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1. He was a carpenter before he was a movie star
2. He is best known for star wars and Indiana jones
3. He is tired of talking about Star Wars

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One of Hollywood's best actors who has played many iconic roles, here is look at 19 quick fun facts about the legendary Harrison Ford.

Harrison Ford is known for much more than playing the lovable scruffy looking scoundrel Han Solo. While that is all we really like to focus on when we talk about him at Dork Side, we do know him for the other roles he has played.

Although you can't really blame us for that though, it would be a bit odd talking about Raiders of the Lost Ark on a Star Wars fan site. I'm getting a bit off track here, the point is Harrison Ford is known for a lot of things, both on and off the set. A really fascinating person; and with a career that spans over several decades that shouldn't be surprising.

So, it's time to look at that. If you have been following our #SoloSeptember event, then you will know it has been all about Han Solo this month, and we could never have had Han Solo without Harrison Ford.

Watch your favorite shows on fuboTV: Watch over 67 live sports and entertainment channels with a 7-day FREE trial!

So, in today's #SoloSeptember post, it's time to honor the man himself and take a look at the person who started it all: Harrison Ford.

Here are 19 quick fun facts about Harrison Ford.

1. Harrison Ford holds the rank of Life Scout in the Boy Scouts of America.

2. Before becoming an actor, Ford was a carpenter. He still practices his trade to this day, more so now as a hobby.

3. In Empire's 1997 'The Top 100 Movie Stars of All Time' list, Ford took the number 1 spot.

4. In 1998, Ford was ranked the Sexiest Man Alive.

5. Kevin Costner was originally set to appear in Air Force One, Ford replaced him.

6. When he divorced from his ex-wife Melissa Mathison it was reported to be the fourth most expensive celebrity divorce, costing Ford approximately $85 million.

7. His wife Mathison was responsible for the screenplay E.T.

8. There is a silent screen actor who shares the exact same name as Harrison Ford.

9. Ford usually goes by the name Harrison J. Ford when being accredited in order to not be confused with the silent screen actor.

10. Ford almost appeared in Jurassic Park. He turned down the role of Dr. Alan Grant, that role subsequently then went to Sam Neill.

11. He has also turned down other major movies such as Proof of Life, The Perfect Storm and The Patriot

12. There is a species of ant named after Ford in recognition of the conservation work he has carried out over the years.

13. His friendship with Billy Dee Williams, Lando Calrissian, is more than just on the screen but off the screen as well. The two are in fact very good friends.

14. Ford has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which is right in front of the Kodak Theatre.

15. During the entire Star Wars trilogy Ford supposedly never signed any contracts.

16. He built his own white ranch house.

17. Ford has been the star in four out of 10 of the biggest blockbusters ever produced.

18. Although we would all love it to be Han Solo, Ford has frequently confessed that Indian Jones is his most favorite character and the one he is the proudest of.

19. Despite everything that we know about the man. Ford is well known for being extremely private. He goes above and beyond in keeping his private life private and is rarely seen by the press unless he absolutely has to be.

So, what did you think of the 19 quick fun facts about Harrison Ford? Did any of them catch your eye? Share what you are thinking in the comments below.

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Harrison Ford is known for much more than playing the lovable scruffy looking scoundrel Han Solo. While that is all we really like to focus on when we talk about him at Dork Side, we do know him for the other roles he has played.

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1. The actor of batman in this came up with the voice
2. I'm batman was almost never a thing
3. The ending of this movie was almost a lot darker

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Batman is a stalwart of the superhero scene, and it'd be easy to think he was popular ever since the character was introduced in Detective Comics #27. In reality, we owe a lot of the caped crusader's current style to mercurial director Tim Burton, whose 1989 Batman revival set the tone for the Dark Knight's latest slate of films.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the year of the film's release, grab your Batarang, hop into your Batmobile, and join us for these Bat-facts about the landmark production.

20. Ray Liotta turned down multiple role offers

Inspired by the earlier success Warner Bros had enjoyed in casting the then-unknown Christopher Reeve as Superman, the team on Batman were also keen to get a relatively fresh face under the iconic pointy-eared cowl.

