(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Sun 22 February 2026 19:45, UK
As we’ve discussed previously, Harrison Ford has been around a lot longer than people imagine and has appeared in a lot more movies than people might think.
There’s a definite and understandable tendency to define him as Han Solo and Indiana Jones, but between those blockbusters, he put in all kinds of excellent screen time in some superb films.
Still going strong in his 80s and currently in the third season of the Apple TV comedy Shrinking, Ford made his start in the late 1960s, struggling as an actor to the point where he genuinely considered just doing carpentry for a living before a couple of life-changing phone calls from Star Wars supremo George Lucas.
But perhaps it’s a sign of Ford’s quality as an actor that, unlike some of his peers in those films, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, for instance, he never seemed to have any difficulty with audiences separating him from Han Solo. It could be because another iconic character came along in the form of Indiana Jones so quickly, but it’s more likely that Ford was simply able to consistently pick up high-class scripts in movies that proved hugely popular.
There was 1982’s seminal sci-fi Blade Runner for a start, which kicked off a succession of films in different genres that cemented Ford as one of the most bankable leading men in Hollywood. The rest of the ‘80s saw him have a string of hits, including 1988’s thriller Frantic, plus the comedy Working Girl, and in the years just before them, he also made two movies that fared very differently, Mosquito Coast and Witness.
The former was the story of a man losing the plot after taking his family into the depths of a jungle, which didn’t do well at the box office, while the latter was more standard Ford as the hero fare, a noir about a police detective trying to protect an Amish woman and her son after they witness a murder. It was a huge hit with critics, Ford was Oscar-nominated among eight nods for the movie, including ‘Best Picture’, and it grossed ten times its budget.
But looking back on his career several years later, Ford appeared to be more fond of the less successful movie, feeling it represented an opportunity for him to play something completely different to his blockbuster action hero persona.
At the time, Harrison had just made 42, a baseball movie about the life of Jackie Robinson for which Ford turned himself into someone unrecognisable to play Branch Rickey, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ford wore a fatsuit and prosthetics and shaved back his hairline for the character, changing his voice and adopting different mannerisms.
It remains one of the roles he’s most proud of, saying: “42 is the first of the character parts that’s attracted enough notice to be — maybe — auspicious for me, because that’s what I’ve always wanted to do, was to play those kinds of parts.
He added: “When I was starting out, I had never a hint that I would end up being a leading man. I still don’t know how that happened. But all I ever thought about was (character from Pulitzer prize-winning 1942 play The Skin of our Teeth) Mr. Antrobus. For Mr. Antrobus (who Ford played while at college), I had a pin-on mustache and a pillow under my shirt and talcum powder in my hair – and I felt free behind that.”