Gere still travels with the perks of movie stardom - the private plane, the limo from the airport, the hotel manager waiting to greet him, and the butler assigned to his suite. Young and attractive women still wait for a glimpse of him in hotel lobbies and seem to gasp when he walks by, some of them voicing disappointment at the ­presence of his wife, actress Carey Lowell. But he is more likely to be dealing with global health issues or a political impasse than with matters related to his film career.

Sometimes Gere pushes his celebrity too far, as happened earlier this year when his efforts to increase voter turnout in the Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip seemed to fall flat. But he is undaunted, expanding the work of his two nonprofit organizations (the Gere Foundation and Healing the Divide) to address a variety of problems. His strategy usually revolves around an effort to get politicians, creatives, and business titans to work together for a common educational goal that relies on access to the media to get the message across. And he knows this media exposure depends, to a large degree, on his own celebrity status.

He admits that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. At first, he thought charisma alone might be enough to galvanize the fight against AIDS in India, but he found that much more hard work was needed to get programs started.

"I've been involved in the AIDS fight since the very earliest days, right in the beginning, when friends of mine were dying," he says. "This is clearly the worst pandemic ever to hit the human race, and our grandchildren will be asking, 'What did you do? Who did something and who didn't?' And I insist on being someone who did something. Through my constant trips to India, it became clear that India was the place it would go next. So I dove into that, kind of naively, thinking if I just brought my movie-star thing to it - do some events, do some interviews - it would create a tipping point for action, and the people who do these kinds of things would do their job. It was foolish and naive on my part because there was no mechanism in place for people to do anything; it had to be started from ground zero. That's what we've been doing the last five years. We needed to expand, we needed more money, and Bill Gates funded us. He's got serious energy and serious money."