Harrison Ford’s 20 best performances – ranked!
When Austrian uber-gay Brüno (Sacha Baron Cohen) accosts Ford in the street only to be rebuffed with a barked “Fuck off!”, it seems certain the rudeness is real. In fact, it is entirely staged: Cohen even dressed the actor in a different outfit because he didn’t look enough like Harrison Ford in his own clothes.
19. Heroes (1977)
This PTSD comedy was meant to catapult Henry Winkler, AKA the Fonz from Happy Days, out of sitcomland and into a movie career, which never quite happened. The highlight is Ford’s touchingly frazzled turn as one of Winkler’s fellow Vietnam vets, a Missouri farmer hollowed out by war.
18. Apocalypse Now (1979)
It was apparently Ford’s idea that the shifty colonel he plays at the start of Francis Ford Coppola’s crazed Vietnam epic should be named G Lucas in tribute to the man who launched his career – and who was originally going to direct the movie back in the early 1970s.
17. Getting Straight (1970)
Richard Rush’s counterculture satire stars Elliott Gould as a former activist failing to keep his radical tendencies in check while completing a master’s in teaching. Ford is the shaggyhaired avant garde artist upbraided for his provocative canvases: “My wife’s ass is a subversive painting?” he asks in his dazed, incredulous drawl.
16. The Conversation (1974)
While still balancing acting with carpentry, Ford popped up as a corporate PA in Coppola’s surveillance thriller. Though nothing about the character’s private life was specified in the script, Ford played him gay – partly to differentiate him from his womanising role in American Graffiti, and partly because, “There was no role there until I decided to make him a homosexual.”
15. Blade Runner (1982)
Ford firing on no cylinders feels like an outrageous waste of his gifts. He is steeped in futuristic noir gloom as the replicant-hunting Rick Deckard, who may or may not be an artificial being himself. The actor looks so defeated from the outset that it’s hard to care either way.
20. Brüno (2009) 14. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
He evidently had more of a blast in Denis Villeneuve’s tardy sequel. The scene in which he cuts short a punchup with his successor, played by Ryan Gosling, is a hoot (“We could keep at this or we could get a drink”). The film also later made possible Ford’s
most uproarious screen appearance: that is, his joyous, prolonged corpsing with Gosling and This Morning’s Alison Hammond.
13. Presumed Innocent (1990)
There was a decent twist in this legal whodunnit, starring Ford as a prosecutor suspected of killing his lover (Greta Scacchi), and the film is a competent genre exercise from the great Alan J Pakula, who later directed him with less impressive results in The Devil’s Own. Still, nothing on screen quite matched the pre-release shock generated by Ford’s severe crop.
12. Star Wars (1977)
It is well known that Ford responded gruffly to the stilted dialogue in his first of four outings as the intergalactic buccaneer Han Solo. “George, you can type that shit, but you can’t say it,” he told Lucas. What’s usually forgotten is his comment after seeing the finished film: “I was wrong: it worked.” More than anyone, Ford understood the tone. “I thought it was funny. I always thought Star Wars and Indiana Jones were basically comedies.”
11. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
The third – and third-best – of the original Indiana Jones trilogy, and the one in which Ford gives his sweetest performance as the whip-cracking hero. Notes of vulnerability and even childlike glee emerge from his scenes with Sean Connery as Indy’s father.
10. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)
Co-star Peter Sarsgaard had nothing but admiration for Ford’s performance as a Russian nuclear submarine captain in Kathryn Bigelow’s claustrophobic thriller. “None of us knew what the hell we were saying: ‘Shut down No 3 generator, blah-blah-blah,’” Sarsgaard told this paper. “Do you give up on that or do you try to find some meaning for yourself? Well, everything has meaning for Harrison Ford. I never saw him throw something away.”
9. Working Girl (1988)
After taking on Roman Polanski’s drab, Hitchcock-esque thriller Frantic and this Mike Nichols-directed yuppie romcom in the same year, it isn’t surprising that Ford was being talked up as the next Cary Grant. That was overoptimistic, but he does bring a charming mix of the suave and the befuddled to the role of the mergers and acquisitions honcho giving Melanie Griffith a leg-up on the corporate ladder.
8. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Ford had significant input into his character by the time the first Star Wars sequel came around. As Han Solo is about to be frozen in carbonite, Leia (Carrie Fisher) tells him: “I love you.” It was Ford who came up with the arrogant retort (“I know”), improving immeasurably on the scripted reply (“I love you, too”).
7. The Fugitive (1993)
Tommy Lee Jones won a best supporting actor Oscar for his role as the deputy marshal in this big-screen version of the 1960s TV series about a surgeon on the run after being falsely accused of his wife’s murder. Ford, though, is superb as the grounded, hounded hero.
6. American Graffiti (1973)
As the slick, Stetson-wearing Bob Falfa, who cruises the streets of Modesto in a 1955 Chevrolet, Ford appears intermittently in Lucas’s nostalgic comedy, like a favourite refrain. The hat was his idea: he hadn’t wanted to cut his then-fashionable long hair. There’s a real sweetness to him here, heightened by our knowledge that he was in his final years of relative normality before Star Wars mania kicked in.
5. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)
The most thrilling instalment of the series gives Ford a chance to show off his range: he has some enjoyable screwball-style sparring with Kate Capshaw (Spielberg’s future wife) and the young Ke Huy Quan, revels in full-on matineeidol aplomb in the opening sequence in a Shanghai nightclub, and commandeers some rough-and-tumble action in the second half.
4. The Mosquito Coast (1986)
Reuniting with his Witness director Peter Weir for this Paul Schraderscripted film of Paul Theroux’s novel, Ford is the misguidedly idealistic father who drags his family (including wife Helen Mirren and son River Phoenix) into the jungles of Central America to start a new life. His eventual mania never quite convinces but his sincerity is beyond doubt.
3. Witness (1985)
Ford received his first and only Oscar nomination for playing the cop who hides out in an Amish community when it transpires that the killers he is chasing are in his own department. His tender performance – especially while crooning along to Sam Cooke’s Wonderful World – and Weir’s lyrical direction go a long way towards compensating for the picture’s homespun folksiness and banal town mouse/country mouse tensions.
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
The role of adventurer-archaeologist Indiana Jones went to Ford only after the first choice, Tom Selleck, was unable to wriggle out of his Magnum PI television contract. His wry, worldweary performance is vital in establishing the tone of a blockbuster that never takes itself too seriously. The set pieces are executed with clockwork precision but it is Ford’s sweaty, sexy, semi-shambolic presence that stops it feeling mechanical.
1. What Lies Beneath (2000)
Robert Zemeckis’s nerve-shredding horror stars Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple dealing first with emptynest syndrome and then the sudden arrival of ghosts. Ford is revelatory in the deepest, darkest work of his career. He must already have been cognisant – and confident – of his capacity for menace: a decade earlier, Martin Scorsese invited him to play the harassed lawyer in Cape Fear but Ford declined to participate unless he could have Robert De Niro’s role as the tattooed psychopath. Here he delivers a gnawing, corrosive portrait of a man who has gone to seed and is going to hell.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is released on 30 June.