Career Resurrection / Film

Companies

• The Walt Disney Company has gone through this multiple times.
  • The first was in 1950 with Cinderella, a return to feature-length animated movies after a string of mediocre package films designed to keep the company afloat during World War II.
  • The second time was in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, a tribute to classic Disney films after some stiff competition from Don Bluth and the failure of The Black Cauldron almost sank the company’s animation division entirely.
  • The third time was in 2010 with Tangled, after Disney had trouble adapting to 3D animation in the 2000s and was routinely trounced by Pixar and Dreamworks Animation.

Films — Animation

• Ellen DeGeneres saw her career suffer when she came out of the closet in 1997 and her character promptly followed suit on Ellen. This cost the show sponsors and viewers, leading to its cancellation. She attempted a comeback with The Ellen Show, but the show failed to attract enough viewers and was canceled before its only season finished broadcasting. Then came Finding Nemo, where her performance as Dory brought her back into the spotlight in probably the biggest way this has ever happened with a voice acting role. Riding the hype and acclaim of the role, Ellen received a talk show and a couple of stints hosting the Oscars and came to be considered one of America's most beloved celebrities (until 2020, when her popularity waned due to her reputation for being rather mean to her crew off-camera). Thirteen years later, the main draw of Finding Dory was considered to be that DeGeneres was the star.

Acting

• Ben Affleck with Gone Baby Gone and The Town. After Gigli infamously bombed, his career hit rock bottom. Then in 2007, he made his directorial debut with the critically and commercially successful Gone Baby Gone. He followed that up in 2010 with the equally successful The Town, which he acted in too. He won his second Oscar ^note having prior won for co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon as a producer in 2013 when his third film Argo won Best Picture. Affleck's profile further increased when he was cast as Batman in the DC Extended Universe, while starring in Gone Girl netted more acclaim. Though Affleck's next directorial effort after Argo, Live by Night, garnered mixed reception and profits in 2016, he recovered his esteem when Air (2023) earned stellar reviews.
• Don Ameche in Trading Places. Ameche was one of 20th Century Fox's biggest romantic stars and light comedians in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, starring in numerous successful films such as The Story of Alexander Graham Bell and Heaven Can Wait. After 1949, however, his film career flatlined with only five film appearances over the course of the next three decades. He made frequent television appearances and also starred in a few Broadway musicals, but his main income came from working in dinner theatre. In 1983, the 75-year-old Ameche was cast in the major role of Mortimer Duke in the hit comedy Trading Places, his first film in 13 years. The film brought him back into the Hollywood mainstream after 34 years put out in the pasture. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his following film, Cocoon, and worked steadily for the rest of his life.
• Julie Andrews with The Princess Diaries. She had been an icon from The '60s till The '80s for popular hits like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. She, frustrated at such typecasting, sought to break away from it, notably in the 1970 flop Darling Lili. Though she later succeeded in 1982 with Victor/Victoria, a botched throat surgery damaged her singing voice. It wasn't until The Princess Diaries that she truly returned to the limelight in 2001 by returning to her Disney roots. Andrews now possesses a different Cool Old Lady image by slightly Adam Westing her previous sweet persona. She also enjoys a lot of success as a Celebrity Voice Actor in the Shrek and Despicable Me franchises, later voicing a sea monster in 2018's Aquaman as well as providing the narration for Lady Whistledown in Bridgerton.
