A sad, cold wind blows across the mantle in Richard Gere’s home, sweeping through the empty space like a storm blowing across the Kansas prairie.
It’s lonely up there.
The actor insists he doesn’t feel snubbed by the Oscars, but despite a nearly 40-year career, Gere has never won an Academy Award. Worse yet, he’s never even been nominated. Most galling of all is that, seemingly everyone else around him has.
Co-star Diane Lane got nominated for “Unfaithful.” Gere got bupkis. Ed Norton was tapped by the academy for his performance in “Primal Fear.” Gere got crickets. Julia Roberts was noticed in “Pretty Woman.” Gere was forgotten. His two co-stars in “An Officer and a Gentleman” won or were nominated — he was left out.
Virtually the entire cast, crew and caterers of “Chicago” received Oscar kudos. Gere was the only major player passed over.
Now Gere’s lack of hardware could finally be remedied. His latest, “Arbitrage,” arrives this weekend as one of the first buzzed-about Oscar contenders of the year, and its lead actor looks pretty likely to at last snag that elusive first nomination.
“It’s way too early for anything like that,” Gere tells The Post. “There are a lot of movies that are still to open.”
The actor, 63, insists he doesn’t think about awards much at all.
“It would be nice to win one,” he says. “But a lot of people worked on the movie. We had a lot of people who put in a lot of energy, and to have it received this generously is great for all of us.”
(Forget the Oscars. With a political answer like that, this guy should be running for alderman.)
“Arbitrage” writer-director Nicholas Jarecki — a native New Yorker and NYU grad — says he and the star were a bit blindsided by the critical praise.
“The night we premiered it at Sundance we headed over to a bar, and I saw an article from [Post critic] Lou Lumenick calling it the first bona fide Oscar contender,” he says. “I saw Richard’s wife’s face [actress Carey Lowell], I saw the pride she took that her husband might be recognized. He’s been absent from the screen for a while, and he’s done some films that didn’t get out there and some films that didn’t work for whatever reason. I could feel it really mattered to him.”
But Gere initially had reservations about taking the role, in which he plays a slick Manhattan investment manager who is desperately trying to sweep accounting irregularities under the rug in order to sell his company. He’s also trying to cover up a fatal car accident in which he was involved.
The actor read the script and liked it, though was uncertain about working with a first-time director. Jarecki met Gere for lunch at the actor’s hotel, upstate’s Bedford Post Inn.
“We started rehearsing right there in the restaurant,” Jarecki tells The Post. “I started running lines, we’re yelling at each other. He grabs me and throws me up against a wall, and I stared right into his eyes and said, ‘I could kiss you right now.’ He laughed and said, ‘It appears we’re both nuts, and we should give this a shot.’ ”
Audiences will see echoes of America’s most famous fraudster, Bernie Madoff, in the film, but Jarecki says that was not his starting point.
“The more I read about Madoff, the more he seemed limited and more of a sociopath,” the director says. “I started thinking more about a King Lear-type character, a noble guy who had gone wrong and made some tragic mistakes because of his own hubris.”
“We started making this almost a year and a half ago, and it was obvious the resonances of Madoff were there,” Gere says. “In one scene where I’m being interviewed by [business reporter] Maria Bartiromo, we talked about it. It was the elephant in the room anyhow, so we thought, ‘Let’s discuss it.’ By the time it was shown at Sundance, there were other [fraud cases], and the resonances with other people were clearer so we took it out of the movie.”
Gere also put his stamp on the character, molding him from a cold math genius to someone more human, with Clintonian charm.
“I’ve had people that were angry with me because they found themselves rooting for him,” he says. “There are aspects of him that are morally questionable, but I think the trick to doing these movies is that you have to root for the guy and witness a bit of yourself there.”
Competing on-screen with Gere, if not for acting awards but in the lush silver-hair category, is Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who has a cameo as a rival banker. (Fun fact: Carter was the only one in the film who provided his own wardrobe.)
The bit of stunt casting was suggested by one of the producers, and Jarecki felt Carter fit the role. Gere says the editor was a surprisingly good actor, though the production was mindful to give him a scene within his comfort zone.
Another plus of Carter’s presence: If Gere somehow doesn’t manage to walk away with an Oscar nomination, he can at least be assured an invite to a rocking party on awards night.
reed.tucker@nypost.com