Richard Gere opens up about an important acting lesson he learned while filming A beautiful woman.
In an interview with SiriusXM’s Spotlight with Jessica Shaw, The 75-year-old actor said the late director Garry Marshall helped ensure the chemistry between Gere and actress Julie Roberts was just right.
“So we are working on it A beautiful woman and we’re trying to figure out how to do it and we’re messing around with the director, Garry Marshall, who’s amazing,” Gere said. “I love Garry.”
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Richard Gere, Julia Roberts in ‘Pretty Woman’ 1990.
Buena Vista Images/Courtesy of the Everett Collection
Richard Gere recalls his first meeting with Julia Roberts before A beautiful woman: ‘Please say yes’
Gere continued, “Julia’s here and I’m here and Julia really started out as an actress and she’s Julia. She’s bubbly and she’s blah, blah, blah, and I come in. I want to act, you know, I want to be an actor, and we’re both everywhere everywhere, you know?”
– She moves, I move, and he says: wait a minute. Garry says, he says, ‘In this movie, one of you moves and one of you doesn’t, and in this one [scene]the girl moves and the boy doesn’t,’ and that really said a lot about how to approach the characters. I mean, you can read from that how they think, how they feel, how they feel about themselves, how calm they are, how restless they are. It said a lot of what Garry said.”
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In a recent performance at Tonight’s show with Jimmy Fallon, Gere recalled how his longtime friendship with Roberts began with a meeting in his office before he agreed to film A beautiful woman.
“Before that, she shot, I think, one film [Pretty Woman] — Mystic pizzaand Gary Marshall… He brought us together,” Gere recounted.
He continued: “I remember Julia came to see me in New York and he said, ‘Richard, Julia, she’s good. She’s good, you’re going to like her.’ So she came to New York, came to my office, Garry met us and went and called her after about 45 minutes and said, ‘How’s it going?’ ”
“And I said, ‘That’s Garry.’ And so I’m talking to Garry and she’s on the other side of the table writing something on one of my sheets and then she turns around and puts it down and I read it and she says, ‘Please say yes.’ So I said, ‘Garry, I think I just said yes.’ ”
He and Roberts would later play romantic partners in another 1999 Marshall film runaway bride, and stayed in touch over the years.
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Source: HIS Education