Harrison Ford returned to Chicago this week not as the world-famous actor audiences associate with Han Solo, Indiana Jones and Dr. Richard Kimble, but as a hometown kid coming back to the place that shaped him. In a moment that felt less like a Hollywood tribute and more like a homecoming, the 82-year-old star was honored at the Field Museum during the Half-Earth Day 2025 gala, receiving the inaugural E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership.
The award recognizes individuals whose work advances global biodiversity protection, a cause Ford has championed for more than 30 years through his advocacy with Conservation International and his outspoken calls for climate action. Ford often says his passion and deep connection to nature first took root in Chicago.
Ford was born at Swedish Covenant Hospital on the North Side in 1942 to parents who were both storytellers in their own ways. His mother, Dorothy Nidelman Ford, was a New York–born radio performer from a Jewish immigrant family. His father, Christopher Ford, carried his own creative lineage, a Massachusetts-born Irish Catholic actor who later built a career as a Chicago advertising executive. Their marriage fused two vibrant cultural identities, Irish Catholic and Ashkenazi Jewish, into a home Ford often described as “modest, middle-class, and full of humor.”
While he spent his earliest years in Chicago, the real shape of his childhood took form in Park Ridge, where the family settled in the 1950s. Their home at 109 N. Washington Avenue became the backdrop to his upbringing, a quiet street framed by maple trees, close to the schools and parks where he slowly found his voice.
Ford graduated from Maine East High School in 1960, but long before that, Chicago’s institutions had already left their imprint. At the gala, Ford reflected on how much the city meant to him. “I grew up in Chicago, that explains it all, doesn’t it?” he told the audience with a dry smile. He spoke about spending his boyhood exploring the city’s cultural anchors in places that would go on to shape his lifelong love of nature.
“It’s where I first learned about nature, at the Field Museum … and the zoo, the Lincoln Park Zoo,” he said. Those early experiences, moments that might seem small at the time, were foundational. They helped set the stage for decades of environmental advocacy that would eventually lead him back to the very museum he visited as a child, this time to be honored for protecting the natural world he fell in love with here.
Ford also recalled one of the first times he felt a sense of deep connection to the living world, an encounter not on a Hollywood movie set, but right here at home. “I looked and there he was ten feet away, a red fox, totally quiet … staring right at me. I discovered a connection to nature. I knew I was part of nature,” he said.
That sense of belonging to nature, to community, to Chicago, echoed through his remarks. Accepting the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award, Ford said, “Young people give me hope. They are more fearless, more connected to the Earth… We just need to get out of their way and help them lead us toward a world where people and nature can thrive together.”
For a man who has traveled the world, Harrison Ford made it clear that the place that first grounded him still holds power. The city where he was born, the suburb where he grew up, the museums where he wandered as a curious kid, remain woven into the person he is today.
And on this night, as the applause rose inside the Field Museum, Chicago welcomed him home again.
ALSO READ:
Chicago celebrates 50 Years of Siskel & Ebert
