JACKIE EARLE HALEY in LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)



Some people on this list needed comebacks after destroying their own careers through bad choices or behavior, but the triumphant, Oscar-nominated comeback of Jackie Earle Haley in 2006’s Little Children was extra sweet because it was such a Cinderella story...and, as they say, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. After memorable breakthrough roles as the punk turned Little League champ in The Bad News Bears (1976) and the Cutter with the heart of gold in Breaking Away (1979), Haley suffered the child star curse and saw his career nosedive into obscurity during the ‘80s, ‘90s and most of the oughts. According to Haley (as quoted on the Internet Movie Database), “I'd always avoided stuff like 'Where are they now?' or 'Whatever happened to?'...You tell me, have you ever seen a 'Whatever happened to' where they seemed anything but pathetic? I could do that or just disappear.” And so, like so many creative types before him who’d ridden their dreams as far as they could, Haley rejoined the everyday rat race where most of us live, delivering pizzas, refinishing furniture, working variously as a security guard, a limousine driver and such, until A-list director Steven Zaillian, in the kind of wet dream moment that (usually) never comes true, just happened to remember the actor’s earlier work and cast him, more or less out of the blue, in the 2006 Sean Penn adaptation of All The President’s Men, which in turn led to Haley’s true comeback via his harrowing, heartbreaking performance later that year as the neighborhood pedophile in Todd Field’s Little Children...which in turn led to a part in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and the plum role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s 800-pound gorilla, Watchmen. So who knows? Maybe there’s hope.

STERLING HAYDEN in DR. STRANGELOVE: OR, HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)



Tall, striking Sterling Hayden developed into one of the biggest stars of the 1950s thanks to his unique looks, cruelly laconic performances and ability to bring mysterious depths to even noir lowlifes. But his heart had never really been in acting, which he found to be a frivolous and often unengaging profession. He had an extremely standoffish relationship with capitalism, and his ability to land roles in high-grossing films was, to him, merely a means to an end:  i.e., his habit of sailing, which got him away from an American consumer culture he often reviled. In 1958, he was involved in a nasty divorce and decided to leave it all behind once and for all; defying a court order, he took his kids, packed up a sailboat for the long haul, and headed off to Tahiti, where he would remain for almost six years. Aside from one brief television appearance, the only thing he did during that time that had anything to do with the entertainment industry was to write a hugely entertaining and profoundly thoughtful autobiography called Wanderer, in which he essentially repudiated his life as a movie star. Still, a nautical life is expensive, and in the 1960s, he enjoyed a protracted comeback which began in the best possible way: with an unforgettably loony performance as the unhinged General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s pitch-black Cold War comedy Dr. Strangelove.

JOHN HUSTON, UNDER THE VOLCANO (1984)



John Huston couldn’t possibly have had a more charmed career. He was practically born into Hollywood royalty; his father, Walter Huston, preceded him in a career as a double-threat director and actor. John himself added more to the package: he was a terrific writer, an intellectual, a keen spotter of talent. His very first movie as a director, The Maltese Falcon, is one of the greatest Hollywood movies of all time, and he followed it up with classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen and Beat the Devil. Things started to go awry for him in the mid-‘50s, though, after an ambitious but failed adaptation of Moby Dick, and by the 1960s, he was directing second-tier work like The List of Adrian Messenger and the disastrous Reflections in a Golden Eye. In the 1970s, he launched some work that contained sparks of genius, but nothing that coalesced into coherence: there were moments of greatness in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, The Man Who Would Be King, and Wise Blood, but all of them fell apart under the weight of their flaws. By the 1980s, he was producing pure schlock like Victory and Annie. Forty years as a director is far longer than anyone has a right to be successful, and people were willing to forgive his sad descent because of the greatness of his earlier work: but Huston, a career rebel, wasn’t about to go out without a fight. In 1984, he directed a stunning Albert Finney in an imperfect but still highly impressive adaptation of the great Malcolm Lowry novel Under the Volcano; it signaled a genuine late-career comeback for Huston, who went on to direct the enjoyable Prizzi’s Honor and the astonishing movie version of James Joyce’s The Dead before finally dying himself in 1987.

TERENCE STAMP in THE LIMEY (1999)



While most of the people on this list have rejuvenated their careers once or twice, the outstanding British actor Terence Stamp has had more comebacks than most people have had hot dinners. He rose to fame alongside his old flatmate Michael Caine and went on to become one of the most celebrated actors of the 1960s, as well as a sort of living symbol of the Carnaby Street crowd of London’s swinging sixties; it was at the end of that decade, after a highly public breakup with girlfriend Jeannie Shrimpton, that he had his first downturn, decamping for an Indian ashram and taking much of the 1970s off. He followed that with his first major comeback, in the juicily hammy role of General Zod in Superman II, and enjoyed a brief resurgence in the ‘80s that faded just as quickly in the waning part of that decade. 1994 found him mounting another big comeback through the simple act of donning a dress in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, but he floundered a bit after that, until 1999, when screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh came through with a role crafted especially for him. Revisiting (and updating) Stamp’s nasty, edgy, working-class persona, and even going so far as to use recycled footage from one of his old films as “archival footage” of the character he was playing, the two created, in the vengeful ex-hoodlum Wilson, the role he’d been working towards his whole career. Stamp’s performance was universally celebrated and allowed him to stage yet another comeback – which has now faded enough that he’s about due for one more.

BEN AFFLECK, GONE BABY GONE (2007)



Ben Affleck never deserved to be a walking punchline for the following reasons: 1) Good Will Hunting was weak and should never had made anyone famous; 2) the kind of callow, narcissistic performances Affleck gave in movies like Paycheck perfectly reflected and commented upon the material 3) "Bennifer" doesn't mean anything. Nonetheless, having become an all-too-easy punchline, Affleck retreated behind the camera and demonstrated a knack for drawing perfectly judged performances and local color. If Gone Baby Gone seems to be under the delusion that the camera exists solely to record said elements, Affleck has a scarily grounded feel for his Boston hometown. The best decision he ever made was figuring out that the SAG-mandated extras should remain out of sight at all times and he should instead train his camera upon incidental alcoholics and degenrates without flinching. This remains the most pungent film of 2007.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Vadim Rizov