One actor they were particularly keen to get on board was Ray Liotta. Aged 35 at the time, the New Jersey-born actor had only a handful of roles to his name, and caught the attention of the Batman filmmakers thanks to his unhinged turn in 1986's Something Wild.

However, as Liotta was approached comparatively early in the project's development, it wasn't yet clear what a mean and moody take on the material it would prove to be. Fearing it would be as goofy as the 60s TV show, Liotta declined to meet the producers.

As we all know, this cleared the way for Michael Keaton. Later, Liotta would be approached again for two other roles - those of the Joker, and Harvey Dent - but once again, he turned them down flat.

Unsurprisingly, the actor has since expressed regret over these decisions, but this clearly didn't hurt him too much professionally given 1989 saw him land a plum role in Field of Dreams, and soon thereafter he got the part that defined his career in Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas.

19. Michael Keaton almost didn't say "I'm Batman"

As we all know from every subsequent big screen incarnation of the role (not to mention that hilarious scene between Seth Rogen and Zac Efron in Bad Neighbours), an essential quality of any great Batman is the ability to say "I'm Batman" in a cool voice.

Michael Keaton successfully cemented himself in the role by uttering those very words in his first scene - but it wasn't always going to be that way.

As written in the shooting script, when the Dark Knight dangles Christopher Fairbank's terrified mugger off the rooftop edge, the exchange was a little more verbose, and ended with Batman declaring, "I am the night."

This scene made its way to print as originally written, in the DC Comics adaptation of the movie, based on Sam Hamm's screenplay.

Clearly seeing the value of keeping it simple, Keaton suggested he simply whisper, "I'm Batman." Good job really, as decades later it remains one of the great hero introductions in film. Nor was it the actor's only significant innovation...

17. Another idea of Keaton's didn't make the final cut

Given the two men previously collaborated on the outlandish supernatural comedy Beetlejuice, it's hardly surprising that Michael Keaton and Tim Burton share a certain predilection for the macabre and unexpected.

That being the case, when Keaton had some more bizarre ideas regarding the dual personality of Batman/Bruce Wayne, the director was more than happy to take these ideas on board.

One of the more bizarre ideas that made the cut was Keaton's suggestion that Vicki Vale should wake up in the night at Wayne Manor to see Bruce Wayne sleeping upside down, bat-like. Keaton had studied the animals in preparation for the film, and tried to incorporate elements of this in his performance.

One even weirder contribution which wound up hitting the bin was Keaton's suggestion that - in line with adopting a different voice - some sort of literal transformation from Bruce Wayne to Batman should be apparent. To this end they shot a suiting up sequence which, in Keaton's words, "showed him going into a sort of trance and it justified this shift in him."

It's not hard to see why this would wind up on the cutting room floor - but unfortunately, no footage of this deleted 'Bat-trance' scene has ever been made public.

14. Jack Nicholson was laughing all the way to the bank

Billy Dee Williams might not have got the best contract on Batman, but the same certainly can't be said of his illustrious co-star Jack Nicholson - and not surprisingly, as Nicholson was very much the star of the show, given Michael Keaton's comparative obscurity at the time.

As well as getting top billing over Keaton, Nicholson's deal for playing the Joker grabbed him a hefty salary indeed, which broke new ground in 1989 and remains a bit of an eye-waterer even now.

On top of the not-inconsiderable upfront fee of $6 million, Nicholson also took a percentage of the profits for the movie, the merchandising, and the sequels - despite the fact that he never played The Joker or any other role in a Batman movie again.

Accounts vary as to just how much Nicholson made once the dust settled, but it's generally estimated to be in the vicinity of $50-60 million - and that's in 1990s money, without adjusting for inflation (meaning it equates to upwards of $100 million today).

Yes, you'd have plenty to grin about yourself under the circumstances.

10. It might have been called Batman in Outer Space

After the campy, 60s Batman started to wear thin, CBS purchased the film rights to the character from DC Comics and started drafting some more... radical ideas for the direction of a mooted film franchise. Following the success of the Superman films, producers considered copying the more interstellar side of the man of steel.

