BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - Richard Gere passed on the role of Clifford Irving, the writer who published a bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes in the 1970s, the first time he was offered it a few years ago.
While the actor vividly remembers the era and the headlines that the scandal produced, he didn't think at the time that he was the right person to play the charismatic, amoral author, who was named "Con Man of the Year" by Time magazine.
"I remember it quite clearly. It was in all the newspapers. This was a big deal. Bigger than anything else," he said. "I admired the script but somehow it didn't connect with me."
He changed his mind a couple of years later, not long after his Oscar-nominated performance as Billy Flynn in "Chicago," when it showed up on his desk again with Lasse Hallstrom attached to direct. "I read it again and said, 'Yeah, absolutely, I know what I can do with this.' "
As Hallstrom recalled, "it was the quickest, most straightforward deal [Gere] has ever been involved with. We started shooting two months later."
"The Hoax," which opens April 13, stars Gere as Irving, Marcia Gay Harden as his long-suffering wife and Alfred Molina as his co-writer and friend Richard Suskind.
Wearing a prosthetic nose, his signature gray hair darkened and wavy to resemble Irving, Gere appears in almost every scene as he and Suskind smooth-talk their way into publishing a tell-all book about the billionaire recluse who eventually comes out of seclusion to tell the world Irving is a fraud.
The movie, based loosely on the book Irving wrote about the hoax, also addresses the controversial relationship between Hughes and then-President Richard Nixon, and suggests that Irving's book about Hughes inadvertently led to the Watergate burglary because of Nixon's paranoia about the billionaire's reconnaissance abilities.
Hallstrom, for his part, said there was no actor better suited to play Irving than Gere, whose career took off in the 1980s with starring roles in "American Gigolo" and "An Officer and a Gentleman."
"I really think he's doing his best work here," the director of "Chocolat" said via phone from New York, where he's shooting a TV drama pilot titled "New Amsterdam" for Fox.
"There's a bit of an actor in Clifford Irving. There's a bit of a flamboyant actor in Richard Gere. The charm and the wit and the eloquence - they both have that."
Gere and Hallstrom consciously avoided meeting Irving, who is credited as a technical adviser but has condemned the film as "a hoax about a hoax." (The writer now lives in Aspen, Colo., and has published several novels since the Hughes scam.)
"Obviously, when you make a movie on something like this, you search out more material," Gere said. "We had a couple of episodes of '60 Minutes' that Clifford was on, before the fraud came out and after it came out. Probably the strongest [source] was the film that Orson Welles made, 'F for Fake,' which is supposed to be about Elmyr de Hory, an art forger who lived in the same community with Clifford in Ibiza [Spain]."
Screenwriter William Wheeler, the only member of the film crew who met Irving, said Gere didn't press him for much information on the man. "Richard wanted to kind of insulate himself."
Like the film itself, the mood on the set was loose and carefree, according to the actors. Harden, who plays Edith Irving, recalled the first time she met Gere in her full '70s hippie costume and Abba-like blond wig.
"I didn't know Richard at all [before filming], other than his kind of movie star demeanor. The first time I saw him he was in Central Park shooting and I came to set to do my makeup and wardrobe. I saw him with his [prosthetic] nose and went over and said [in Edith's Swiss/German accent], 'Hello, look at these boobs.' I don't know why I said it, but 'boobs' was so much fun to say. He just laughed and had a great time. I didn't know he'd be as quick to laugh as he is."
The actor, a longtime student of Tibetan Buddhism and outspoken critic of China's occupation of Tibet, exhibited a similar easygoing attitude with a table full of reporters while promoting "The Hoax," making sure everyone in the room had a chance to speak and apologizing for the "terrible flu" he recently picked up.
When asked if he finds it tough to leave strong characters like Irving behind at the end of a workday, he shrugged.
"When I was younger, it certainly was. I think most young actors have this need to, it's almost muscular, to hold onto a character so tightly it's very hard for it to breathe. But with maturity and being more comfortable with the process of conjuring up another person, it comes and goes. What you want to stay stays, and you let the rest go." *