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Harrison Ford

b. 1942 Specialist

A carpenter who became Han Solo, then kept flying planes

Portrait of Harrison Ford — Kevin Paul — 2025 — CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Harrison Ford was expelled from Ripon College four days before graduation for plagiarism, having drifted into a drama class his senior year mainly to get over his shyness. He moved to Los Angeles anyway, signed a small contract with Columbia Pictures, and spent most of the late 1960s in minor television roles that went nowhere. When a studio executive told him flatly he had no future in film, he believed it enough to become a self-taught carpenter, building cabinets and decks for Hollywood clients, including the writer Joan Didion, to support his family. He was still doing that work in 1973, in his thirties, when a casting director asked him to read lines for other actors' auditions.

Reading those lines for other people's screen tests, Ford caught the attention of George Lucas, who cast him in American Graffiti and then, in 1977, as Han Solo. That role, and Indiana Jones four years later, made him for a long stretch the biggest movie star in the world, in five Star Wars films and five Indiana Jones films across five decades. He worked steadily outside both franchises too, as a fugitive, a detective, a president, an Amish-country cop, earning his only Oscar nomination for Witness in 1985. He kept working into his eighties, in a fantasy sequel, a Marvel film, and two television series, without ever quite settling into the retirement his box office would have allowed him.

Ford has crashed more planes than most people who own one. A hydraulic door fell on him during Star Wars filming in 2014 and broke his ankle; a small plane's engine failed over a Los Angeles golf course in 2015 and broke his pelvis; a helicopter he was flying lost power during training in 1999. He kept flying anyway, kept a de Havilland Beaver with old bullet holes from CIA operations in Southeast Asia, and used it to fly emergency rescues in Wyoming, once airlifting help to a stranded hiker and once finding a lost Boy Scout near Yellowstone. The same instinct that nearly killed him repeatedly on film sets and runways also put him, unpaid, in the air looking for people who needed finding.

Ford has spent more than thirty years as vice chair of Conservation International and has testified before Congress on Tibetan independence and climate policy, work that gets far less attention than any of his films. He is, by his own description, one of Hollywood's most private public figures, married three times, still working past eighty, with three species named after him and a hometown airport's worth of aviation honors most actors never accumulate. At an age when most of his 1970s contemporaries have stopped, he is still playing the role that made him famous, and still, by choice, landing his own plane.

Lifespan

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Harrison Ford's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

Star Wars film
As Han Solo, opposite Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher 1977
Raiders of the Lost Ark film
Introduced Indiana Jones, directed by Steven Spielberg 1981
Blade Runner film
Ridley Scott's adaptation of Philip K. Dick 1982
Witness film
Earned his only Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor 1985
The Fugitive film
As Dr. Richard Kimble 1993

Life in brief

with age at each point

July 13, 1942 aged 0 Born in Chicago, Illinois
1964 aged ~22 Begins summer stock theater and moves to Los Angeles
Early 1970s aged ~28 Works as a self-taught carpenter for Hollywood clients Clients included the writer Joan Didion.
1973 aged ~31 Cast in American Graffiti by George Lucas
1977 aged ~35 Becomes Han Solo in Star Wars
1981 aged ~39 First plays Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark
1985 aged ~43 Earns his only Academy Award nomination, for Witness
June 15, 2010 aged 67 Marries Calista Flockhart in Santa Fe, New Mexico
2023 aged ~81 Plays Indiana Jones for the final time in Dial of Destiny