As bizarre as it might seem, Batman has proven that he's able to survive in the vacuum of space, trained to do so by the Martin Manhunter in an issue of the Justice League of America comic book series.

Batman has also survived in a vacuum in an early issue of Justice League International, though this was apparently due to an artificial atmosphere being temporarily created due a programming directive in an artificially intelligent satellite. Who knew?

We're not saying Batman in Outer Space would have had the world's greatest detective going full Space Aquaman and breathing freely, and it seems like a bad idea on the face of things, but let's be honest - it definitely would have reignited interest in the character.

Batman even gets a spacesuit in LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham, finally fulfilling the fantasy of seeing Bruce Wayne brood in the darkest night of all: the cold vacuum of space.

9. Tim Burton was picked for director because of Pee-wee Herman

Love him or hate him, Tim Burton is one of the most visually iconic directors of our time, and the success of Batman (1989) owes much to Burton's warped and moody Gotham. Swept under the rug in favour of Burton's more arthouse-style offerings, however, is the film that gave him his big break.

In fact, Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) was not only Burton's first full-length directorial debut, but was also a roaring financial success, making back its budget five times over in the domestic market alone.

The film is an out-and-out farce, but scratch a little below the surface and you'll find all of Tim Burton's usual quirks. For one thing, the film is scored by long-time Burton collaborator Danny Elfman, and the plot of the film is in fact based on the seminal Italian Marxist film Bicycle Thieves (1948), which details the slow descent into criminality and despair after a man is robbed of his livelihood.

All in all, that premise doesn't exactly scream comedy, but with Phil Hartmann at the scriptwriting helm, it turns out anything can be funny.

Combined with the positive reviews for Beetlejuice (1988), CBS thought Burton would be the perfect fit for the latest incarnation of the Dark Knight. Maybe one day we'll see Paul Reubens in that title role - once Robert Pattinson has hung up the cowl, of course.

8. The film's villain wasn't originally going to be the Joker

If you're racking your brain for films starring cult '80s actor Rupert Thorne, you're going to come up short. Thorne is actually a lesser-known player in Batman's deep rogues gallery, at least in terms of portrayals on the silver screen.

One of the major crime bosses of Gotham, Thorne unfortunately tends to get overshadowed by the more weird and wonderful residents of Gotham's seedy underbelly like the Penguin and, of course, the Joker himself.

That being said, Thorne did get his dues in Batman: The Animated Series, in which he's featured far more prominently. A corrupt politician, he uses his influence to have the city council declare Batman an outlaw, and later participates in an auction to win knowledge of Batman's secret identity.

First introduced in 1977, it's easy to draw parallels between Thorne's corruption and the aftershocks of the Watergate scandal; his bushy eyebrows and jowls definitely bring Richard Nixon to mind. But when Burton came to film his version of Batman a decade later, Thorne's city government sleaze might not have resonated quite so much.

It would have been fairly easy to keep Thorne in the film. Jack Nicholson's Jack Napier is first despatched to ACE Chemicals by mob boss Carl Grissom - with Napier later meeting Batman, falling into a vat of chemicals, and becoming the Joker. In fact, Grissom was adapted from Thorne's character, but given a "normalised" name by scriptwriter Sam Hamm.

6. The production team were banned from taking inspiration from Blade Runner

For a decade full of bright synth pop and relentless political optimism, there sure were a lot of dark dystopias depicted on film in the 80s. The most famous of these is probably Blade Runner (1982), featuring Harrison Ford flying around a city overrun with neon, advertising, and rain. In fact, the dark environment of the film had already become so iconic that it was in danger of seeping into several other releases.

Like Ridley Scott's 2019 Los Angeles, Gotham is also famed for its dingy alleyways, moonlit skies and rampant urbanisation. The surface-level similarities are so strong that Anton Furst, the production designer for Batman (1989) forbade his team from watching the cult sci-fi flick during the design phase of the film.

Additionally, neon was dropped entirely, with the team instead drawing on stark photographs of mid-twentieth century New York, as well as buildings designed by Japanese architect Shin Takamatsu. Furst wanted a more chaotic feel: "A city run by crime, with a riot of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going."