• Dan Aykroyd, not only with Trading Places opposite Don Ameche (see above), but also with Ghostbusters. Aykroyd was part of the inaugural cast of Saturday Night Live when it premiered in 1975, staying on board for the next four years. During his tenure, he, together with fellow cast member and dear friend John Belushi, formed a band on SNL for a musical skit, the Blues Brothers. That bit's popularity resulted in a film based off said premise, also called The Blues Brothers, to be released in 1980, which was a Sleeper Hit in that year's box office calculus. They made a popular comedy duo, but Belushi's untimely death caused by drug addiction put a tragic end to that collaboration. Studio executives were hesitant to cast Aykroyd after Belushi's passing, which they allegedly compared to casting "Abbott without Costello." Aykroyd's starring roles in Trading Places and Ghostbusters (the latter of which he co-wrote with co-star Harold Ramis) quelled their worries when they became big successes, proving he could mesh well with other actors besides Belushi. He returned to host or guest star on SNL multiple times, while eventually gaining an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in 1989's Driving Miss Daisy. He reprised his Ghostbusters role in the sequel that same year, which was profitable despite becoming a classic case of Sequelitis. Unfortunately, he would later suffer a downslide with the failure of Nothing but Trouble in 1991 (which he starred in, wrote, and directed). While Aykroyd would appear in many failures afterwards, his recurring presence on SNL and continued work in the Ghostbusters franchise (notably reprising his role as Ray Stantz in Ghostbuster II's direct sequels Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire) ^note the 2016 film being a reboot with little to no connection to the previous films ensure he's still around in Hollywood.
• Javier Bardem initially found fame in his native Spain before moving to Hollywood. After truly making his name known in America with his Oscar-winning role in No Country for Old Men (having received a previous nomination for Before Night Falls), his career, with further hits like Vicky Cristina Barcelona (which he starred in opposite his wife Penélope Cruz, also mentioned on this page), Eat, Pray, Love (which was a surprise box office success despite getting mixed reviews), Biutiful (which got him his third Oscar nomination), and Skyfall (where he played a Bond villain) continued rising. However, Bardem's input began to slump after Skyfall with films that either were polarizing (To the Wonder, The Counselor, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, mother!, etc.) or just hated (like The Gunman). His luck, thankfully, changed for the better in 2021 with roles in three movies: The Good Boss, Dune, and Being the Ricardos. The latter two got particularly positive notices after becoming major contenders in that year's Oscars ceremony, with Bardem even getting his fourth Oscar nomination for playing Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos (starring with Nicole Kidman, also mentioned on this page, who got an Oscar nomination too, playing Arnaz's wife Lucille Ball). He later returned as Stilgar for Dune: Part Two, which was an even bigger hit in 2024.
• Sacha Baron Cohen in The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. In the late 2000s, Baron Cohen became famous for his role in 2006's Borat. However, none of the films that followed (Bruno, The Dictator, Grimsby) achieved the same level of success. Luckily, 2020 saw the above two critically acclaimed films released on Netflix and Prime Video respectively. The former is seen as one of the best movies of the year, while the latter is considered a worthy sequel and became the year's second most streamed movie (after Hamilton on Disney+).
• Drew Barrymore in Scream. After starting off as a child actress in the blockbuster E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as well as Firestarter and Irreconcilable Differences during The '80s, Barrymore's pre-adolescent drug and alcohol problems and her Stage Mom overshadowed her career. While she cleaned up early in The '90s, by that time her career had been reduced to low-budget, independent movies (which most of the time, seemed to typecast her as a promiscuous, rebellious, and/or out-of-control youth) like Doppelgänger, Poison Ivy, and the remake of Gun Crazy, and small roles in major movies like Batman Forever. Her small but memorable role in 1996's Scream brought her more and more A-list friendly roles (beginning with The Wedding Singer), most often of the Romantic Comedy variety. After her Netflix TV series Santa Clarita Diet was cancelled, she started hosting her own syndicated self-titled daytime variety talk show.
