PETER O’TOOLE (1932 - )



The standard line on Peter O’Toole is that he’s the greatest actor to never win an Academy Award. He should have won it for Lawrence of Arabia, of course:  selected by David Lean based on his stage work (like most great British leading men, who come from a culture where theatre is not synonymous with frothy mass-market musicals, O’Toole carried on a very successful stage career contemporaneous to his film acting), he became an instant superstar. Perhaps the Academy simply assumed, around the time he appeared in My Favorite Year, that if drinking hadn’t killed him by age forty, he’d be around forever and they could award him at their leisure. Though raised in Leeds and soaked in London theatrical tradition, O’Toole is the most Irish of actors: not only for his name and his reputation as a hard drinker, but also for his whimsy, his sly charm, his often self-deprecating humor, his reputation as a raconteur without peer (his autobiographical series Loitering with Intent are some of the most enjoyable books ever penned by a movie star, and show that he shares more in common with Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan than nationality), and, when a role calls for it, fiery intensity. His roles have run the gamut from savage countercultural tour de forces (The Ruling Class) to respectable grand-old-man performances (The Last Emperor), and he’s got a third installment of his autobiography coming out, as well as a performance alongside John Malkovich in a big-screen adaptation of “The Song of Roland”. Hurry up, AMPAS; no one lives forever.

NICK NOLTE (1941 - )



In recent years, Nolte's off-screen reputation as the drunken old caveman from Mars has gone a long way in blotting out his on-screen legacy, which is a great pity -- for us, since he continues to give a very convincing simulation of a man who really doesn't give a shit, except about the quality of his work. He spent most of the first thirty years of his life dicking around accumulating "experience" before he began turning up in bit parts in movies and guest shots on TV series -- he was in many a Quinn Martin production -- before making his movie debut alongside a giggly penis named Don Johnson in the drive-in sequel Return to Macon County (1975). It was a return to TV, in the form of his role in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man that got the studios to thinking that there might be money in them thar pecs. In Nolte's first big-budget movie, The Deep (in which he got to go scuba-diving while modeling the latest in '70s porn star 'staches), he looked wooden with embarrassment, a good sign that his package included a healthy brain.  Luckily, he was able to quiet talk that he was an overhyped dullard with fiery performances in North Dallas Forty and Who'll Stop the Rain?, an adaptaton of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers that gave him the chance to play a character based on Neal Cassidy. (A couple of years later, he played Cassady for real in the misbegotten Heart Beat.) Through the 1980s and into the '90s, in such movies as 48 Hrs., Under Fire, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Weeds, Q & A, Lorenzo's Oil, The Prince of Tides, and "Life Lessons", the Martin Scorsese-Richard Price segment of the anthology feature New York Stories, Nolte's hulking yet graceful physique and his ability to invest it with emotional power and suggestions of experience made him a highly welcome presence in a movie culture dominated by dimpled young'uns fresh from the Nautilus room. He was still doing a lot of bad movies for the money, though, and after the 1996 Mulholland Falls, he snapped, announcing to the press that he was taking his star off the door and was now a character actor, pitching his services to the indie film scene and anyone else who had an interesting script that was in no danger of being rewritten on a whim by the studio CEO's niece. A lot of highly paid talent have had days where they wanted to make a similar announcement, but Nolte actually kept to it: he starred in Keith Allen's version of Vonnegut's Mother Night, co-starred with Julie Christie as aging sex bombs in Alan Rudolph's Afterglow, signed on to play Lt. Col. Tree in the strongest section of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, ran the gauntlet for Paul Schrader in Affliction, played Adam Verver in the Merchant-Ivory production of Henry James' The Golden Bowl, made his best case that an American could still look cool to the French even in the age of Bush in Neil Jordan's The Good Thief, and cast a worried, sage eye at Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas's Clean. In between, he did a lot of well-intentioned weird shit, ranging from trying on ladies' underwear in Rudolph's misguided Vonnegut blowout Breakfast of Champions to Ang Lee's Hulk, where he did at least manage to prove that he could look weirder and act scarier before his character went CGI. More recently, he parodied his own gruff-psycho image in Tropic Thunder. It may not make for a smooth-looking resume, but no one can accuse him of going gentle into that good night.

CLARK GABLE (1901-1960)



Perhaps more than anyone on this list, Clark Gable deserves to be considered one of the greatest leading men of all time not because he was a great actor, but because he was a great movie star. He practically taught the world what the phrase "movie star" meant during his tenure as the “King of Hollywood” in the Golden Age of motion pictures: the hyper-inflated salaries, the relentless womanizing, the backstage battles over contracts and perks, the feuds with directors and producers, the endless high living. Gable embodied it all, from the time he made the transition into talking pictures to the time he died, going out alongside Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits. So much of his career was good timing: he had become (largely by virtue of his girl-grabbing good looks; the papers called him “young, vigorous and brutally masculine”) the biggest star in the business in time to do a lot of things that no one had ever done before. He broke taboos left and right, and every one of them made him a bigger and bigger star: appearing shirtless, going without shaving, slapping a woman in the face, uttering the word “damn”. So what if he couldn’t bring himself to cry when he played Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind?  Let all the guys who were better actors collect their accolades: the roguish, cruelly handsome Gable went about his business of being the biggest movie star of all time.

