10. SIDNEY POITIER (1927 - )
Poitier's breakthrough as the first African-American actor fully recognized as a leading man and star secured him a permanent place in the cultural history of the movies, but his status as a major actor and one of the great talents of his day may have eroded a little. In part this is because a lot of the movies he starred in were high-minded tosh that have dated very badly, not least because of the perceived need to present Poitier's characters as being superhuman and even morally superior to whites, the thinking being that a black man wouldn't be worth building a movie around if he were merely human. But just as Jackie Robinson had to play baseball extraordinarily well to earn his place on the roster of the Brooklyn Dodgers, it was Poitier's enormous talent that made most of his movies watchable at all. Even in something like To Sir, With Love, his powerful presence and banked fires seems informed by the mixture of intelligence and anger that made him stand out as the student worth saving in the juvenile-delinquency melodrama The Blackboard Jungle. It would be nice to report that, as the sixties gave way to the seventies and opportunities began to open up for black artists, Poitier was able to drop the black messiah act and take more challenging, morally complicated parts, but instead, he seemed to accept the idea that "Sidney Poitier" was a fixed concept that had no place in the era of Super Fly and Shaft. (In one of his 1971 movies, Brother John, his mistreated black Southerner character turned out to really be Jesus.) Poitier withdrew from the center of the film world, concentrating on directing and appearing in light comedies, aimed at the underserved African-American family audience, in which he played tightass straight man to such co-stars as Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby. Them after a long layoff, he turned up acting again in such movies as Shoot to Kill, Little Nikita, and Sneakers. He didn't look as if he'd aged much and he could still command the screen, but the new scripts sucked about as much as the old ones had. He appears to have been effectively retired for the last decade or so.
9. DENZEL WASHINGTON (1954 - )
For a long time, Denzel Washington seemed content to play it safe. He looked good in a military uniform (Glory, Crimson Tide, Courage Under Fire) or a detective's plain clothes (Devil in a Blue Dress, Fallen, The Bone Collector), and his career strategy appeared to be "If Harrison Ford can do it, I can do it," which is admirable in the sense that he clearly never wanted to be pigeonholed as The Black Guy in Hollywood's eyes. There are limitations to this approach, though, and eventually folks start to notice that, for example, in Philadelphia you're the lawyer, not the guy dying of AIDS, and they start to wonder if your career is just going to be one tailored suit after another. (To be sure, many a leading man has built a career on just that.) Of course, you run the risk of upsetting a whole other contingent of your fans when you finally say what the hell, I'm gonna have some fun playing the baddest cop in Los Angeles – especially when that's the role that finally wins you the Best Actor award on Oscar night. All these complaints seem petty now; Washington blew the roof off the joint in Training Day and ever since then, he's been livelier in his straight roles (Inside Man, Deja Vu) and more willing to sprinkle the occasional bad dude (American Gangster) in with the noble characters (The Great Debaters). So hey, maybe he knew he was doing all along.
8. JAMES DEAN (1931-1955)
It’s inconceivable that a career like James Dean’s could happen again. History and circumstance prohibit it; the mere fact of his existence proscribes it. When the blazingly handsome Indiana farmboy blazed out of existence so spectacularly on Route 466, he took with him the possibility of anyone ever repeating his singular, spectacular career. It was not merely the circumstance of his death that made him a legend; plenty of actors had died young before, and plenty would die young after. But so stunning was his rise to the top, and so distinct was his personality both on and off the screen, that no one since would carry into death the legendary quality that makes his a name to conjure with, a shorthand for infinite possibility fatefully snuffed. The closest modern-day analogue, for example, is Heath Ledger – but the young Australian was four years older than Dean at the time of his own death, and had an astonishing sixteen more screen roles. That’s one of the qualities that makes Dean such a towering figure in Hollywood: even ignoring his brooding personality, his smoldering good looks, his pioneering, emotional Method performances, his controversial personal life, and his restless and rebellious off-screen persona, it is staggering to consider that James Dean, as iconic an actor as can be imagined, made only three films in his entire life. Of course, had he lived, he likely would have been instrumental in tarnishing his own fiery purity, but…well, he didn’t live, did he?
7. SEAN CONNERY (1930 - )
Connery became a star because, at a point where his animal presence was enough to hold the camera but his acting was still at the beginner's stage, he became James Bond. What's amazing is that he's still so strongly associated with the role even though he's long since developed not just a strong body of work but a strong screen image that's pretty far from the over-accessorized pretty boy stud of Dr. No and From Russia With Love. In fact, by the time of his last "real" Bond movie, 1971's Diamonds Are Forever (not counting the 1983 rehash Never Say Never Again), his Bond was starting to look more human and fleshy and fallible, never more comfortably in his skin than in a throwaway moment where he gets to apologize to a rat for his body odor. By then, he had given impressive, full-bodied performances in such mid-60s films as The Hill and A Fine Madness, and was known to delight in opportunities to strip off his hair pieces and indulge in his taste for extravagant and weird facial hair choices. One thing that never changed much, whether he was playing an Irish-American cop in The Untouchables or a beefcake messiah assassin circa 2400 A.D. in the visually opulent, brain-damaged Zardoz, was his voice, and that was probably a right call: after purring his way through his first couple of appearancs as 007, Connery had developed one of those voices that makes almost any line seem worth hearing at least once. The Scottish music machine that he calls a larynx may have as much as his strapping form and experienced manliness to do with his status as probably the longest-reigning A-list sex symbol in the history of movies, an iconic musk dispenser who was able to convincingly get younger actresses ranging from Tia Carrere to Catherine Zeta Jones to respond to his first call at an age where most former Mr. Universe contestants have to ring three times just to get the nurse. The odd bit of voice work aside, he has been officially retired since 2003, having cited his experiences during the production of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with having convinced him that he'd gotten too old for that shit.
6. JIMMY STEWART (1908-1997)
Over the years, there have been as many "young Jimmy Stewarts" in movies as there have been "new Dylans" in music. That alone would probably be enough to qualify the real deal for this list, but what's most interesting about Stewart the actor is how far off the mark most such comparisons are. They're usually intended to evoke an aw-shucks, American as apple pie appeal, and certainly that's part of the story with Stewart -- the stand-up, virtuous hero of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Glenn Miller Story and The Spirit of St. Louis, the man of decency who would age into the stammering sentimentalist reading weepy odes to his dead dog on The Tonight Show -- but such shorthand doesn't take into account the disturbed, obsessive Stewart of Vertigo and the Westerns he made with Anthony Mann, notably The Naked Spur. (And despite its status as a perennial holiday favorite, he's not exactly a ray of sunshine in It's a Wonderful Life, either.) His Boy Scout qualities made him an icon, but like David Lynch – the man Mel Brooks called "Jimmy Stewart from Mars" – it's his darker impulses that made him an artist.
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Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce