The interpreter of Indiana Jones and Han Solo was the victim of an accident in his youth which left him a discreet but not invisible scar on his face.
You have to be very observant to notice it, but it is there: the scar on Harrison Ford’s chin. With her deep voice and charming smile, she is an integral part of the Star Wars and Blade Runner actor’s signature, currently starring in Indiana Jones’ latest movie. And if the actor was the victim of a plane crash a few years ago and an accident on the set of episode 7 of Star Wars, neither of these events is however at the origin of this so distinctive scar.
If you’ve noticed it, you’re not alone, as several screenwriters have included this scar in a few Harrison Ford films. In Working Girl, in 1988, the scar of his character, Jack Trainer, is thus explained by a fall. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we discover our hero, then a teenager and embodied by River Phoenix, injuring himself with his whip, permanently splitting his forehead.
The true origin of Harrison Ford’s scar, however, is less epic. We must go back to the young years of the actor, long before he became famous in Hollywood, to find the anecdote. When the future comedian was 22 years old, he was the victim of a car accident as banal as violent.
Harrison Ford was then working in a department store in California near Laguna Beach and was on his way to work when he lost control of his vehicle. The machine will be embedded in an electric pole, and the future actor will come out of it very fortunately unscathed, or almost. The star’s various biographies say that Harrison Ford was trying to buckle his seat belt when he veered off the road and it was while hitting the steering wheel that the future Indiana Jones split his chin open. It was the emergency operation to sew it up that left the indelible mark that is now its signature.