JOHN BARRYMORE (1882-1942)



In its early years, Hollywood studios would sometimes make a big deal about having signed famous stage actors to appear in movies, but few of the actors who had legendary theatrical careers made a very strong, lasting mark in movies. Being able to act on a stage wasn't necessarily a detriment to someone hoping to be a movie star, but the two forms rewarded different qualities to a different degree, and movie and theatrical history is full of names, from Barrymore's sister Ethel to Helen Hayes and Tallulah Bankhead, who tended to lose something in the transition. With the possible exception of Marlon Brando, whose stage performances were said to have had an in-the-moment naturalistic intensity that marked him as made for the movies, and who, once he made it in Hollywood never looked back, John Barrymore probably did a more thorough job than any other big American Broadway star of making the same kind of splash in the movies. The fact that he was such a supernaturally handsome son of a bitch helped, especially in movies like Grand Hotel (co-starring his brother Lionel), where he coasted on romantic glamour. But his most enduring movie roles were in comedies such as Twentieth Century, True Confession, and Midnight, where the verbally intricate demands of high-energy screwball comedy made it possible for him to tap into his full theatrical style, which might have proved deadly if he'd tried doing it on camera in a drama. He also played the washed-up actor Larry Renault in Dinner at Eight (1933), a role that gave him the chance to mock his off-screen reputation yet also milk it for pathos, and in one grand moment, to do both at once: having worn out his last string, Renaut opts for suicide by turning on the gas and then lying back to wait for death, after having carefully arranged that his famous profile will be discovered to its best advantage.

NICOLAS CAGE (1964 - )



Here's the thing about Nicolas Cage: he has humor, imagination, daring, passion, and is clearly not in it to be bored. Because of these things, and because, like many actors who enjoy their jobs, he works a lot, he often appears in material that he can't salvage, and because the spectacle of someone who's not inclined to phone it in even when trying to keep a movie like Ghost Rider or The Wicker Man remake on life support can provide plenty of material for a laugh riot of a YouTube montage, Cage's reputation has dropped like the stock market in the last several years. This same thing happened to Brando and John Barrymore in their day, and it might yet happen to Johnny Depp if by some unlikely misfortune he ever gets ugly enough. But from the pure sweetness of his first unlikely heartthrob roles (Valley Girl, Birdy) to the way he twisted himself into pretzel knots in such surreal-slapstick turns as his dashing hillbilly goofball Hi in Raising Arizona and his corporate high rise bloodsucker wannabe in Vampire's Kiss to his poleaxed romantic lead in Moonstruck, he earned his place at the head of the line. As a member of the Coppola family, he has evidence for his theory that there's a point to being perceived as bankable in Hollywood, and while he's been making embarrassing box office hits since at least Con Air, he's also poured everything he had into difficult roles in major pictures (such as his hell-bent-on-dissolution hero in Leaving Las Vegas) that would be difficult for any other actor to bring off. It's been awhile since he did anything as great as that, but he reaffirms his stature as an honest, hard-working man every time he takes a break from going "Whoa!" in response to fireball explosions long enough to do something as unembarrassing as The Weather Man or Adaptation. And even though his list of projects in the pipeline include not just the hinky-sounding Bad Lieutenant follow-up but Ghost Rider 2, we're not ready to count him out yet.

JEFF BRIDGES (1949 - )



Son of Lloyd and brother of Beau, Jeff Bridges made his movie debut in 1970 and got his first Academy Award nomination a year later for playing cute but not so astute in The Last Picture Show. Although he never threatened to become a culture hero or knock De Niro or Pacino or Redford or Nicholson off the newsmagazine covers in the '70s, he spent his first decade starring in a string of pictures -- Fat City, The Last American Hero, Hearts of the West, Winter Kills, and even the 1976 King Kong remake -- that established him as a solid performer who could be counted on to work hard and seriously at his art while bestowing his own immense likability on any movie halfway deserving of it. Those qualities have kept him in steady demand, even as his lust to keep working and his taste for novelty have sometimes dropped him into flops like TRON (the one that proved that computer games were not going to put the movies out of business) and Somebody Killed Her Husband (the one that proved that Farrah Fawcett was not going to be putting actual movie actresses out of business). But he's kept getting better and plunging deeper for his emotional effects as he's grown older. At his best, he can lift a movie like The Fisher King to near-greatness, or a movie like American Heart (where, as an ex-con, his affability had to fight its way through the hard shell of someone who still felt like a caged animal) above mediocrity, or even give the audience a rooting stake in something as trumped-up as The Door in the Floor. In the final analysis, he probably remains more of a consummate actor than a star, but he's such a consummate actor that when a role absolutely demands to be played by a star -- whether it's the tortured romanticism of his small-time piano player in The Fabulous Baker Boys or The Big Lebowski's stoned Zen master hero or even the baldly villainous flash of his role in Iron Man -- coming across as a star turns out to be comfortably within his range.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six & Eight

Contributors: Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent