For: Harrison Ford (silent film actor)

Harrison Ford (born July 13, 1942) is an Academy Award- and BAFTA-nominated, as well as Golden Globe-winning, American actor. Ford is best known for his performances as the titular character in the Indiana Jones film series and as Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy. He is also known for his role as the haunted android tracker Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's sci-fi cult film Blade Runner. His four-decade career also includes roles in other Hollywood blockbusters such as The Fugitive, Air Force One, Witness, Presumed Innocent and What Lies Beneath. At one point, Ford had roles in the top five box-office hits of all timeFact: date=August 2008, though his role in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (as Elliot's school principal) was deleted from the final cut of the film. Five of his films have been inducted into the National Film Registry.

In 1997, Ford was ranked # 1 in Empire's "The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time" list. As of July 2008, the US domestic box office grosses of Ford's films total almost US$3.4 billion, with worldwide grosses surpassing $6 billion, making Ford the No. 2 US domestic box-office star for lead roles behind only Eddie Murphy. If counting both supporting movie roles as well as starring roles, Ford would be the 5th biggest film star, behind that of voice-actor Frank Welker, Samuel L. Jackson, Eddie Murphy and Tom Hanks.

Early life

Ford was born July 13, 1942 to Dorothy (née Dora Nidelman), a homemaker and former radio actress and Christopher Ford (née John William Ford), an advertising executive and also a former actor. Harrison Ford's maternal grandparents, Anna Lifschutz and Harry Nidelman, were Jewish immigrants from Minsk, Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His paternal grandparents, Florence Veronica Niehaus and John Fitzgerald Ford, were of German and Irish Catholic descent, respectively. When asked in which religion he was raised, Ford jokingly responded, "Democrat". He has also said that he feels "Irish as a person, but I feel Jewish as an actor".

Ford was active in the Boy Scouts of America, and achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout. He worked at a Scout camp as a counselor for the Reptile Study merit badge. Because of this, he and Eagle Scout director Steven Spielberg later decided that the character of young Indiana Jones would be depicted as a Life Scout in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They also jokingly reversed Ford's knowledge of reptiles into Jones's fear of snakes.

In 1960, Ford graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois. His was the first student voice broadcast on his high school's new radio station, WMTH-FM, and he was its first sportscaster during his senior year, 19591960. The radio room still bears his graffiti. He attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He took a drama class in his junior year, chiefly as a way to meet women. Ford, a self-described "late bloomer", became fascinated with acting. Towards the end of his freshman year, he was a member of a folk band called The Brothers Gross; he played gutbucket. Ford did not graduate.