BURT REYNOLDS (1936 - )
It may be hard for you young whippersnappers to believe, but 30 years ago, Burt Reynolds was the biggest star in the world. He'd be the first to admit that his career management skills were never a match for his good ol' boy charisma and winking, bubblegum-popping likability – in fact, he's practically made a second career out of admitting it. His forgettable early career in television and B-movies (Navajo Joe, anyone?) isn't what convinced John Boorman to cast Reynolds in his breakthrough role in Deliverance; rather, it was his easy command of the Carson panel as a guest host of The Tonight Show that led to his star-making turn as Lewis Medlock. His Southern charm and Marlboro Man looks led to a series of redneck roles, from White Lightning to Smokey and the Bandit, which became the second-highest grossing movie of 1977, behind only Star Wars. Reynolds went to that well a few times too many, famously turning down Terms of Endearment to reteam with hick flickster Hal Needham for Stroker Ace. His career never came close to returning to the heights of Smokey, but he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in Boogie Nights. True to form, he fired his agent after seeing the rough cut, fearing his career was ruined…and then when the movie instead revived his career, he squandered the comeback opportunity by going right back to making crap again.
STEVE McQUEEN (1930-1980)
Steve McQueen's best-known roles didn't require him to do much other than be Steve McQueen, but really, who cares? A lot of leading men coast by on personal charm; that's sorta what people like about them. And the thing that made Steve McQueen popular had nothing to do with his acting chops and everything to do with how fucking cool Steve McQueen was. He was so cool that just typing his name over and over again makes me feel cooler. So he made himself a star by stealing The Magnificent Seven from bigger-name actors, just by being cool. He convinced John Sturges to put a motorcycle chase into The Great Escape, because motorcycle chases were cool, and he was Steve McQueen, dammit. He effortlessly makes The Thomas Crown Affair a fun movie to watch. And Bullitt, man! There's nothing even approaching acting in that movie, but McQueen just kills. I think people were surprised when it turned out that McQueen could act after all. His roles in Junior Bonner and Papillon called on him to do something with all that legendary cool, and McQueen delivered in spades. He wasn't so great in The Getaway, and no one got out of The Towering Inferno without some stink. He made only a few more movies before his all-too-early death in 1980. But he left a legacy of untouchable cool backed by unsuspected competence that's unique among actors too fucking cool to break a sweat while making something as inconsequential as a movie.
HARRISON FORD (1942 - )
For a lesson in the importance of Leading Man star power, one need look no further than the disparity between the first Star Wars trilogy and the second. Sure, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith had shinier special effects, and Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and even Hayden Christensen have all been known to deliver fine acting performances (albeit in non-green screen environments)...but Ford managed to bring a recognizably human heart to his half of the trilogy despite the hokey dialogue and distracting special effects, and then he went on to prove his Leading Man status in all the Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan and other ‘80s and ‘90s tentpole action flicks that followed. For some, none of Ford’s films matter as much as the cult classic Blade Runner, and his female fan base may have a particular soft spot for Witness or Working Girl...but Ford’s inability to expand his range much beyond the action genre (despite interesting against-type anomalies like The Mosquito Coast, What Lies Beneath and “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck”) keeps him batting clean-up the Honorable Mention list rather than enshrined in our Top 25.
WILLIAM POWELL (1892-1984)
In the days when Americans still dreamed of embodying classy sophistication, before we all started hating elitists and shooting wolves from helicopters, Powell was as classy as you could get without actually turning English. Of all the homegrown American stars of his day, he may be the one who it's hardest to imagine doing time in a Western between trips to Manhattan. He was built to swill cocktails and trade wisecracks, but his eyelids, which he kept permanently at half-mast, signaled that he was dangerously close to becoming jaded. The only solution was for him to find the perfect woman and verbal sparring partner -- you didn't want him turning cold and becoming one of those rich rotters, but you also didn't want him coming after your girlfriend or sister. So when Powell met Myrna Loy for the first time on-screen, the nation must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. He had co-starred with other actresses, notably Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, and he also had a well-known off-screen connection to Jean Harlow before she died, but his partnership with Loy struck so many people as so ineffably perfect (like picking up the paper to see if your favorite wastrel buddy from college had been forced into rehab yet and discovering instead that he'd married the first duchess to be crowned Playmate of the Year) that they wound up doing fourteen pictures together, including six installments of the Thin Man series. (Their first co-starring gig, which was released the same year as The Thin Man, was Manhattan Melodrama, in which Powell, as a politically ambitious D.A., marries Loy after Clark Gable, who plays a gangster, has had his fun with her; at the end, Gable winds up happily going to the electric chair after whacking Powell's crooked rival, because he isn't about to stand by and see his beloved New York denied having such a handsome-looking couple make it to the Governor's mansion. Manhattan Melodrama now has its place in history as the movie that John Dillinger was watching just before G-men mowed him down as he was leaving the theater. I'll bet he had a good time.) After supporting Henry Fonda in the 1955 Mister Roberts, Powell retired and stayed that way, for almost thirty years, until his death at 91.
CHOW YUN-FAT (1955 - )
Chow was being called things like "the most photogenic man alive" and "the coolest actor in the world" when his movies were still available only to American movie fans who lived in cities with significant Chinatown districts. As it is, the pull of his image had a awful lot to do with the craze for Hong Kong movies that started among Western film geeks in the late 1980s and would lead to Hollywood trying to buy up most of the hottest Chinese directors. But John Woo, who made Chow a star with the 1986 A Better Tomorrow and then made him the sort of figure for whom words such as "star" seem inadequate with The Killer, Once a Thief, and Hard-Boiled, has yet to do anything as good in Hollywood as his early work, and while there are many factors that might help explain this, the failure of his American films to include footage of Chow's face is one that should not be underestimated. Chow himself has taken to focusing on the great dream of cracking the American market, haltingly and with some very strange results: his role in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie was scissored by officials in his home country who felt that the characterization was "in line with Hollywood’s old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." At 55, Chow could probably benefit from finding a new stage to sustain his career a while longer. If he does, some of us won't care if it means that he's doing his acting while speaking phonetically-learned Portuguese.
MARCELLO MASTROIANNI (1924-1996)
For most of his long career, and even now, years after his death, Mastroianni was probably the best-known internationally of all Italian movie stars, and indeed, he did seem to have the field pretty well covered. He achieved great popular success in comedies such as Big Deal on Madonna Street and Divorce, Italian Style, but he also happened to arrive in time to embody the tortured-artist/modern man figure that was so important to such directors as Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2), Antonioni (La Notte), and Visconti (The Stranger). Though he gave handsome bearing and weight to these iconic roles, he usually seemed happiest playing ordinary men cast into remarkable circumstances that throw their frailties and limitations into sharp relief. At the very end of his career, when he was in his seventies, he worked with such veteran avant-garde directors as Raul Ruiz (Three Lives and Only One Death) and the ninety-ish Manoel de Oliveira (Voyage to the Beginning of the World), as if he were still hoping to learn from those odder and even older than himself. His experiences in English-language pictures -- John Boorman's Leo the Last, Robert Altman's Ready to Wear -- were few and far between and not particularly successful, but he did once send a shout-out to his American fans by appearing on an episode of Laugh-In and giving the camera his best soulful, romantic look while ripping off his toupee.
Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Seven & Eight
Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs, Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent