Agent-manager Patricia McQueeney still remembers her first encounter with 27-year-old Harrison Ford. "He sat on the couch in my office—his head down, his hands between his knees and kind of (frowned) at me, looking up at me underneath his brows, extremely uncomfortable and almost embarrassed," she says. "At that time he was working as a carpenter and had done some small parts around town, and I can remember looking at him and thinking, What in the world am I going to do with him?"

One can imagine Harrison Ford, now 51, being equally embarrassed (and pleased) by receiving the National Association of Theatre Owners' first Boxoffice Star of the Century award at the ShoWest ceremonies tomorrow in Las Vegas. When asked for comment on the award, Tommy Lee Jones, his co-star in last year's smash hit "The Fugitive," left a message on the answering machine: "in regard to Harrison Ford becoming the Star of the Galaxy um ... er ... the Century." One can imagine Ford's lip curling with that wryly ironic smile, eyes rolling back as if to say, "Give me a break."

The screen icon, who has starred in seven of the 20 highest-grossing films of all time (with domestic boxoffice grosses approaching $2 billion), has come a long way since his days as a $150-a-week contract player at Columbia Pictures, then located on Gower Street. In an oft-told story that is part of the Ford legend, the young actor was criticized by a studio exec for his lack of "star quality" after his brief screen debut as a bellboy in "Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round" in 1966.

"In his first movie Tony Curtis played a grocery clerk, and you could immediately tell he was a movie star," said the studio boss. Replied Ford: "I thought you were supposed to think he was a grocery clerk." Ford was fired the next day.

But others saw what the exec missed. "Everybody could tell very early that the kid had potential," says Walter Beakel, head of the Columbia talent program at the time, who helped Ford enter a similar program at Universal Studios. "But he did not have enough confidence and enough technique to cut it, because he was very young. He hadn't matured enough to go into creative, emotional leading-man roles."

It didn't help that the brooding, cerebral Ford was not a "studio man", was not willing to play the politics of self-promotion with the studio honchos. He was fired from his second contract after only a year and a half.

Disillusioned with the industry and the limited roles available to him, Ford went into car- pentry full-time, teaching himself the trade from borrowed library books. Among his early jobs: building a $10u,000 recording studio for Brazilian composer Sergio Mendez. "Harrison always had enormous dignity and was extremely smart," says McQueeney, who began to manage his career in 1970. "If he didn't like a role that I gave him, he would just turn it down. And sometimes they were good jobs, very lucrative. But they were television jobs, and he wouldn't tie himself up with a series. He had two little boys and a mortgage, but he'd say: 'No, I'm not going to do it. I'll go build a cabinet."

Friend and casting agent Fred Roos, and early supporter who had introduced Ford to McQueeney after casting him in "Zabriskie Point" (1970), describes the potential he saw in the young actor; "He was not a leading man in the way they thought of leading men at the time - not pretty enough. The strongest quality I saw was his great sense of masculinity. There was kind of a dangerous intensity that he had, and combined with that was this droll sense of humor. He had extreme confidence but nothing braggadocio. And he was so tasteful and caring about the way he did carpentry; he wouldn't accept anything that wasn't perfect. If I would suggest (building) something I wanted that he thought was in bad taste, he would refuse to do it. And he was always right."

In 1973 Roos brought Ford to the attention of a young director named George Lucas, who, with executive producer Francis Ford Coppola, was mounting a low-budget film called "American Graffiti." The part of hot-rodder Bob Falfa was a small but vivid character role. But Ford, stubborn as always, nearly blew the deal, refusing to work for SAG scale. Roos came back with an extra $15 a week, and Ford signed on for the 28-night shoot, along with other members of McQueeney's "family": Cindy Williams, Charlie Martin Smith, Candy Clark and Mackenzie Phillips.

"He was a little bit on the wild side," says Lucas. "We shot all night - it was pretty boring - and he had a tendency to drink a few beers and get in that Chevy from 'Two-Lane Blacktop,' which was incredibly hot, and sort of race up and down the streets. The police who were on the picture kept threatening to impound the car and take him downtown.

