Richard Gere: An actor and a gentleman

(CBS News) "Pretty Woman" is among the many movies that have Richard Gere one of Hollywood's biggest stars. More than 20 years later, he's still at the top of his game . . . and expanding his range. Rita Braver now..with a Sunday Profile:

He's played lovers and lawyers, spies and rogues. But did you ever think that in real life Richard Gere would be . . . an innkeeper?

"It was a wreck, it was falling down, and we invented everything that you see here," he said.

The Bedford Post Inn, a small, luxury getaway that he and a business partner lovingly restored, is close to Gere's home, about an hour outside New York City. It has a gourmet restaurant and right elegant rooms.

Braver asked the reason Gere said to himself, "What I really need in my life is to run an inn."

"Well, I never thought to run one. I had not interest in running anything. I like to build. My mother said I have an 'edifice complex'!" he laughed. "One of the funniest things she ever said, which is true: I like to build beautiful things."

But mostly what he's built is an extraordinary film career. His latest movie is called "Arbitrage," with Gere starring as a charming, debonair and crooked hedge fund manager.

"It's a movie about his moral challenges, and how one thing after another shoves him further and further up against a stone wall with no way out," Gere said. "But I think as we go through the movie, we realize that everyone in this movie is morally challenged - everybody, from the police to the lawyers, to his own family."

"You've got to know that people are saying about your performance in this film that it's Oscar worthy. What do you think when you hear that?" Braver asked.

"People are very generous about this, and of course it makes me feel good," he said.

Now 63, Richard Gere has been acting since he won the lead in "The King and I" in high school. Raised in upstate New York, he plays down his family's distinguished lineage: "It turns out I had, like, five EXTREMELY distant relatives on the Mayflower."

"Something to be a little bit proud of," said Braver.

"Please! Both of my parents came from a very, very small town, agrarian town, a farming village in northeastern Pennsylvania." Gere's grandfather is even featured in the logo of his inn - a farmer hauling wheat from his field.

Gere honed his dramatic skills on stage, in summer stock and on Broadway.

It was an incredibly vibrant time; Late '60s, early '70s in New York was a lot of experimental, exciting theater," Gere said. "New kinds of plays were being written that related much more to the world that young actors, actresses lived in, and the Tennessee Williams plays and the Eugene O'Neill plays."

But then director Terrence Malick offered him the lead in the 1978 film "Days of Heaven," playing a young farm worker with a dark past.

"I could feel when Terry asked me to do the movie and we were going to start shooting, I know that my life had taken a leap," he said.

But the real leap came a few years later: "An Officer and a Gentleman" was a box office smash. Gere plays an aspiring Navy pilot, who grapples with a tough drill instructor - and a challenging romance.

"That was a really wonderful experience shooting that move," Gere said.

"As you were making the film, did you realize, 'Hey we've got a hit here, people are gonna love this'?" Braver asked.

"No, no, no, in fact, no one knew," he said. "It's like with 'Pretty Woman.' No one knew. We were making this movie. No one knew."

But Gere DID know that he and Julia Roberts were going to click on screen:

"She came into my office and I mean, she is that - I mean, that woman from 'Pretty Woman' was in my office," he recalled. "And we had a good buzz going between us. So I said, yeah, this definitely could work."

"Have you ever been in the middle of a film and you're working with a leading lady and you're saying to myself, 'Oh my gosh, this is not working, we don't have that spark'?" Braver asked.

After a lengthy pause, Gere said, "No." "Why are you laughing?"

"'Cause I think probably a lot of ladies would feel a spark when they were around you," Braver said.

"You want to know the truth? I don't think I would do a movie with someone where there wasn't That thing," he replied. "I mean, you walk into a room and there's some people you go, Oh, yeah, I got a buzz with that person."

And there's no doubt the audience - especially the female contingent - gets a buzz from watching Richard Gere, from his early film days in "American Gigolo," to his 2002 Golden Globe-winning turn as a singing lawyer in "Chicago."

His looks and sex appeal have always been a big factor. But he says he doesn't think about it. "There's some reason that I'm still allowed to make movies, okay? I'm not a fool and there's a lot of factors that tie into that. But it's not my life, it's not how I see myself. I don't look in the mirror. That's not my life.

"I have a very simple straightforward life which has nothing o do with that."

In fact, his life is grounded in his Buddhist faith, which he says gives him perspective. "It's a path that I trust totally," he said. "The more energy I put into it, the more results I get, sure."

And there is his family. After a brief marriage to model Cindy Crawford in the '90s, Gere married actress Carey Lowell in 2002. They have one son, Homer.

"You're an involved dad?" Braver asked.

"Oh, yeah. I was 50 when he was born, so I had kind of done myself, at that point."

"You didn't think you were going to have kids?"

"I honestly didn't think about it all that much, you know? Clearly I was waiting for the right woman - and then he just happened, and I was overjoyed."

And he has some new priorities: "I'm not going to make a movie, because I just need to make a movie. There's got to be something that I really care about. And you know, I have a basic rule, that if it's not going to be within an hour of my family, where we're shooting, I probably am not going to do it."

Luckily, there's plenty of work nearby.

For more info:

• "Arbitrage" (Lionsgate)
• Bedford Post Inn, Bedford, N.Y.