Richard Gere Focuses Star Power on India

Feb. 26, 2006 — -- The actor Richard Gere also is one of America's most committed AIDS activists. His focus now is on the epidemic in India. As President Bush travels there this week, Gere is in his camp.

Richard Gere: There's not been a president who has taken this subject more seriously than our current president. And I don't agree with him on very many things, but I certainly can praise him on this.

The president of the United States coming there in a world where he's seemingly obsessed with terrorism, clearly obsessed with it, and talking about HIV-AIDS in the same breath, in the same paragraph. [It is] extremely important, very important that he spends the money now, and to focus on it.

We're talking about a country of a billion people. It could be 20 million people die in that country unless we do something very quickly.

That's why I felt it was so necessary to jump in. India is a country that I care about deeply, and I've been spending much of my adult life there. And what I felt that I could bring to this that maybe someone else couldn't was the ability to talk to people at a high level -- in government, in business and in my own community of actors.

And when I first started talking about it, they were very reluctant to say they knew anyone who was sick. That level of stigma is something that we've had to deal with in a very head-on kind of way.

The entire continent of Africa is essentially lost as a productive community because no one cared about it. Now, we're talking about a population in India that is close to a billion people. If this crisis hits them to the degree it's expected to, we've lost Asia. Americans -- with the almost unlimited funds we have to do good in the world for ourselves and others -- to not do this, it's a waste of the promise of who we are as Americans.