"There was an incident where [Ford] and Paul LeMat threw Rick Dreyfuss into a swim- ming pool right before Rick was going to do a lot of his close-ups. [Rick] whacked his head [and] got cut across his forehead," says Lucas.

The phenomenal success of "American Graffiti" catapulted Ford's fellow actors into stardom, but Ford seemed unable to get beyond co-starring roles in television movies of the week and a small but memorable role as Robert Duvall's assistant in Coppola's critically acclaimed "The Conversation."

With his wife Mary, whom he had met at Ripon College in Wisconsin, and his two infant sons, Ford was then living in a broken-down fixer-upper in the Hollywood Hills that had a blanket serving as a bathroom door and a tarp covering the exposed living-room wall. Times were tough.

"Sometimes his wife Mary would call me and say: 'Harrison is depressed. Would you talk to him?"' says actress and friend Cindy Williams, who worked with Ford in "Graffiti" and "The Conversation." "They were poor as church mice, and it broke your heart that he wasn't working all the time. And that's when I'd say: 'Some day, Harrison, you'll see. You'll be like Cary Grant.' And lo and behold, from my mouth to God's ear!"

In the meantime, however, Ford was back to doing carpentry, hanging a door at Coppola's Zoetrope offices, where Lucas was casting his next film, "Star Wars." Lucas wanted to avoid using actors from "Graffiti" but asked Ford if he would be willing to read the Han Solo part against the actors who were coming in to audition. Ford got the part.

"When the movie came out and was such a hit, there was no question in my mind where Harrison was headed," says McQueeney, "and no question in his mind either. Harrison came into my place and sat down and looked up at me and said, 'Patricia, this is a miracle.' Because it had been very, very tough for him."

Says Lucas: "The experience of the 'Star Wars' films - especially the first - and of working with a lot of British actors like Alec Guinness mellowed him out a lot as an actor. He began to see how it was a real profession - in terms of how you act professionally on the set - by being around a lot of actors who did their job and didn't cause a lot of difficulties and didn't take a lot of time and did their homework before they came on the set. All the kinds of professional things you expect caught him at the right moment and made him realize how important the job of an actor is and how everybody depends on everybody to do their job well and not to be self-indulgent. He became a very good professional actor from that point on. He disciplined his talent in a much different way, which makes it a dream to work with him."

To avoid typecasting as the larger-than-life Solo, Ford worked constantly during the next few years, playing a variety of roles: a worm farmer and Vietnam vet in "Heroes" ( 1977), an American of finer caught behind enemy lines in "Force 10 From Navarone" ( 1978), an American G.I. in love in the WWII romance "Hanover Street" (1979), a bank robber cross- ing the country with rabbi Gene Wilder in "The Frisco Kid" ( 1979) and a cameo as Col. Lucas (named after George) in Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."

But none of the films found a substantial audience, and people began to wonder if Ford was really a star or just a "Star Wars" fluke.

With "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980), the Han Solo character grew from character actor to leading man and in the process became the most popular of the "Star Wars" heroes, says producer Howard Kazanjian, who was a production executive on that film. But Solo was also killed off - or at least carbon frozen - at the end of the film, because Ford had refused early on to sign a three-picture deal.

Meanwhile, Spielberg and Lucas were searching for an unknown actor to star in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." They were determined that no stars from "Star Wars" would be cast, lest the audience get confused. After an exhaustive search they finally found their man, a rising young television actor named Tom Selleck. The only snag was a pilot that Selleck had shot months before: the option agreement still had a few weeks remaining. The filmmakers got Universal to release Selleck from his contract, but CBS, intrigued by the interest in the actor, decided to exercise the option a mere three days before it was to lapse. "Magnum P.I." became a hit series and Selleck a TV star. Lucas returned to Ford, who in some ways had always been a model for the character. "In a way, Han Solo is the Ioffspring of Bob Falfa in 'American Graffiti, sort of a fantasy version of what Indiana Jones is," says Lucas. "It's funny. Those characters are my alter-ego, I guess. In a way, Harrison becomes my alter ego."

