DUSTIN HOFFMAN (1937 - )
He isn't on this list so much for his work in the later years, though Ishtar definitely gets honorable mention. It is more for the deliciously anti-leading man stuff he did way back when. He redefined the romantic hero in The Graduate: "Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?" So lost and confused, so attractive. No wonder he gets the girl (and her mother). Then there's more heroes against the odds: Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, the somewhat psychotic-seeming protagonist of Marathon Man and, well, Tootsie. Here's to you Dustin Hoffman.
JEAN-PAUL BELMONDO (1933 - )
How goes the plot of Breathless again? Can't remember? Well maybe that is because you were distracted by the dreaminess of Jean-Paul Belmondo. Seriously, the man took the Humphrey Bogart cigarette thing and improved upon it. How many actors can do that? He made this film nerdess get a Jean Seberg haircut and take up a Gauloises Blondes habit when she was sixteen. Unfortunatly she never ended up with Jean Paul in a hotel room. Oh well. At least Pierrot Le Fou is coming up on my Netflix list.
JOHNNY DEPP (1963 - )
There's no sense beating around the bush: for a long, long time, we remained steadfastly resistant to Depp's charms. He was very pretty. He seemed to mean well. It was sweet that Marlon Brando seemed to see something in there that was worth encouraging. We were glad that we did not personally own any of the hotels that he stayed in and that subsequently needed extensive reconstruction. But he had a penchant for moist, self-pitying whimsey, and an unfortunate ability to seem to bring it out of others, as in his first starring role for Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands. He often looked lost, whether in sausage movies like Nick of Time or meatier fare such as Ed Wood, where he mostly smiled a lot. And when he tried for deeper emotions, as in Donnie Brasco, he sometimes seemed to be dipping his bucket into an empty well. But by 2003, the year that he let Captain Jack Sparrow out of the bottle and appeared in Robert Rodriguez's mostly uninspired, messy Once Upon a Time in Mexico, apparently starring in some livelier, stranger film that he was making in his head, the lad had won us over. Depp may still look a bit like a teen pin-up, but his ambitions as an actor clearly have less to do with romancing or charming audiences than with bringing us images from a different dimension, and after more than twenty years of practice, he's harnessed enough mastery of his physical instrument to his boundless imagination that he does whatever it is he's doing pretty darned well, even if what it is that he thinks he's doing sometimes remains an open question. He puts on as good a show now as any actor of his generation. It's not clear that he can play a straight role and invest in with real emotional power, but the dark, deep tones of his Sweeney Todd -- in many ways his greatest breakthrough yet -- suggest that he's only begun to realize his full promise.
JOHN WAYNE (1907-1979)
Like it or not, the man born Marion Morrison is the face of the cinematic take on American history. He rarely stepped outside his comfort zone of Westerns and war movies, where Man struggled and fought with Otherness and Nature in morality plays writ as large as the myth of American exceptionalism. He had 171 movies under his belt when he died, and most of them aren't great or even good. A lot of them espouse a distinctly conservative political viewpoint. And a handful are absolutely stunning. Let's start with Stagecoach, the movie that Orson Welles used as a template for how to make movies when he was getting ready to make Citizen Kane. John Ford brilliantly used the Monument Valley location to emphasize how tiny the people in Stagecoach were in their environment, and it fell to Wayne, the outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold, to save everyone from their fates. Now look to Rio Bravo and The Searchers. In the former, Wayne is the tough sheriff intent on standing alone against corrupt power. In the latter, Wayne plays a damaged, obsessive, creepy loner who spends the bulk of the movie on the hunt for his little niece so that he can do her the honor of mercy-killing her after her defilement (or so he imagines) at the hands of Native Americans. That's about as ugly as a plot can be, but it's a testament to Wayne's iconography that he can play both parts without changing the John Wayne-ness of the roles. It's rare to see John Wayne lose, which made The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that much more meaningful. There's plenty of other great iconic Wayne movies: Red River, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon are among the best. You may hear some ugly words spoken unironically in many of his movies but, well, it's important to remember that the westward expansion in American history isn't just about triumph, but triumph at the expense of someone else. It's possible, maybe even necessary, to appreciate both of these points at the same time.
RICHARD BURTON (1925-1984)
Richard Burton arrived in Hollywood in the late 1940s as the heir apparent to Laurence Olivier, blessed with blazing intelligence, a stern handsomeness, crazy Shakespearean chops, and one of the greatest voices in cinema history. Yet it took years for Burton to find his niche in Hollywood, his gifts mostly wasted in cookie-cutter roles in movies like The Robe and Alexander the Great. But if youth didn’t become him onscreen, middle age sure did. Whereas Burton was ill at ease with uncomplicated heroism, he excelled playing more compromised characters, often opposite his two-time wife Elizabeth Taylor. Night of the Iguana showed him as the ideal antihero for both John Huston and Tennessee Williams, while his work as the dissolute academic George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? afforded him his best co-starring vehicle with Taylor, who according to Burton brought out the best in him as an actor. But best of all is the aging agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in which Burton plays the washed-up operative with a dissolute grace that makes the character unimaginable in anyone else’s hands. In his later career, Burton took an alarming number of “paycheck roles,” primarily to cover the debt he’d incurred from both of his divorces from Liz Taylor. But even then, despite being deep into alcohol issues, he was still capable of the old Burton magic, as in the film adaptation of Equus or his final big-screen appearance in 1984. His career was mired in subpar movies, gossip, and booze -- “a spoiled genius from the Welsh gutter,” he called himself -- but Richard Burton also touched genius in a way that few actors could manage.