As a result, without neon or even that much colour, buildings warp and criss-cross in a way that feels true to the Gotham City of the comics without seeming too unrealistic.

The production design was marked for particular praise by critics, to the point that it almost became a sticking point: Burton was accused of prioritising the look of the set and the film in general above the character of Batman himself.

5. The Batmobile was based on Salt Flat Racers from the 1930s

In the 1960s TV series and film, the Batmobile, already a mainstay of the franchise, was much more recognisably a car. It began as a concept car by Ford, the Lincoln Futura, which was beefed up and given an iconic red-and-black paint job to transform it into Batman's preferred mode of transport.

As with much of the film, Burton and his team took the Batmobile back to the drawing board, plumping for something far more strange and ghost-like in keeping with the tone of the production.

The enormous turbine in the front is a dead giveaway of the jet aircraft inspirations, but Furst claims that in the end the team drew upon "pure expressionism," looking at Salt Flat Racers for the sleek design they wanted. In particular, Sir Malcolm Campbell's famous 'Blue Bird', which claimed the world land speed record in 1935, served as source material.

The Blue Bird reached a speed of 301.129mph on the Bonneville Speedway in Utah, driven by Major Sir Malcolm Campbell. Looking at both cars, the futuristic and curvy look is an obvious connection.

In the end, the Batmobile was built around a sixth generation Chevrolet Impala, after attempts to work the chassis of a Jaguar and a Ford Mustang both failed.

4. It could have been a Batman and Robin origin story

In the original Tom Mankiewicz script, Dick Grayson - or Robin - played a much larger role. In fact, the film mostly focused on the origin story of the dynamic duo, and was simply titled The Batman.

Mankiewicz imagined a starry cast, including Peter O'Toole as the Penguin, Bill Murray as Batman and Eddie Murphy as Robin. The film was mooted with a $20 million budget and was announced in the mid-80s.

As we know, this version never came to pass. The script underwent nine separate rewrites, though Mankiewicz's original vision was still used as a guideline. Unfortunately, Dick Grayson's character and role in the film continued to be reduced.

When Burton came aboard, he hired Sam Hamm to rework the script, which reduced Grayson from a supporting character all the way down to a cameo.

Just before shooting began, there was still a glimmer of hope for the Boy Wonder. Unfortunately, filming was complicated by the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike, in which Hamm was prohibited from rewriting anything.

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20 Facts You Never Knew About Tim Burton's 'Batman' (1989)

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Batman is a stalwart of the superhero scene, and it'd be easy to think he was popular ever since the character was introduced in Detective Comics #27.

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1.  The berlin wall was very bad because families were being separated from each other.
2. When the Berlin Wall was taken down it marked the end of the cold war
3. Pieces of the berlin wall still stand in the city as a monument of freedom.

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1. The fall of the Berlin Wall happened by mistake.
At a press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, East German politburo member Günter Schabowski prematurely announced that restrictions on travel visas would be lifted. When asked when the new policy would begin, he said, "Immediately, without delay." In actuality, the policy was to be announced the following day and would still have required East Germans to go through a lengthy visa application process. Schabowski's confused answers and erroneous media reports that border crossings had opened spurred thousands of East Berliners to the Berlin Wall. At the Bornholmer Street checkpoint, Harald Jäger, the chief officer on duty, faced a mob growing in size and frustration. Receiving insults, rather than instructions, from his superiors and nervously expecting results of his cancer diagnostic tests the next day, the overwhelmed Jäger opened the border crossing on his own, and the other gates soon followed.

2. The Berlin Wall was erected more than 15 years into the Cold War.
More than 2 million East Germans, most of them skilled laborers and professionals, fled to the West between 1949 and 1961. The Soviet Union had rejected East Germany's original request to build the wall in 1953, but with defections through West Berlin reaching 1,000 people a day by the summer of 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev finally relented. The residents of Berlin awoke on the morning of August 13, 1961, to find barbed wire fencing had been installed on the border between the city's east and west sections. Days later, East Germany began to fortify the barrier with concrete.

