Richard Gere is not someone with whom many people enjoy a laugh. In fact, when we asked John Travolta whether he and Gere had enjoyed a chuckle at the overlap in their careers – American Gigolo, Days of Heaven, An Officer and a Gentleman and Chicago were all offered to Travolta before going to Gere – the Grease star snorted with laughter. “I don’t know if you can have a laugh like that with Richard Gere,” he replied. “He’s a pretty serious guy!”

While Gere, it seems, has not inherited the mirth, he and Travolta still have plenty in common: as well as the aforementioned overlaps, both have experienced a career defined by dizzying highs and crushing lows. Indeed, this pair has endured more ups and downs than a hotel elevator, although, for now, at least, both are on the up. While Travolta is currently enjoying the plaudits bestowed on his latest movie, Hairspray (as featured in The Knowledge on June 30), Gere is set to bask in the praise lavished on his most recent outing, The Hoax.

Recounting the story of Clifford Irving, a rather average novelist who succeeded in selling a bogus biography of the überrecluse Howard Hughes to a prestigious US publishing house in the early 1970s, The Hoax is a tantalising tale whose protagonist loses his grip on reality.

“I first read the script four years before I signed up to play Clifford,” says Gere. “He agreed to do it because [the director] Lasse Hallström came on board; Hallström is a master at mining poignancy from scripts. “With Lasse there’s no sense of heightened reality,” continues Gere. “He keeps the story real, but lets it float with humour. He made the script for The Hoax come alive.”

The film is sold with the strapline “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, and while that’s a mantra to which Irving subscribed whole-heartedly, it is not one with which Gere, in his personal life at least, is particularly comfortable. After all, the 57-year-old Philadelphia native has been the subject of more than one hoax himself, the most famous incorporating a supposed passion for rodents, specifically gerbils.

“I’ve had my share of bogus stories,” admits Gere, “but I don’t really want to talk about it. I have it clearly in perspective.” The Gere side of his family, he says, “were all earth-orientated people, while my mother came from a more neurotic family”.

He was an outsider at university. “Most of the time because I didn't have many friends, I'd just disappear into the movies.” He dropped out of studying philosophy. “When I decided to leave college I thought my parents were bourgeois. My father knew what I refused to accept – that I would have to go through hell and he just didn’t want to see it. I wasn’t sure I wanted a career in the performing arts but once I decided to take a look, my parents were supportive although I don’t think they ever understood.”

The perspective adopted by the newspapermen who invented those gerbil rumours (Gere was, in fact, in India during the period he was allegedly in an LA hospital having rodent-related canal surgery) came scurrying out of its dark hole when Gere was shooting An Officer and a Gentlemen (1982). In the previous year he had starred as a gay man in the Broadway show Bent, in an attempt to quell his reputation as a Hollywood sex symbol, but had emerged instead as a slice of hot totty for men and women alike.

He had enjoyed his breakthrough in the late 1970s, shifting from off-Broadway small-timer to on-screen big-timer courtesy of Looking For Mr Goodbar (1977), in which he played Diane Keaton’s crazed Latin lover, and then Days of Heaven (1978), directed by Terrence Malick. By the time he shot American Gigoloin 1980, this young prince of Hollywood looked set to inherit Warren Beatty’s crown.

Like Beatty, Rudolph Valentino or Louise Brooks, Gere became synonymous with his on-screen persona. “I have always said that it’s very flattering to be desired,” he says, “but it was always ridiculous to assume that because I could play a gigolo on screen I would be anything like that off the screen.”

He retreated from the public eye. His career seemed on the wane. “Sure, my career has had peaks and troughs,” he explains, “but I’ve never got depressed about the business. This is just a job. People think that because actors are so identified with their career that that is the defining issue, but that’s not the case with me.” Then came Pretty Woman.

Whether he was seeking the acclaim or not, it propelled Gere to the Alist once more, and the press again began delving into his private life. His high-profile divorce from Cindy Crawford in 1994 was framed by rumours that the actor was gay (he took a full-page advertisement out in The Times denying the rumours), and again he shifted himself out of the limelight, seeking out smaller projects.

This millennium has been much kinder; Gere has enjoyed big paydays with films such as Runaway Bride (1999), The Mothman Prophecies(2002) and Chicago(2002), and is now happily married to Carey Lowell, with whom he has a six-year-old son, Homer. “My wife and I know all about the pitfalls,” he says. “Relationships are a bit like a shark – they have to keep in motion. But I am happy, and, of course, Buddhism’s played a big part in that.”

Gere’s attempt to find “big” happiness sifts through his personal rather than his professional life, and he says that he has “many different lives outside of work, all of which are fulfilling”. That said, The Hoax has proved fulfilling, too, although stepping back into the spotlight has already reignited interest in Gere as a sex symbol.

“C’mon,” he says with a hint of a smile. “I’m 57, how much longer can I be a sex symbol? If people think I still look good, well that’s because I have had a lot of plastic surgery.” He stops and laughs. Gere is, of course, joking. As John Travolta attests, it’s a rare moment.

The Hoax is on general release from Friday

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