• Paul Bettany with Avengers: Age of Ultron. Bettany got his breakout role playing the title character in the 2000 crime film Gangster No. 1, which subsequently led to roles in more high profile movies: among those were A Knight's Tale, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander, Wimbledon, etc. Even The Da Vinci Code, which drew a great deal of controversy, was a big hit nevertheless. His input later on, however, declined with failures like Firewall, Inkheart, Legion, The Tourist, and Priest (2011). Bettany retained a steady income with his voice role as J.A.R.V.I.S. in the Marvel Cinematic Universe ^note films Iron Man, Iron Man 2, The Avengers (2012), and Iron Man 3, but his live-action career was described as dead before he was double cast as The Vision in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The role, which was his most prolific one in live-action after four years, renewed his audience recognition and garnered him tons of praise, with critics noting his performance was an unexpected but welcome surprise in the film, that somehow stood out within its ensemble cast. He returned as Vision in Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War, plus the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision alongside Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch. For his performance in WandaVision, Bettany got an Emmy Award nomination. Alongside Olsen and Kathryn Hahn, this made the three of them the first actors in an MCU property to get major awards acknowledgment. ^note  In early 2023, Angela Bassett became the first actor to get an Oscar nomination for starring in an MCU film with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
• Emily Blunt with Edge of Tomorrow and Into the Woods. After her breakout role in The Devil Wears Prada, Hollywood saw her as the next best thing. Unfortunately, her career, after making many errors in film choices, the comedy flop Gulliver's Travels (2010) becoming the most notorious (which her commitment to forced her to decline the part of Black Widow in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), appeared as if it would be perpetually restricted to small indies or supporting roles, such as in Looper. But then, 2014 had both Edge Of Tomorrow and Into the Woods catapult her back onto the A-list. Blunt now enjoys a better profile: with films like Sicario, A Quiet Place (plus its sequel), Mary Poppins Returns and Jungle Cruise. Blunt later starred in Oppenheimer alongside Robert Downey Jr. and Cillian Murphy, with her performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer's wife Kitty getting her an Oscar nomination (her first) for Best Supporting Actress.
• Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Brando was a major star in The '50s with classic hits such as A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront, and he had won an Oscar for Best Actor for the latter. By The '60s, however, Brando's failed movies outweighed his successes, partly due to his temper on set, and most movie studios considered him a risk. Flash forward to 1972, when Francis Ford Coppola was adapting Mario Puzo's novel onto the big screen, and he wanted the 47-year-old Brando to play the patriarch of a Mafia family. Paramount finally gave in after Coppola gave Brando a screen test, and The Godfather became an instant classic. Brando won a second Oscar for his performance as Don Vito Corleone, and high-profile roles in Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now and Superman: The Movie soon followed.
• Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men. After being deemed a rising star in The '80s following The Goonies, a number of barely released films and short-lived television series derailed him. Brolin spent several years in obscurity in films like Mimic and Hollow Man until turning it around in 2007 with supporting roles in three films: Grindhouse, In the Valley of Elah, and American Gangster, before playing the main protagonist in No Country for Old Men. The role got him much praise despite an Award Snub, although the next year he received more acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Milk. He hasn't looked back since then, with roles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thanos and in Deadpool 2 as Cable. He later joined the Dune universe by appearing as Gurney Halleck in Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two. Beyond franchise work, Brolin reunited with No Country for Old Men directors The Coen Brothers (mentioned down in Directors) with hailed performances in True Grit and Hail, Caesar! Additionally, he appeared in Sicario with Emily Blunt (see above) and returned for its sequel Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
• George Burns was a Vaudeville comedian who made his fame during The Golden Age Of Radio and Television with The Burns and Allen Show, and doing the rounds with Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, and others. He faded like many stars of the age before winning an Academy Award for The Sunshine Boys at age 79 and then starring in the smash Oh, God! series, remaining a hot property til his death at age 100.
• James Cagney in White Heat. Cagney first became famous in The '30s for playing "tough guys", most notably gangsters in several crime classics (like The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Roaring Twenties (1939), etc.). He broke from this typecasting with his Academy Award-winning role in the musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, which made good usage of his lesser-known vaudeville training in song and dance. However, he later formed his own production company which, despite his best efforts, failed to make a hit, even with films where he was the star. He thus returned to the gangster genre once more with White Heat, which was a big success and reinvigorated his career. He continued to have a lucky streak all the way until he retired in 1961, only coming out of retirement to star in the critically acclaimed Ragtime in 1981.
