Buddha Meets Hollywood

Buddha Meets Hollywood

By Susanne Weingarten

When Richard Gere meditates in India, even the Dalai Lama makes time for his famous acolyte. Religion has become the opiate of choice for the U.S. acting profession. Some stars need it to massage their egos. But for a heart-throb like Gere, meditation may be the path to overcoming his narcissism.

When Richard Gere reflects on his youth, he pictures a depressive, brooding, lost young man with a leather jacket and long hair. Someone toting around a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist tome Being and Nothingness. Someone harboring thoughts of suicide who checked himself into a New York psychiatric clinic at the age of 21.

When others recall the young Richard Gere, sex comes more readily to mind than existentialism. In his home city of Syracuse he had girls "diving at him from across the street," Gere's sister Joanne recalls. He was a "gorgeous hunk," gushes one theater director who had shared a dressing room with Gere at the Provincetown Players in the late 1960s. Like the rest of the troupe, he looks back with gloomy nostalgia at the supple ex-gymnast with the irresistible erotic aura. That's how easily self-image and external perceptions can diverge.

The erotic aura no doubt helped make Gere a movie star in the first place. His 1980 breakthrough - American Gigolo - featuring the actor playing a high-class Beverly Hills toy boy, is basically about Gere's phenomenal sexual impact on his environment.

But it was a glimpse of his inner self that made Richard Gere a Buddhist. The depressed young man had sought meaning in life and a way out of despair. He finally found both - not in the writings of Sartre but in Eastern religion. "Back then doubts were eating away at me," Gere noted a few years ago. "And Buddhism as a religion seemed like the therapeutic way to deal with that. I know it was the right decision. For the first time, I felt I had really found myself."

[long article, continued at Spiegel Online]