3. The Berlin Wall was actually two walls.
The 27-mile portion of the barrier separating Berlin into east and west consisted of two concrete walls between which was a "death strip" up to 160 yards wide that contained hundreds of watchtowers, miles of anti-vehicle trenches, guard dog runs, floodlights and trip-wire machine guns.

4. More than 100 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.
The Centre for Research on Contemporary History Potsdam and the Berlin Wall Memorial Site and Documentation Center report that at least 138 people were shot dead, suffered fatal accidents or committed suicide after failed escape attempts across the Berlin Wall. Other researchers place the death toll even higher. The first victim was Ida Siekmann, who died on August 22, 1961, after attempting to leap to a West Berlin street below her fourth-floor East Berlin apartment window. The last fatality occurred in March 1989 when a young East German attempting to fly over the wall in a hot air balloon crashed into power lines.

5. More than 5,000 escaped by going over and under the Berlin Wall.
The first defector to escape across the Berlin Wall was 19-year-old East German border guard Corporal Conrad Schumann, who was immortalized on film as he leapt over a 3-foot-high roll of barbed wire just two days after East Germany sealed the border. As the Berlin Wall grew more elaborate, so did escape plans. Fugitives hid in secret compartments of cars driven by visiting West Berliners, dug secret tunnels and crawled through sewers. The three Bethke brothers pulled off the most spectacular escapes. Eldest brother Ingo escaped by floating on an inflatable mattress across the Elbe River in 1975, and eight years later brother Holger soared over the wall on a steel cable he fired with a bow and arrow to a rooftop in West Berlin. In 1989 the pair flew an ultra-light plane over the wall and back to pick up youngest brother Egbert.

6. John F. Kennedy expressed relief when the Berlin Wall was erected.
In June 1961, Khrushchev warned President John F. Kennedy that he would blockade West Berlin if Western forces were not removed, a belligerent act that could lead to war. When Kennedy heard news that the communists had walled off East Berlin instead of cutting off West Berlin, he confided to an aide, "It's not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war. This is the end of the Berlin crisis. The other side panicked-not we. We're going to do nothing now because there is no alternative except war."

7. Kennedy did not tell Berliners he was a "jelly doughnut."
On June 26, 1963, Kennedy famously told a crowd at the Berlin Wall, "Ich bin ein Berliner." The president intended to express solidarity with the citizens of Berlin by saying he was one of them, but some critics claimed that by adding the indefinite article "ein," he actually called himself a jelly doughnut, known in much of Germany as a "Berliner." Linguists say, however, that the president did not commit a grammatical faux pas because "ein" is required when the speaker is speaking figuratively, not literally, about being of a certain nationality, as was obviously the case with Kennedy. In addition, the jam-filled pastry known as a "Berliner" in the rest of Germany is called a "pfannkuchen" in Berlin, so there would have been no confusion among the listeners.

8. East Germany called the wall the "Antifascist Bulwark."
Rather than keeping its citizens in, the East German government claimed it erected the Berlin Wall to keep Western fascists, spies and ideas out. Two weeks after ordering the construction of the "Antifaschistischer Schutzwall," East German leader Walter Ulbricht claimed, "We have sealed the cracks in the fabric of our house and closed the holes through which the worst enemies of the German people could creep."

9. The Brandenburg Gate had once been part of an 18th-century wall.
Prussian King Frederick William II commissioned the iconic triumphal arch straddling East and West Berlin that served as the iconic backdrop for famous presidential speeches by Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. When completed in 1791, the Brandenburg Gate was incorporated into the city's original Customs Wall, which ringed the city beginning in the 1730s.

10. A piece of the wall stands in the bathroom of a Las Vegas casino.
Official demolition of the Berlin Wall began in the summer of 1990. More than 40,000 wall sections were recycled into building materials used for German reconstruction projects, but a few hundred segments were auctioned off and are now scattered around the globe from the Vatican gardens to the men's room of the Main Street Station Casino in Las Vegas, where urinals are mounted on a graffiti-covered wall segment protected behind glass.

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10 Things You May Not Know About the Berlin Wall

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1. The fall of the Berlin Wall happened by mistake. At a press conference on the evening of November 9, 1989, East German politburo member Günter Schabowski prematurely announced that restrictions on travel visas would be lifted. When asked when the new policy would begin, he said, "Immediately, without delay."

