Up in the quiet hills of Brentwood, where the driveway gates beckon with a stately, inward swing, Harrison Ford’s hideaway nestles against an opulently green, wooded hillside.
The star of “Air Force One”–and 5 of the 25 top-grossing movies of all time–is dressed in jeans, boat shoes and a bottle-green work shirt. It’s scarcely the same attire that his film character, President James Marshall, wears when Air Force One is hijacked by terrorists from Kazakhstan.
Ford’s house is a white, two-story California hybrid of cottage and bungalow, with big windows and open porches on the second floor that would seem to be perfect for morning coffee and looking out at the world.
“It was built in the mid-’40s and it was one story when I got it,” says Ford. “I found the original architect and worked with him on the design. He was 95.”
French doors open onto a large living room with dark-stained hardwood floors, and a ceiling, walls and molding painted in three subtly different shades of cream. Part of his art collection is displayed, on the walls, including a number of drawings and paintings by the late-19th-Century French artist Edouard Vuillard.
“I’m not an obsessive collector,” he says. “I tend to stop buying when I run out of wall space.”
Ford sits on one of the room’s four couches, which are conversationally grouped with armchairs on three antique Persian rugs. It’s a sociable room and the 55-year-old actor smiles at a compliment on its proportions.
“I’ve always believed that architecture should be on a human scale,” he says. “It is not about egos.”
It’s also not his primary residence. When he can, he and wife Melissa Mathison live on their 800-acre ranch outside Jackson Hole, Wyo., where the Grand Tetons lurch abruptly out of the plains and into an endless sky.
“You get a sense of reference there,” he says. “You feel part of something that’s got order and balance and harmony to it. All the schizophrenic s— that we go through in this kind of environment, all the distraction and noise, all the confusion of misplaced, misdirected energy just doesn’t happen there.”
Ford confronted that bad energy early in his career. He’d gone straight from Ripon College in Wisconsin to the Laguna (Calif.) Playhouse to the contract-player pool at Columbia Pictures, where he toiled in obscurity, on small films and episodic TV. Frustrated, he quit the studios around 1970 and worked for a decade as a carpenter. This aspect of his career is Hollywood legend.
“I have gone on to other things, but the myth has gone on far longer than the reality,” he adds. “I’ve delighted in participating in the designs of things, in the houses I live in, but I’ve lost most of the tool skills I once had.”
Yet it is Ford’s workmanlike approach to acting that his “Air Force One” colleagues praise. “He is a superb craftsman,” said director Wolfgang Petersen. “He is always, mentally and physically, perfectly prepared.”
His first big break was as the hot rodder Bob Falfa in George Lucas’ 1973 classic “American Graffiti,” but carpentry paid the bills until the next one came in 1977, when he played space rogue Han Solo in Lucas’ “Star Wars.”
His turn finally came in 1981 in Lucas’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” directed by Steven Spielberg–a movie uniquely designed to appeal to grownups as well as the Saturday matinee crowd.
The science-fiction classic “Blade Runner” followed in 1982. “Witness” in 1985, got him an Oscar nomination and established him as Hollywood nobility.
Ford has starred in fairy tales like “Sabrina” (1995) and Mike Nichols’ “Working Girl” (1988). Suspense films like “Frantic” (1988) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990), and all-out actioners like “The Fugitive” (1993) and last year’s “The Devil’s Own” have established him as Hollywood’s box-office king.
Even as “Air Force One” is opening in theaters, Ford is at work on his next project, a comedy called “6 Days, 7 Nights” that became fodder for gossip columns when his co-star, Anne Heche, came out as Ellen DeGeneres’ lover.
“She (Anne) has great energy and it was a lot of fun. But comedy is a lot like running on slippery rocks. One misstep and you’re up to your ass in cold water,” he says.
Next year, he’ll star in a story of love and war in Sarajevo, and, somewhere down the road, he’d like to return to one of his favorite characters.
“I’d love to play Indiana Jones again,” he says without hesitation. “It’ll take a while for a script to develop, and then George and Steven and I have to get together on a time. But we certainly all have an ambition to do it.”
But in this one, Indiana won’t be battling the Nazis.
“We’ve strung this out over so many years that signs of Indiana’s age are apparent,” Ford says with a wry smile. “I’d like to see us sneak up into the ’50s, perhaps. That’s got some potential.”
