Category:Actor

Humphrey Bogart was thirty-six before he played Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest and finally broke through. James Dean made three films before dying at twenty-four. Daniel Day-Lewis has won three Academy Awards for Best Actor and reportedly turns down most of what crosses his desk. The figures gathered in this category share a single trade with wildly different routes through it. Some came from vaudeville and radio. Some came from the Actors Studio. Some came from television sitcoms or stand-up clubs. What they have in common is a body of recorded screen work substantial enough to anchor a biographical entry.

Background

The acting profession as understood today is largely a product of the twentieth century. Stage acting predates it by millennia, but the screen actor is an invention of the silent film era, when performers such as Harold Lloyd worked out a physical vocabulary for the camera that had no precedent in theatre. The arrival of synchronized sound in the late 1920s forced a second reinvention. Voices that did not record well ended careers; voices that did, including those of Cary Grant and James Stewart, built them.

The studio system of the 1930s and 1940s placed actors under long-term contracts at MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount and the other majors. Performers were assigned to projects, loaned out, and groomed through publicity departments. The collapse of that system after the 1948 Paramount antitrust decision shifted power toward agents and toward the actors themselves. By the 1950s the Method, taught at the Actors Studio in New York by Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, was reshaping screen performance through figures including James Dean and, later in his career, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino. The New Hollywood of the late 1960s and 1970s gave such actors leading roles in films that the old studios would not have produced.

The category covers performers working from the silent period through the streaming era. The continuity is the craft. The discontinuity is almost everything else: the technology, the economics, the genres in fashion, the relationship between actor and audience.

Notable members

The classical Hollywood leading man is heavily represented. Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck and John Wayne between them defined much of what mid-century American cinema looked like to a global audience. Their range was narrower than that of later generations by design; the studios built personas and protected them. Wayne was the Western. Bogart was urban fatalism. Peck was moral seriousness. Stewart shifted, particularly in his postwar work with Anthony Mann and Alfred Hitchcock, toward something darker than his prewar persona suggested.

Adjacent to them sit performers whose primary identity was musical, comic or both. Fred Astaire redefined the screen dance number across roughly three decades at RKO and MGM. Bob Hope moved between vaudeville, radio, film and television and built a long association with USO tours. Dean Martin worked as half of a comedy team with Jerry Lewis before a substantial solo career in film, music and television. Harold Lloyd, the earliest figure in the group, produced his best-known work in the silent era and retained ownership of much of it.

The generation that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s brought a different idea of what a leading actor could look and sound like. Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Gene Hackman and Anthony Hopkins all built reputations on character work rather than glamour. Hopkins, trained in the British theatre, became internationally recognizable for The Silence of the Lambs in 1991, decades into his career. Hackman moved between leading and supporting parts with unusual consistency before retiring from acting. Daniel Day-Lewis, slightly younger and also shaped by British stage training, became identified with extended preparation and infrequent output.

The contemporary generation is broader still. Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx have each won Academy Awards and worked across drama, action and biographical roles; Foxx came to film through stand-up and sketch comedy on In Living Color. Leonardo DiCaprio moved from television and early-1990s independent films into the post-Titanic career that has dominated American leading-man casting for two decades. Sean Penn and Mel Gibson both built directing careers alongside their acting work, Gibson winning Best Director for Braveheart. Keanu Reeves has alternated between large action franchises and smaller projects since the early 1990s.

A comedy lineage runs through Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Adam Sandler and Dax Shepard. Murray and Aykroyd came through Saturday Night Live in its first seasons; Sandler came through the same show roughly fifteen years later and built a production company, Happy Madison, that has shaped much of his output. Murray's later collaborations with Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Jim Jarmusch are often cited as a second act.

Television-trained leads are well represented by Bryan Cranston and Jon Hamm, both of whom became widely recognized through long-running cable dramas, Breaking Bad and Mad Men respectively, before expanding into film. Ron Howard is unusual within the group: a child actor on The Andy Griffith Show and Happy Days who transitioned almost entirely into directing, winning the Academy Award for Best Director for A Beautiful Mind.

The nature of the work

Screen acting is unlike most other professions in that the public sees the output but almost none of the process. A finished performance is the product of casting, rehearsal, multiple takes, editing, sound design and color. Actors typically work out of sequence, often with incomplete scripts, and often without their scene partners physically present. The economic structure is similarly unusual: long stretches of unemployment between projects are normal even for established figures, and most working members of the Screen Actors Guild earn below the threshold for union health insurance in a given year.

Paths into the profession vary. Conservatory training at institutions such as Juilliard, RADA or the Yale School of Drama is one route. The Actors Studio and similar workshops are another. Stand-up comedy, sketch shows such as Saturday Night Live, and children's television have all served as feeders. Several figures in this category, including Howard and Reeves, had no formal training of consequence. Others, including Hopkins and Day-Lewis, came up almost entirely through classical theatre. The category also intersects with related groupings such as Famous People from Atlanta, which collects notable figures by geographic origin rather than profession.

What unites the entries below is durability. A single role, however well received, rarely produces enough biographical material for an encyclopedia entry. The performers gathered here have, in most cases, worked across decades, formats and registers.