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1. In 137 while working with a movie company he got a spot to act in a few movies
2. In 1966 he ran for the governor of California and won the election.
3.  He was the oldest person elected president.

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Ronald Reagan's Childhood and Education

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, to Edward "Jack" Reagan (1883-1941), a shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan (1883-1962). The family, which included older son Neil Reagan (1908-1996), resided in an apartment that lacked indoor plumbing and running water and was located along the small town's main street. Reagan's father nicknamed him Dutch as a baby, saying he resembled "a fat little Dutchman."

Did you know? Among the items on display at Ronald Reagan's presidential library in California is a 6,000-pound graffiti-covered section of the Berlin Wall, given to him by the people of Berlin.

During Reagan's early childhood, his family lived in a series of Illinois towns as his father switched sales jobs, then settled in Dixon, Illinois, in 1920. In 1928, Reagan graduated from Dixon High School, where he was an athlete and student body president and performed in school plays. During summer vacations, he worked as a lifeguard in Dixon.

Reagan went on to attend Eureka College in Illinois, where he played football, ran track, captained the swim team, served as student council president and acted in school productions. After graduating in 1932, he found work as a radio sports announcer in Iowa.

Ronald Reagan's Movies and Marriages

In 1937, while in Southern California to cover the Chicago Cubs' spring training season, Ronald Reagan did a screen test for the Warner Brothers movie studio. The studio signed him to a contract, and that same year he made his film debut in "Love is on the Air," playing a radio news reporter.

Over the next three decades, he appeared in more than 50 movies. Among his best-known roles was that of Notre Dame football star George Gipp in the 1940 biographical film "Knute Rockne All American." In the movie, Reagan's famous line-which he is still remembered for-was "Win one for the Gipper." Another notable role was in 1942 in "Kings Row," in which Reagan portrayed an accident victim who wakes up to discover his legs have been amputated and cries out, "Where's the rest of me?" (Reagan used this line as the title of his 1965 autobiography.)

In 1940, Reagan married actress Jane Wyman, with whom he had daughter Maureen and an adopted son, Michael. The couple divorced in 1948. In 1952, he married actress Nancy Davis. The pair had two children, Patricia and Ronald.

During World War II (1939-1945), Reagan was disqualified from combat duty due to poor eyesight and spent his time in the Army making training films.

From 1947 to 1952, and from 1959 to 1960, he served as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), during which time he testified in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee ( HUAC). From 1954 to 1962, he hosted the weekly television drama series "The General Electric Theater." In this role, he toured the United States as a public relations representative for General Electric, giving pro-business talks in which he spoke out against too much government control and wasteful spending, central themes of his future political career.

Ronald Reagan, Governor of California

In his younger years, Ronald Reagan was a member of the Democratic Party and campaigned for Democratic candidates; however, his views grew more conservative over time, and in the early 1960s he officially became a Republican.

In 1964, Reagan stepped into the national political spotlight when he gave a well-received televised speech for Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (1909-1998), a prominent conservative. Two years later, in his first race for public office, Reagan defeated Democratic incumbent Edmund "Pat" Brown Sr. (1905-1996) by almost 1 million votes to win the governorship of California. Reagan was re-elected to a second term in 1970.

After making unsuccessful bids for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1976, Reagan received his party's nod in 1980. In that year's general election, he and running mate George H.W. Bush (1924-2018) faced off against President Jimmy Carter (1924-) and Vice President Walter Mondale (1928-2021). Reagan won the election by an electoral margin of 489-49 and captured almost 51 percent of the popular vote. At age 69, he was the oldest person elected to the U.S. presidency.

1981 Inauguration and Assassination Attempt

Ronald Reagan was sworn into office on January 20, 1981. In his inaugural address, Reagan famously said of America's then-troubled economy, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem."

After the more informal Carter years, Reagan and his wife Nancy ushered in a new era of glamour in the nation's capital, which became known as Hollywood on the Potomac. The first lady wore designer fashions, hosted numerous state dinners and oversaw a major redecoration of the White House.