• Jim Carrey in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020). He seemed to fade from the limelight after 2014's Dumb and Dumber To, the sequel to Dumb and Dumber. Due to various legal issues surrounding that film against the crew responsible for making it, it marked the end of Carrey's reign as a box office heavyweight after he had been the biggest for a time. Carrey mainly appeared in smaller art-house releases and direct-to-video fare after that flop, becoming better known for controversial paintings critical of former president Donald Trump among several others. He also suffered from severe depression and coped with his ex-girlfriend's suicide. However, 2017 saw things begin to turn around: the Netflix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (about his experiences making Man on the Moon) was highly acclaimed, he had a modest success with the Showtime series Kidding (which ran two seasons), and he got the role of Dr. Robotnik in a film adaptation of the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series. When the film was released in 2020, it not only was the film the second video game-based live-action film to see critical and box office success after Pokémon Detective Pikachu, but it also was Carrey's first big-budget movie in 6 years. From there his well-reviewed debut novel (with Dana Vachon) Memoirs and Misinformation sold well, and guest performances as the presidential candidate and later president Joe Biden on Saturday Night Live garnered viral fame and some acclaim. Come 2022, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) managed the biggest opening weekend of his career (slightly outperforming Bruce Almighty). Meanwhile, his voiceover work on The Weeknd's Dawn FM was widely regarded as a highlight of the album. These successes also point to his now having a multigenerational fanbase.
• Jennifer Connelly in A Beautiful Mind. Connelly, a rising ingenue in The '80s, made her screen debut in Once Upon a Time in America directed by Sergio Leone, which got an initially bad reception, but was later Vindicated by History as one of the decade's finest movies. Parts in the giallo flick Phenomena, directed by Dario Argento, and the fantasy film Labyrinth, where Connelly starred opposite David Bowie (see his section under Music), kept furthering her status as an '80s icon. But later in the decade and continuing into The '90s, her career sank as she began getting typecast as Ms. Fanservice. She slowly rebuilt her esteem with lauded acting in Dark City and Requiem for a Dream, but it was her Academy Award-winning role as mathematician John Nash's wife Alicia in A Beautiful Mind that fully revitalized her stardom. Since then, her career, thanks to successes like Little Children, Blood Diamond, and Only the Brave (which, though not wholly profitable, were critically acclaimed), has continued thriving. She later landed her biggest hit yet starring opposite Tom Cruise as his love interest in Top Gun: Maverick, which became her highest-grossing film to date. She currently stars on the TV series Snowpiercer, based on the film of the same name by director Bong Joon-ho.
• Gary Cooper in High Noon. Cooper, one of only a handful of actors who managed to successfully transition from silent films to talkies, was one of the most popular leading men during the The Pre-Code Era as well as The Golden Age of Hollywood. His roles included, among others, Academy Award-nominated parts in movies like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Pride of the Yankees, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, while Sergeant York, in 1941, actually won him the award for Best Actor. However, his star power sank after For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1943 and persisted for nine years into the post-war era. None of his films during this time were particularly successful before he played the lead role in 1952's High Noon. That Western became Cooper's biggest hit in years and won him another Oscar for Best Actor. His following movies kept drawing in both good reviews and crowds before his death in 1961.
• Penélope Cruz reached immense heights in the 2000s after she got critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination for Best Actress for her performance in 2006's Volver (which was her third collaboration with acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, after starring in Live Flesh and All About My Mother in The '90s), before soon winning the award for Best Supporting Actress in Vicky Cristina Barcelona two years later. After her Oscar victory, however, she fell into a slump starting with the 2009 adaptation of the musical Nine. While she got another Oscar nomination for it, critical reception and box office profits were far inferior than Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Cruz's next films failed to light the world on fire (although Sex and the City 2 and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides made money despite mediocre reviews), with her career hitting its nadir when Zoolander 2 became a critical and financial disappointment. However, she soon rose from the ashes of that film's failure. After Murder on the Orient Express (2017) became her first box office success in years, Cruz appeared as Donatella Versace on American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Her performance on the FX series was critically acclaimed, and she received her first Emmy nomination for it. Cruz soon reunited with Almodóvar to star in his autobiographical Pain and Glory, before headlining his 2021 drama Parallel Mothers. The film premiered in Venice to a dazzling reception, with Cruz later winning the film festival's award for Best Actress. Her performance in it would later garner Cruz her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress since Volver.
