Saturdays with the Stars: Harrison Ford

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Bruce Lee, an actor who (like Steve McQueen before him) died relatively young and forged a type of movie star that hadn't really been seen before.  This month, as promised, we are going to start a six-month run of actors who made virtually all of their successful films post-1975.  To start that, we'll begin with the one guy who did have two big movies before 1975 (American Graffiti & The Conversation), but who would become synonymous with two characters that would reshape the cinematic landscape after Jaws, and make him the movie star's movie star, an action hero that the whole family could root for, even if his prickly public demeanor might bristle at such superlatives.  This month's star is Harrison Ford.

Born in Chicago, Ford (like Bruce Lee last month) had a clear path before him if he followed his parents' footsteps into show business.  His mother was a radio actress, and his father a former actor & advertising executive.  He grew up in a mixed faith household, his mother being Jewish while his father was Irish-Catholic, and both were quite progressive, something that Ford would carry for the rest of his life (the rare action film star of the modern era that is very much a Democrat).  Though incredibly handsome, Ford's initial forays into entertainment were middling, getting bit roles in westerns while George Hamilton & James Caan (both roughly the same age as Ford) got top-billing in the same pictures.  So frustrated with acting was he that he had a side gig as a carpenter (one of his clients included writer Joan Didion), and were it not for George Lucas seeing his potential in American Graffiti, he might have made that his life.

But Lucas saw something in Ford that soon the entire world would, as he put him as Han Solo in Star Wars, a movie that would make him a household name, while Lucas (as a producer) a few years later would give Ford the role he might be most synonymous with, Indiana Jones.  These two movies launched highly lucrative franchises for Ford, but they were hardly the only movies that really commanded the public's attention.  Throughout the 1980's and 90's, Ford was one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood, particularly when it comes to launching action franchises.  So famous is Ford that part of me almost didn't want to include him here because I struggled to come up with four major films that I hadn't seen of his (according to Letterboxd, I have seen 28 of his films).  So while we won't review Star Wars and Indiana Jones (as I've seen them all many times), we will talk about them, alongside some of Ford's other biggest pictures of the era, including two forays into more serious acting.