Just over two months after his inauguration, on March 30, 1981, Reagan survived an assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. (1955-), a man with a history of psychiatric problems, outside a hotel in Washington, D.C. The gunman's bullet pierced one of the president's lungs and narrowly missed his heart. Reagan, known for his good-natured humor, later told his wife, "Honey, I forgot to duck." Within several weeks of the shooting, Reagan was back at work.

Ronald Reagan's Domestic Agenda

On the domestic front, President Ronald Reagan implemented policies to reduce the federal government's reach into the daily lives and pocketbooks of Americans, including tax cuts intended to spur growth (known as Reaganomics). He also advocated for increases in military spending, reductions in certain social programs and measures to deregulate business.

By 1983, the nation's economy had started to recover and enter a period of prosperity that would extend through the rest of Reagan's presidency. Critics maintained that his policies led to budget deficits and a more significant national debt; some also held that his economic programs favored the rich.

In 1981, Reagan made history by appointing Sandra Day O'Connor (1930-) as the first woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ronald Reagan and Foreign Affairs

In foreign affairs, Ronald Reagan's first term in office was marked by a massive buildup of U.S. weapons and troops, as well as an escalation of the Cold War (1946-1991) with the Soviet Union, which the president dubbed "the evil empire." Key to his administration's foreign policy initiatives was the Reagan Doctrine, under which America provided aid to anticommunist movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a plan to develop space-based weapons to protect America from attacks by Soviet nuclear missiles.

Also on the foreign affairs front, Reagan sent 800 U.S. Marines to Lebanon as part of an international peacekeeping force after Israel invaded that nation in June 1982. In October 1983, suicide bombers attacked the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. That same month, Reagan ordered U.S. forces to lead an invasion of Grenada, an island in the Caribbean, after Marxist rebels overthrew the government. In addition to the problems in Lebanon and Grenada, the Reagan administration had to deal with an ongoing contentious relationship between the United States and Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942-).

During his second term, Reagan forged a diplomatic relationship with the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-), who became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. In 1987, the Americans and Soviets signed a historic agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles. That same year, Reagan spoke at Germany's Berlin Wall, a symbol of communism, and famously challenged Gorbachev to tear it down. Twenty-nine months later, Gorbachev allowed the people of Berlin to dismantle the wall. After leaving the White House, Reagan returned to Germany in September 1990-just weeks before Germany was officially reunified-and took several symbolic swings with a hammer at a remaining chunk of the wall.

1984 Reelection

In November 1984, Ronald Reagan was reelected in a landslide, defeating Walter Mondale and his running mate Geraldine Ferraro (1935-), the first female vice-presidential candidate from a major U.S. political party. Reagan, who announced it was "morning again in America," carried 49 out of 50 states in the election and received 525 out of 538 electoral votes, the largest number ever won by an American presidential candidate.

Ronald Reagan's Later Years and Death

After leaving the White House in January 1989, Ronald Reagan and his wife returned to California, where they lived in Los Angeles. In 1991, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum opened in Simi Valley, California.

In November 1994, Reagan revealed in a handwritten letter to the American people that he had been recently diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Nearly a decade later, on June 5, 2004, he died at his Los Angeles home at age 93, making him the nation's longest-lived president (in 2006, Gerald Ford surpassed him for this title). Reagan was given a state funeral in Washington, D.C., and later buried on the grounds of his presidential library. Nancy Reagan died of heart failure in 2016 at age 94 and was buried alongside her husband.

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Ronald Reagan: Biography, Facts & Movies

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Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, Illinois, to Edward "Jack" Reagan (1883-1941), a shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan (1883-1962). The family, which included older son Neil Reagan (1908-1996), resided in an apartment that lacked indoor plumbing and running water and was located along the small town's main street.

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1. The ford escort was the first escort to have a Front-wheel drive.
2. The ford escort was discontinued in 2002.
3.  There have been 6 different generations of ford escorts

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For the North American Ford Escort, see Ford Escort (North America). For the 1950s Ford Escort estate car, see Ford Squire. The European Ford Escort was a car made by Ford Motor Company from 1968 through 2002. In UK the Four-door saloon and the Three-door hatchback was discontinued in 1998.