. Highly talented, but deeply dull. He told us all we needed to know about him. He lived on an 800-acre ranch in Wyoming with his second wife, of nearly 20 years, and spent most of his spare time in his carpentry workshop. Then, suddenly, he downed tools. He swapped chisel for champagne, moved into a New York hotel and tripped the light fantastic in nightclubs. There were other changes. He took to sporting a gold earring in his left ear. When spotted at a strip joint in Wichita, Kansas, he introduced himself as “Tom, a meat processor”. Then he shacked up with the actress Calista Flockhart, who was young enough to be his daughter. The old Ford was consigned to the crusher. And the shiny new model has avoided talking much about it. Until now.
Ford, 63, who lives with the 41-year-old Ally McBeal star Flockhart and her adopted five-year-old son, Liam, had obviously decided to open the emotional locker before we met, near their home in Los Angeles. To get him to reveal anything is usually like pulling the back teeth of a rhinoceros, with tweezers. But this time he comes out with mouth open wide. “I am more than contented in my life,” he announces. “Calista and I have been together from practically the first day we met, at the Golden Globes (in 2002).
“Was it love at first sight? These things do not really happen like that. We went out for a drink with a bunch of people and got on well. She soon established I had not seen a single episode of Ally McBeal. I do not watch much television. I remember her telling me how tiring a weekly show like that can be. Now the show is over and I have cut back on movies, we see a lot of each other. These are happy times for me.”
Was he aware of how it all looked — that here was a man who might have been suffering a late-life crisis? “Sure,” he admits. “But I was interested in changing my life. As an actor, I have always taken risks, and I like playing other people. It was time I applied those rules to myself. I needed to be someone else. I opened myself up to possibilities. I have been rewarded.”
How did he feel, this most secretive of men, when he watched his private life being splashed across gossip columns — with pictures? “The paparazzi had a harvest, didn’t they?” he says, smiling. “I read most of it. I wanted to know what they were saying about me and whether it was accurate. But I also knew that time would move on and my so-called misdemeanours would be forgotten. There would soon be someone else out there, getting the same treatment. So I didn’t complain and just got on with things.”
He also got on with setting himself up with Flockhart. But he neatly sidesteps rumours of a secret engagement. “I have bought her diamond earrings,” he admits. “Not a diamond ring.” Can he see the day when he may marry for a third time? “Anything is possible in life,” he says. “But I won’t be making any announcements in the press.” For now, though, Ford is enjoying the banter. When he tells me they share their life with two crossbred dogs, one picked up from a pound, the other from the streets of Los Angeles, he refuses to give their names. “They have privacy issues,” he jokes.
Ford and Flockhart were spotted last summer, minus dogs, taking a narrow-boat holiday in Shropshire. He had, he tells me, flown his private aircraft across the Atlantic, stopping to refuel in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik — “where we had the best Indian meal I’ve ever tasted” — before the canal trip. “It was just four of us — me, Calista, Liam and the nanny,” he says. “I found it relaxing and fun, and the rest of the family loved it. You can see the English countryside in a way you can’t when you’re speeding down the M1.”
But he feared he had taken on a task too big. “The boat was a 60-footer,” he reports. “That was longer, and the canals narrower, than I’d anticipated. So it became a question of looking ahead, being observant, working out where we were going and what was possible.”
Ford has clearly spent a career observing and working out the possibilities. It has established him as one of the world’s biggest stars, with earning power of up to $20m per movie. Did he, perhaps, become known as being so solid and reliable that he became sick of playing the straight man in his own life? “I just had an earring because I always quite fancied the idea,” he says. “The more dramatic changes had to be made, and I have always enjoyed having a good time, though perhaps not quite so publicly. I am sitting here now, Botox-free and with grey hair.”
The hair may indeed be grey, but the green-blue eyes are clear, and Ford appears sleek, in a well-fitted dark-blue suit and matching polo shirt. He’s a man’s man, who, for years through his early acting struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, made his living in Hollywood as a carpenter. He talks in a low and slow voice and is undoubtedly accomplished, with all this talk of flying aircraft and piloting narrow boats. That gives him an extra edge when he insists: “I don’t think I went through any sort of crisis.”
His crisis was, instead, at the box office. Ford had nearly 25 years of nonstop success. From being virtually unknown in Star Wars (1977), he mined box-office gold as the gung-ho archeologist Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), while courting critical credibility with Ridley Scott’s iconic Blade Runner (1982). By the late 1980s, it seemed he could do no wrong: he charmed the young, and young at heart, with more Indiana Jones, the furrowed-brow art-house crowd with Peter Weir’s thriller Witness (1985), and women with the romantic comedy Working Girl (1988), while sorting out the boys from the men with chisel-jawed action films such as Patriot Games (1992) and The Fugitive (1993). Then, from the late 1990s, he seemed suddenly to lose his touch as his personal life underwent a sea change. He did not fare well playing a Russian captain in K-19: The Widowmaker (2002), and his last big film, Hollywood Homicide (2003), delivered his worst set of reviews yet.
We are talking today because he has spent two years working out where he went wrong and delivering an old-fashioned thriller, Firewall, in which he’s back at his best. “I have built up an audience, and they did not accept me as a Russian,” he says. “That is fair enough. The script was not ready when we started Hollywood Homicide. I should have known better.”
It is work that has dominated Ford’s conversation in previous interviews. So when he upped and left his wife, Melissa Mathison, writer of the film ET, whom he married in 1983, he knew that he would invite sudden attention. They have a son, Malcolm, 19, and a daughter, Georgia, 15. He also has two sons, Ben, 38, and Willard, 36, by his first wife, Mary, whom he divorced in 1979. That first divorce hardly rated a mention at the time. His only real success in a 15-year acting career had been as Han Solo in Star Wars.