• Jamie Lee Curtis found her career slowing down in the 2000s and announced that she was going into retirement after Christmas with the Kranks flopped. She returned properly to the public eye with a starring role in Scream Queens (2015), which got her a Golden Globe nomination. She also returned to the series that made her famous with Halloween (2018), which became the biggest financial success of the franchise and some critics called it her best work in years. She later joined the ensemble casts of Knives Out in 2019 and Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2022. In addition to getting massive critical praise and shockingly good box office returns, the latter got Curtis her first Academy Award nomination – and win – in her career.
• Willem Dafoe with Shadow of the Vampire and Spider-Man. Dafoe initially was one of the most notable up-and-coming actors of The '80s, having attained an Oscar nomination for his supporting performance as Sgt. Elias in Oliver Stone's Platoon and further critical praise for his role as Jesus in Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. His trajectory dipped down, however, when he starred opposite Madonna in the critically reviled erotic thriller Body of Evidence, which was deemed one of the worst films of The '90s and was nominated for six Golden Raspberry Awards (with Dafoe being nominated for Worst Actor). While Madonna was able to retain success with her music, Dafoe spent the next few years in relative anonymity. He kept popping up sporadically in supporting roles (most notably in Clear and Present Danger and The English Patient, with Dafoe rarely mentioned in those films' plaudits despite their success), before his portrayal of silent film star Max Schreck in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire netted him rave reviews and another Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Two years later, he portrayed the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, which became his first big financial success in years. Dafoe, since then, garnered two more Oscar nominations for The Florida Project and At Eternity's Gate, became a member of Wes Anderson's Production Posse, was in the $1B dollar-grossing Aquaman, and appeared in many other critically acclaimed films (Finding Nemo, The Fault in Our Stars, John Wick, The Lighthouse, Poor Things, etc.), which re-affirmed his place on Hollywood's A-List. He later reprised his role as the Green Goblin in the MCU-set Spider-Man: No Way Home, which eclipsed the first Spider-Man and Aquaman as his highest-grossing film ever. Despite its 2021 release amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, No Way Home scored over $1 billion dollars during its first two weeks in theaters. It became the first film since the start of the pandemic to do so and broke many other box office records in the process. Reviews were positive too, with Dafoe's performance considered a standout for the manic energy he brought to the role while also being game to do his own stunts despite being in his sixties.
• Bette Davis pulled this off twice. After transitioning from Broadway to the silver screen, she became one of Hollywood's most respected leading ladies of The '30s and The '40s. But after she had a failed lawsuit against her studio, she found herself doing smaller and smaller films. Then came her famous performance as Margo Channing in All About Eve and the following Oscar nomination. After the buzz from that had died down, she went radically against type as a psychotic White-Dwarf Starlet in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? - and that ensured that she was still working steadily until her death.
• Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York. Day-Lewis was considered one of the top stars of the early '90s, thanks to his Oscar-winning role in My Left Foot and hits like The Last of the Mohicans. Afterwards, due to his infamous selectiveness, he decided to retire from acting due to not liking the roles offered to him. Scorsese convinced him to return for One Last Job. His iconic performance as Bill the Butcher and his second collaboration with his favorite director^note Lewis always cited Taxi Driver as the film that inspired him to become an actor revived his passion for his craft, and Lewis went on to the second stretch of his career which lasted fifteen years between this and Phantom Thread (which led to his second retirement). During this period, he won two more Best Actor Oscars for There Will Be Blood and Lincoln, establishing himself as the best film actor of his generation and putting him in the pantheon with Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.
