PEOPLE Harrison Ford

HARRISON FORD: HAN SOLO, INDIANA JONES & MORE Inside his life and career, from Hollywood carpenter to iconic star of history-making hits • Man of Action: The Fugitive to Air Force One to the MCU PLUS On TV: Shrinking & Yellowstone’s 1923…

Not every man can comfortably carry himself to the anthemic blast of a John Williams score in real-life situations. One expects to hear the rousting bum-ba-BUM-baa of the Indiana Jones march at the movies. But talk-show bands play it when Harrison Ford comes through the curtain, as do awards-show orchestras as he steps onstage. Or offstage. Ford has joked that it followed him into the room where he had a colonoscopy. This is the peculiar price of creating an indelible movie hero, a feat which Ford has, remarkably, accomplished twice: with the dashing archeologist Indiana Jones and the roguish Star Wars pilot Han Solo. He could have made a comfortable living on just those two massive series. But the guy likes to work. For nearly five decades he has led…

“IN STAR WARS HE CARRIES HIS REAL PERSONALITY INTO THAT, BECAUSE HARRISON, ABOVE ALL THINGS, IS A REALLY FUNNY GUY”—RIDLEY SCOTT, IN A BAFTA TRIBUTE TO FORD “ROMANTIC LOVE IS ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING AND FULFILLING KINDS OF LOVE, AND I THINK THERE IS A POTENTIAL FOR IT AT ANY STAGE OF YOUR LIFE”—FORD, A YEAR INTO HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH FLOCKHART…

DON’T QUIT YOUR DAY JOB, KID! With only a semester of drama classes from Wisconsin’s Ripon College, where he was a philosophy major, Harrison Ford has his carpentry skills as much as his acting chops to thank for launching his $9 billion film career. Between small TV and film parts he paid the bills by building decks and porches around Los Angeles. Among his clients were the writer Joan Didion and, notably, director Francis Ford Coppola. The older son of actor-turned-advertising executive Christopher Ford and homemaker and former actress Dorothy, Ford grew up in Park Ridge, a suburb of Chicago. At Maine East High School, Harry, as he was known, “was a tall, skinny kid with long legs,” a classmate, Marilyn Fox Spiegel, told People. “He pushed around the audio-visual…

IT’S A HOT JUNE DAY IN 1979, and the cast of The Empire Strikes Back is sweating on a steamy set in Hertfordshire, England, that’s meant to be a Cloud City carbon-freezing chamber. The scene will come at the emotional climax of this first Star Wars sequel, in which Han Solo is captured by Darth Vader to be delivered to the gangster Jabba the Hutt—and almost certain death. As Solo is lowered into the freezer, Princess Leia, watching in horror, confesses her feelings for the roguish smuggler. “I love you,” she says. “I couldn’t tell you before, but it’s true.” “Just remember that,” replies Han. “’Cause I’ll be back.” Well, that was how it went in the initial script by Star Wars creator George Lucas and screenwriters Leigh Brackett and…

Is Rick Deckard human? For 40 years fans of Blade Runner have split over the question: Is the ex-cop hunting rogue replicants a man or himself one of these lifelike androids—and would he know it if he were? That puzzle is at the heart of the 1982 sci-fi classic that explores how memory defines the soul, while racing through a rain-soaked, neon-lit dystopian Los Angeles of the future. On opposing sides of the debate are the star who played Deckard, Harrison Ford, and the movie’s director, Ridley Scott. Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner let Ford take a darker, moodier turn than he had with Han or Indy, as Deckard wrestles with existential questions of love, morality and his own…