Cindy Crawford, 57, reveals how she ‘changed’ herself to make marriage work with Richard Gere, 74, in her early 20s in The Supermodels

She entered into a high-profile marriage to one of the world’s biggest movie stars when she was just 22 years old.

And now, Cindy Crawford is looking back on her whirlwind relationship and marriage to Richard Gere.

The 57-year-old fashion icon recalled how she changed herself and her interests to align with Gere’s when she began dating the Pretty Woman star in 1988, while reminiscing about her new Apple TV+ series The Supermodels, which also features interviews with fellow catwalk stars Naomi. Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington.

In the documentary series, she recalled how she adopted some of Gere’s interests in Buddhism as she tried to “mold” herself to better fit in with him.

She was 17 years younger than Gere, now 74, and the couple quietly eloped in 1991 after dating since 1988.

According to Crawford, she had not yet sufficiently developed her own interests during her early marriage, so she absorbed much of Gere’s.

“At the beginning of a relationship, when you’re a young woman, you say, ‘Do you like baseball? I love baseball,” she said.

“Do you really like Tibetan Buddhism? I might be interested in that. I’ll try that. »

Crawford was referring to Gere’s well-known interest and devotion to Buddhism in his comments.

In his 20s, he became fascinated with Zen Buddhism, a more minimalist, meditation-focused version of the folk religion that originated in China and spread throughout Asia before becoming popular in Japan.

But in the late 1970s, he visited Nepal and met many practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, which placed much more emphasis on rituals. Gere followed that trip with a meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama in India, where he lives after being exiled from Tibet.

“You’re willing to mold yourself around the person you’re in love with,” Crawford continued.

Although the brunette beauty seemed to regret playing such a passive role in her marriage, which ended in divorce in 1995, she also described a broadening of her horizons thanks to the social circles in which Gere moved.

“He was older, so I was like in a different circle and I wasn’t doing some of the same fashionable things anymore,” she said.

Although Crawford reduced her modeling work during her relationship with Gere, she also expanded her profile with more film and television work during and immediately after her marriage.

In 1989, a year after meeting the Chicago actor, she became the first host of MTV’s House Of Style, and during that time she appeared on the iconic Freedom! by George Michael! 90 – along with all of her Supermodels costars – and she played Jon Bon Jovi’s girlfriend in his music video for Please Come Home For Christmas.

In 1995, she got her first leading role in a feature film alongside Billy Baldwin in Fair Game, which was a critical and commercial failure.

Although Crawford was less of a model when he was married to Gere, his connection with the American Gigolo star helped reinvigorate Hollywood culture.

She caused a stir at the 63rd Academy Awards in 1991, shortly before she and the actor eloped, when she matched the red carpet with a plunging scarlet Versace dress that left little room for the imagination.

She even participated in the ceremony when she presented the award for best set design with Susan Sarandon.

Crawford’s dress caused a sensation and increased the importance of fashion at the Oscars.

Although several stars had already worn eye-catching couture clothes to the ceremony, the Oscars were not yet the fashion showcase they would become in later years.

“If I’m going to go to the Oscars, I better be a fucking model,” she remembers thinking at the time. “When I showed up in this red dress, I think it was a bit like, ‘Wow, fashion is back at the Oscars.’

In the interview, Crawford mostly focused on how her relatively young age affected her ability to “change in a relationship” with Gere.

“I just think that your 20s, for women, is a time where you start to blossom and feel your own power and connect to your inner strength,” she shared.

“And it’s hard to change in a relationship because one person may have been a subscriber and all of a sudden you’re not,” she continued, referring to the end of the marriage. “I think at 22 I was more willing to say, ‘OK, I’ll follow,’ and then you start to say, ‘Well, I don’t want to just follow. I want to lead sometimes and I want to walk side by side sometimes.”

Crawford then entered into a lasting marriage with Rande Gerber in 1998, and they share two model children: daughter Kaia Gerber, 22, and son Presley Gerber, 24.

Gere would also have other marriages.

His second union was with former Law & Order actress Carey Lowell, to whom he was married from 2002 to 2016.

Then, in 2018, he married Spanish publicist and activist Alejandra Silva, 34 years his junior.