The result is a man whose hybrid life is unique, perhaps, to this day and age. One week, he may be on a meditative retreat to India to further his study of Buddhism at the feet of the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual and political leader of Tibet who has been a friend and mentor to Gere for several decades. The next, he may be on a publicity tour with Jennifer Lopez to push a movie. Gere, whose next film, Bee Season, will be released November 11, sees no contradiction in these very different aspects of his life.

"People always ask me, 'How can you deal with this horrible, superficial, shallow world of movies, and then do this work with the Dalai Lama and Nobel Prize winners?'?" says Gere, a quiet and thoughtful man with longish silvery hair. At the time of this interview, he's on a brief visit to Brussels to open Pilgrim, a just-closed (in September) exhibit at the Young Gallery of his photos of Tibetans. "But to me, it's just people. It takes 400 to 600 people to make a movie. They are real people with real families and real issues, and interacting with them is the same as dealing with anyone in the world."

That said, Gere prefers to talk about AIDS and Tibet and the need to raise the social status of women in Africa and in the Middle East rather than discuss his extensive filmography, which dates back to Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Days of Heaven, and other 1970s films. But the fact is, he has been receiving increasing respect from critics.

Asked earlier this year to name the most underrated actor in movies today, Entertainment Weekly film critic Owen Gleiberman singled out Gere and said that many critics who had written him off should now reappraise his talents. "A lot of critics, including me, got so used to thinking of Richard Gere as an empty vessel of fake intensity that we're all still playing catch-up to how much he really has ripened with age," he wrote. "In Unfaithful, he caught the shame of a cuckolded husband with a candor that felt nearly confessional, and in lighter fare like Dr. T & the Women and, most snazzily, Chicago, he has perfected a mode of quicksilver bemusement."