Taking the lead on the dance floor

Months of learning to ballroom dance for his latest movie paid off in an unexpected way for Hollywood star Richard Gere. The romantic leading man of An Officer And A Gentleman and Pretty Woman puts on his dancing shoes as a bored businessman secretly taking dancing lessons in a bid to transform his mundane life.

Gere spent months polishing up his footwork so he could partner long-time dancer Jennifer Lopez in Shall We Dance?. The payoff wasn't what audiences see on the big screen - although he displays plenty of nifty footwork - but what happened when he and actress wife Carey Lowell finally got around to having a wedding party.

"We'd been married for at least a year and been too busy to have one," he recalls. "In the meantime, my wife had been taking dance lessons from one of the teachers in the movie. I knew she'd been taking a couple, but I didn't know she'd been taking a lot. I found out later.

"So we had our wedding party, we had a band there, and at one point my wife grabbed me and said, 'let's dance for the people' and we had one of those spotlight dances.

"We just started, and it was spinning and dipping, the whole deal. I mean it was like I was doing routines from the movie, she knew them all.

"It was one of those magic moments. Both our families were there, and all our friends, and it really was out of a film. It was beautiful. Her family had always said she had two left feet and couldn't dance, so for them to see her move like an angel was fantastic."

Gere is clearly devoted to former Bond girl Lowell, with whom he has a son, Homer. When asked to name his perfect movie fantasy dance partner, his answer is simple: "My wife. There's no-one else."

At 55, he's one of Hollywood's longest-serving leading men, who's undertaken movies and off-screen humanitarian work. A student and friend of the Dalai Lama, he's travelled throughout India, Nepal, Tibet, Mongolia and China. One of his son's names, Jigme, means fearless in Tibetan.

While others have faded from view, Gere has stayed on top by varying his roles and refusing to be typecast. As a result, he's probably had as many box office failures as hits, but achieved longevity in the precarious Hollywood movie business.

He was actually in India when Shall We Dance?, a remake of a hit Japanese film, opened in the US. "I got a call from my wife and she was crying on the phone, and I thought something had happened to the kids, or whatever," he says.

"But she started reading the New York Times review and the first line was something like, 'not since Fred and Ginger'. It was really one of those incredibly generous paragraphs and she was just so proud and all of that."

Having spent five months learning to tap dance for the film of stage hit Chicago a few years ago, you'd think that Gere would have thought twice before accepting a role that involved learning to ballroom dance. And John Clark, his character in Shall We Dance?, is a lawyer like Chicago's Billy Flynn.

"What's another dance I could do?," he asks. "Because I've done tap dancing and ballroom dancing. I suppose I could do jazz, or something like that?"

Australian choreographer John O'Connell, who worked on the films Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge, was recruited to teach the cast at a kind of "ballroom boot camp". Gere didn't wait, beginning rehearsals with instructors in New York as soon as he was cast.

He's done stage musicals early in his career - including Grease on the London stage - and won a gymnastics scholarship to college, so he had an athletic background. Even so, his dedication to mastering ballroom dancing surprised everyone. During production, he'd practise after filming had ended, sometimes into the early hours of the morning.

The motivation was fear, he says. "The realisation that whatever you do on film is going to be there for a while tends to be a good motivator to be as good as you can get.

"I was so bad that they were all kind of worried, you know, 'can he really pull this off or not?'. So they showed up and I was in the middle of the first lesson and it was horrible.

"And it was horrible for a long time. It was really embarrassing and humiliating, all of that. It actually ended up being quite good because we took a lot of things from the early rehearsals I had and put them into the movie."

During the first lesson, he had the humiliation of the teacher using a piece of wood to keep his arms in the right position. "Also, ironically, my very first rehearsal was in a studio with a glass wall and there was this extraordinarily beautiful Argentine girl, who was doing a tango on the other side of that. I mean she was beautiful.

"So I'm dancing so badly I can't believe it. I wanted to look good in front of this girl but it was so much like the movie that we ended up designing the room in the film to make it look like this very first rehearsal I had in New York."

An additional problem was that co-star Jennifer Lopez was making a film in Canada and Gere was in New York. They rehearsed their big dance scene - a tango - with different partners in different locations. "She's a great dancer, there's no question about that. I'm not a great dancer. I'm an actor who can fake a lot of things," he says.

"We never had a full rehearsal together before we shot the tango. Thank God the choreography was right. We'd had good people that we'd both learned it separately with, and we had a good chemistry. She was incredibly generous and forgiving. She's a ten and I'm a somewhere-below-a-ten."

The movie's John Clark experiences not so much a midlife crisis as a realisation that he has everything in his life - wife, family, home, job - but feels something is missing. Learning to ballroom dance, after seeing a girl gazing from the window of a dance studio from the train, gives him that special something.

"This is not a dysfunctional household. There's wit and charm and love and affection and sex," says Gere. "They have everything seemingly on all levels but still there's this yearning for something else, for something more. This is very relevant to our problems in the West. We do have it all and still there's this itch.

"The film isn't about a traditional midlife crisis. It's not about changing your hairstyle, getting a red sports car and a trophy wife. It's about some kind of mysterious yearning that became manifest in seeing this melancholy girl in an Edward Hopper-esque setting at the window. That set it off and literally got him off the train."

Gere's own personal crisis occurred earlier than midlife - when he was a teenager. "I looked around and saw the world is dissonant, it's not what it appears to be or what I'm being told it is. There's more, there's more love, there's more openness, there's more freedom, there's liberation and there's a possibility of getting past the boundaries," he explains.

So began his journey into Buddhism. He's a founder of the Gere Foundation, which contributes to health education and human rights projects, particularly to do with Tibet and its endangered culture.

He's combined his movie career with humanitarian work over the past two decades. He recognises that, like the rest of us, he's not as young as he was. In his case, there's film to prove it. "When Chicago opened there was a tape that the BBC had done of me doing Grease, at 23 or something, and it was played a lot in the States. I was amazed at how energetic I was at that point. I don't think I could do that now," he admits.

* Shall We Dance? (12A) is now showing in cinemas.