Like so many of his screen creations, the real Harrison Ford combines strength with silence and draws a veil over the life he lives far from the flashgun glare of Hollywood.

Now, for the first time, he is laid bare in all his compelling complexities. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews, with family and friends, colleagues and contemporaries, and with Harrison Ford himself, Garry Jenkins has built up the first complete portrait of the screen's ultimate hero. It is an absorbing story, filled with new and revealing detail. Jenkins describes the troubled, often tortured early years of the uncompromising, midwestern misfit most knew as plain Harry Ford and chronicles the brutal treatment meted out to him when he took his place within the fading Hollywood star system. He records the backstage battles Ford fought even after success had transformed his life and offers fresh glimpses behind the scenes of films such as American Graffiti, Star Wars, Witness, and the Indiana Jones adventures. And he shines new light on the women who have shared Ford's life, on the painful marriage break-up that blighted his belated success, and the second chance he has determined to take.

This is the story of a flawed and fallible hero, a man scarred yet strengthened by his experiences: Hollywood's imperfect hero as he has never been seen before.