In playing Indiana Jones, Ford entered a new level of international stardom, with "Raiders" grossing $242 million at the domestic boxoffice alone. In 1982 he expanded his screen persona in Ridley Scott's ground-breaking futuristic film noir, "Blade Runner." In 1983, Han Solo was revived for "Return of the Jedi," thus completing the "Star Wars" trilogy. Ford, whose first marriage had by now ended, married screenwriter Melissa Mathison ("E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial," "Black Stallion").

But he was still not being taken seriously as an actor and McQueeney began searching for a script that would bail him out of his larger-than-life screen persona. She found that script in "Called Home," a police drama set in Amish country that had been passed on by every studio and actor in town. Producer Ed Feldman had originally wanted Selleck to play the lead (in what would later be called "Witness") but Selleck's agent had passed as well. Ford, who is aware of the role that luck has played in his career, brought in Peter Weir to direct. Ford later received an Academy Award nomination and long-sought recognition for his nuanced and powerful performance in this film.

Between blockbusters "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (1984) and "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (1989), Ford did a second film with Weir, "The Mosquito Coast." That film's ecological themes were close to his heart. "He says, 'I'll do these other films, but once in a while I've got to do one for me,"' says McQueeney. "He loved what his character, Allie Fox, had to say.

Harrison is very much into the environment and anti-pollution and all of those good things that Allie Fox was also into. But what I didn't like was the torture that he put his wife and his two kids through. And I said: 'The audience thinks you're a hero. They aren't going to want you to be this mean guy who drags these people through the jungle.' We often have friendly fights, friendly arguments, but with that one we really had a knockdown drag-out."

That film was followed in the next few years by projects that were largely director driven. While in Paris with Mathison, Ford and agreed to work with director Roman Polanski, who wrote "Frantic" (1988) specifically for Ford. He worked with director Mike Nichols on both "Working Girl" (1988) and "Regarding Henry" (1991) and with Alan Pakula on the courtroom drama "Presummed Innocent" (1990).

"Harrison's career has developed by making very smart choices that were director-oriented rather than character- or plot-oriented choices," says Bruce Berman, president of worldwide production at Warner Bros. Pictures. "He will still only want to work with really good directors. But I think that he's become slightly more flexible in his choices and story is becoming as important an element, because 'The Fugitive' had a terrific plot and the Tom Clancy books are good parts and good stories."

It is ironic that an actor who was once so resistant to multipicture deals has come to be identified with three of the most prominen film trilogies: "Star Wars"; "Indiana Jones" and the Tom Clancy thrillers, including"Patriot Games" and "Clear and Present Danger," which recently wrapped in Mexico (The first of the Jack Ryan series, "The Hunt for Red October" was originally offered Ford, who passed on it. He felt the story real belonged to the Ramius character.)

Ford's maturation as an actor - and more than that, as a filmmaker - reached new heights this past year with director Andrew Davis' brilliantly realized "The Fugitive." In the making of the film the actor played a decidedly hands-on role.

"His last film has shown that his future is unlimited," says Weir. "He is one of the giants of the hundred years, one of the pantheon of American screen personalities. And he's freed himself from us, the directors. There was a period when he trusted directors with whom he had successful experiences. But to a degree, he was always a filmmaker. He has just gained in confidence."

Adds Berman: "I don't think that the jury is in yet, because Harrison has an evolving body of work that may be half over - but it's certainly not much more than [half over]. I think he will go down in history as one of the broadest-appeal movie stars who has ever worked. Cary Grant, Clark Cable - those kinds of people - he's in their league and more, in the sense that he appeals to men, women and younger people. He's a person that you want to root for and that you'd like to be."

By Todd Coleman
Originally published in
the Hollywood Reporter
March 1994