Short Biography

Harrison Ford`s father was a local advertising executive who sometimes worked as a radio actor, and his mother was a former radio actress who stayed home and tended the children. The family was of all-American mixed heritage, German, Irish, and Catholic on his father`s side, Russian Jewish on his mother`s side.

As a boy, he was `Harry Ford`, a C student in high school who never played sports, but he tinkered with electronics in the school`s radio club. His school district had (and still has) its own radio station, but that nerdy hobby scored Ford no particular popularity. He says he never dated in high school.

In college he signed up for drama classes for, he has said, two reasons: He thought the class would be easy and thus raise his low grade point average, and he was hoping to meet women. He got a good grade, and met and married a woman from that class, but he also discovered that he loved performing. He made his first stage appearance as Mac the Knife in the school`s production of Threepenny Opera, but he was inevitably expelled from college, due to academic problems.

He sidestepped the military draft -- and the Vietnam war -- by filing as a conscientious objector. When he was required to appear before the draft board and explain his stance, he instead feigned general nuttiness in a performance that convinced his interrogators he was not military material.

Ford made his professional debut performing in locally-produced plays in Wisconsin, and soon came to Hollywood, where he worked as a carpenter while looking for work as an actor. He was eventually signed as a contract player at Columbia, making $150 a week -- good money -- but only when he was assigned a role, which was not often. He made his first screen appearance with one line as the bellhop in the 1966 heist adventure Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round with James Coburn. His first substantial speaking part came in the Civil War western A Time for Killing with Glenn Ford (no relation).

He was an adequate actor, but he had no shyness about complaining when the scripts were poor, and he had no patience for bad advice. In one encounter, a studio executive scolded Ford for his lack of on-camera charisma, telling him that even in Cary Grant`s earliest roles, even if he was playing a grocery clerk, you could tell he was destined to be a star. Ford replied, "I thought the point of acting was to make you think he was a grocery clerk." Understandably unpopular with management, Ford was eventually fired. He then signed with Universal, where he worked occasionally on TV shows like The Mod Squad, The Partridge Family, and Love American Style, before he was fired again.

At that point, Ford decided that carpentry was more satisfying work than the shallow, tedious sitcom bits he was doing. By then he had a reputation as a top-notch carpenter, so he had plenty of work. He constructed a recording studio for Sergio Mendes, a sun deck for Sally Kellerman, and after The Godfather proved a huge hit, Ford was hired for an expansion of Francis Ford Coppola`s office. A few months later, Ford was an actor again, working for producer Coppola and director George Lucas, playing the hot-rodder who raced Paul Le Mat in American Graffiti. He almost turned the role down, though -- carpentry paid better.

He later had a small but pivotal role in Coppola`s The Conversation with Gene Hackman, but acting was still Ford`s secondary career. Then he was hired to build some

Miscellaneous Information

Distinctive Features

Scar on Chin

Friends and Family

Terence Ford [Brother] (April 21,1945)

Dorothy Nidelman [Mother] ((radio actress, b. 17-Oct-1917))

Christopher Ford [Father] ((advertising executive, b. 20-Nov-1906, d. 10-Feb-1999))

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