WARREN BEATTY (1937 - )
Usually, Warren Beatty is lumped in with the generation of movie stars who emerged during the 1970s -- Pacino, Nicholson, DeNiro, Hoffman. But unlike those men, Beatty’s stardom predates the period: he came of age during the late 1960s, as the classical period of Hollywood was drawing to an end. Perhaps that explains why Beatty was so uniquely able to fit in roles both classical and contemporary. But while Beatty’s rakish charm and lothario reputation might have helped to make him a star, it was his adventurous spirit that kept him there. By 1967, he had acquired enough clout to produce a violent crime drama that became one of the seminal films of the era, Bonnie and Clyde. From there, Beatty worked selectively, collaborating with his equally gifted friends and some of the most talented filmmakers of the day, including Robert Altman in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, in which Beatty gave perhaps his finest performance. Beatty served as producer on many of his films, and writer/director on four of them. Yet these productions were rarely vanity projects -- Shampoo found a dramatic context in which Beatty could wrestle with his public image, while the notorious flop Ishtar memorably cast him against type as the shy songwriting partner of ladies’ man Dustin Hoffman. All the while, Beatty has never shied away from his passions, particularly for liberal politics. Who else would have not only made a film about Communist John Reed at the height of the Cold War but would have taken home an Oscar for it as well? Who else would have taken a story of a Senator who finds his political voice in hip-hop culture? Beatty has laid low since 2001’s misbegotten Town and Country -- far too long an absence for a star as vital as this one. Come back, Warren. All is forgiven.
GREGORY PECK (1916-2003)
With his tall, un-fussy presence, it’s easy to think that Gregory Peck was all about heroes. Certainly, his serene masculinity was well-suited to such manly genres as Westerns and war movies. But if all Peck did in his career was to play the good guy over and over, he wouldn’t be worth mentioning here. Consider the way Hitchcock cast him against type in 1945’s Spellbound -- with a more obviously “crazy” actor in the part it would be easy to dismiss the character as a nutjob, but because it’s Peck we root for him to beat his demons. Similarly, he made a most unlikely Captain Ahab, but after seeing him tied to the side of the white whale, it’s hard to imagine another actor doing it better. Peck was one of those rare stars who could do damn near anything, be it the foreign correspondent who romances runaway princess Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, the besieged lawyer of Cape Fear, even Dr. Joseph Mengele in The Boys From Brazil. But the film that defined him for future generations was To Kill a Mockingbird. As an embodiment of fifties-era manliness, Peck was something of an inspired choice to play the bookish, bespectacled Atticus Finch. And while many of his more conventionally heroic characters are respected by virtue of their strength, Peck imbues Atticus with a forthright goodness that is no less commanding of respect. Other movie heroes may buckle swashes or save the day on the battlefield, but Peck makes Atticus a good guy to whom we can all relate -- the father we had, or wish we had, or wish we were.
And finally, yes...
MEL GIBSON (1956 - )
It may be hard to remember now, but there was a time not too long ago when Mel Gibson -- better known of late for his drunken, anti-Semitic rants and strange directorial inclinations -- was one of Hollywood’s most effortlessly likable leading men. He demonstrated his intensity early in his career, as the enigmatic postapocalyptic hero of the Mad Max trilogy. But it was the Lethal Weapon franchise that propelled Gibson to international superstardom, providing him a mainstream context for his slightly off-kilter presence while affording the breathless women in the audience a good long look at his ass. In the decade to come, Gibson demonstrated his appeal across numerous genres including a solid effort in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Hamlet. And even when the film itself was unworthy, he rose to the occasion all the same. Look at his work in 1997’s Conspiracy Theory, in which he distinguished an otherwise ordinary thriller with his unhinged performance. Better yet, check out 2000’s What Women Want, which after more than twenty years in the business marked his first lead role in a romantic comedy. The movie’s premise (a male chauvinist pig starts to hear women’s thoughts) is too gimmicky by half, but Gibson singlehandedly salvaged it by making his character more or less the last guy you’d expect to be the center of a romantic comedy -- which, of course, makes it all the more satisfying when he reveal his more sensitive side. Lately, Gibson has taken a break from acting, directing two epics that were shot in dead languages. But we’re happy to see that Gibson is once against stepping in front of the camera, since it’s pretty clear there are many more facets of his talent that he hasn’t shown us yet.
Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven
Contributors: Sarah Sundberg, Phil Nugent, Hayden Childs, Paul Clark