[3] Gere's other films include An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), The Cotton Club (1984), No Mercy (1986), Pretty Woman (1990), Sommersby (1993), Intersection (1994), First Knight (1995), Primal Fear (1996), Runaway Bride (1999), Dr. T & the Women (2000), Shall We Dance?

[7][13] Gere first worked professionally at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Provincetown Playhouse on Cape Cod in 1969, where he starred in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

His first major acting role was in the 1971 rock opera Soon, written by Scott Fagan and Joe Kookoolis, which opened on Broadway at the Ritz Theatre and closed after three performances.

[7] Gere was one of the first notable Hollywood actors to play a homosexual character, starring as a gay Holocaust victim in the 1979 Broadway production of Bent, for which he earned a Theatre World Award.

Gere played a small but significant part in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) and starred in director Terrence Malick's well-reviewed drama Days of Heaven (1978).

[19][20] His career rebounded with the releases of Internal Affairs (1990) and Pretty Woman (1990), the latter of which earned Gere his second Golden Globe Award nomination.

[21] The 1990s saw Gere star in successful films including Sommersby (1993) (opposite Jodie Foster), Primal Fear (1996) and Runaway Bride (1999) (which reunited him with his Pretty Woman co-star Julia Roberts).

[20] Gere was notably singled out for portraying businessman Robert Miller in Arbitrage (2012), earning his fourth Golden Globe Award nomination.

Among many positive reviews,[29] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone cited Gere's performance as "too good to ignore" and "an implosive tour de force".

[36] Gere is an accomplished musician, composing and performing the Pretty Woman piano theme and a guitar solo in Runaway Bride.

[45][46] In September 2007, Gere called for the boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to put pressure on China to make Tibet independent.

During a live news conference to promote condom use among truck drivers, he embraced Bollywood superstar Shilpa Shetty, dipped her, and kissed her several times on the cheek.

As a result of that gesture, a local court ordered the arrest of Gere and Shetty, finding them in violation of public obscenity laws.

About a month later, a two-judge bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, K. G. Balakrishnan, described the case as "frivolous" and believed that such complaints against celebrities were filed for "cheap publicity" and have brought a bad name to the country.

[55] Gere discussed the persecution and loss of land of the Jumma people as an example of a tragic story that repeats itself in different continents of the world, calling attention to the crime against their peaceful culture and how it reflects on humanity's relationship with nature and capacity to survive.

"[61] In February 2023, Gere was one of the 480 global figures who signed a statement from Freedom House expressing support for Mahsa Amini protesters, urging sanctions on Iranian officials, and calling for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to be proscribed as a terror group.

[64] During those years, he was also sporadically linked with Tuesday Weld,[65] Carole Mallory,[66] Dawn Steel,[67] Loree Rodkin,[68] Barbara Carrera,[69] and Barbra Streisand.

[72] Gere has also reportedly dated models Laura Bailey,[73] Tina Chow,[74] Dalila Di Lazzaro,[75] and Padma Lakshmi.

After studying Zen for five or six years,[88] he and Brazilian painter Sylvia Martins traveled in 1978 to Nepal, where Gere met many Tibetan monks and lamas.

[105] On May 17, 2012, Albanian President, Bamir Topi awarded the Medal of Gratitude to Gere with the citation: "With gratitude and honor outstanding personality of the world art, great humanist and activist for the protection of human rights, which unmasked and the American public made known, and further, inhuman crimes, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, in 1999, the Serbian military machine against the Albanian civilian population living in its land.