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Gere began appearing in Hollywood films in the mid-1970s. He 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. His first major acting role was in the original London stage version of Grease, in 1973. 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. Gere with Lobsang Nyandak during The Tibet Fund annual gala in 2016

He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst on a gymnastics scholarship, majoring in philosophy after two years, he left and did not graduate. In 1967, he graduated from North Syracuse Central High School, where he excelled at gymnastics and music and played the trumpet. Both of Gere's parents were Mayflower descendants, and his ancestors include Pilgrims such as John Billington, William Brewster, Francis Eaton, Francis Cooke, Degory Priest, George Soule, and Richard Warren. One of his ancestors, also named George, was an Englishman who came from Heavitree and settled in the Connecticut Colony in 1638. His paternal great-grandfather, George Lane Gere (1848–1932), changed the spelling of his surname from "Geer". Gere was raised Methodist in Syracuse, New York. His father had originally intended to become a minister. Richard Tiffany Gere was born in Philadelphia on August 31, 1949, the eldest son and second child of housewife Doris Ann (née Tiffany 1924–2016) and NMIC insurance agent Homer George Gere (born 1922).