• Johnny Depp arguably underwent this twice, first in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. He started off as Freddy's first victim and later gained notice on 21 Jump Street before breaking through in Edward Scissorhands. After that, his resume is a bit spotty, mixing dubious films (like Don Juan De Marco and Nick of Time) and some hidden gems (Donnie Brasco, Ed Wood and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) along with a lone blockbuster (Sleepy Hollow... like Edward, with Tim Burton). Then he turns up in Pirates, earns an Oscar nomination, signs on for the sequels and renews his partnership with Burton to fantastic results in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Alice in Wonderland. However, although it was a huge hit at the box office, Alice in Wonderland was heavily criticized with many arguing that Depp had become typecast as an eccentric loner. Depp's next films, Transcendence, The Rum Diary, The Tourist and Mortdecai were outright bombs, and culminated in the massive flop The Lone Ranger. Depp's performance in Black Mass was widely hailed as a return to form and seemed to have restored his critical respectability, but his next film after that, Alice Through the Looking Glass, irreparably nuked that respectability by being another colossal flop, not helped by his simultaneous domestic violence scandal. His replacement casting of Mads Mikkelsen in the sequel to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald didn't help, although he still maintains strong fan support and is rumored to be signing up for smaller-scale indie roles in the new decade.
• Laura Dern was a critical darling in the early '90s, appearing in such acclaimed films as Blue Velvet, Mask, Wild at Heart and Rambling Rose - as well as her prominent role in Jurassic Park (1993). She faced some backlash in her career when she starred in Ellen's infamous "The Puppy Episode" and claims that she didn't work for a full year afterwards because of her role (though she claims she'd still do it all over again). Dern maintained a low profile in the 2000s but slowly returned to prominence in The New '10s. It started with an appearance in the Academy Award-nominated The Master and aided by the Sleeper Hit The Fault in Our Stars. She got an Academy Award nomination for Wild, and later was cast the star-studded miniseries Big Little Lies as well as The Last Jedi. She finally won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Marriage Story in 2019, and returned in the summer of 2022 to the Jurassic Park series with Jurassic World Dominion.
• Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious. Diesel had started the Turn of the Millennium as an Action Hero with films like The Fast and the Furious (2001), XXX, and Pitch Black before destroying his credibility with action duds like The Chronicles of Riddick and Babylon A.D. and the critically ravaged family film The Pacifier. An attempt to establish dramatic credibility in Find Me Guilty won critical plaudits but no attention from moviegoers. Diesel reestablished his career by returning to the series that made him famous, as well as returning to Riddick. Furthermore, his status as One of Us has also produced two highly acclaimed Riddick games, Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena. He also gained near universal adoration for voicing Groot in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
• Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. One of the biggest examples of this in modern Hollywood. He played a few roles in his Brat Pack years before receiving high critical praise in the biopic Chaplin as Charlie Chaplin, and the sky was the limit. Then his well-documented substance abuse problems eventually landed him in state prison in California as well as being in and out of rehab. He landed a recurring role on Ally McBeal (which he got fired from due to his last arrest) and would surface in a big-budget A-list film like U.S. Marshals with Tommy Lee Jones or Gothika with Halle Berry, but never as the first-billed star. He would invariably be seen on the cover of some tabloid and being carted back to rehab shortly thereafter. Heck, his addiction and arrests were referenced on shows such as King of the Hill and The Simpsons. Downey Jr. rehearsed a comeback with critically praised roles in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and A Scanner Darkly. Then Iron Man hit, his next film (Tropic Thunder) netted him an Oscar nomination, Sherlock Holmes (2009) won him a Golden Globe, and Iron Man 2 was a smash hit at the box office. He also got top billing in the All-Star Cast of The Avengers, once again reprising what's now recognized as his signature role, Tony Stark/Iron Man, a character he has gone on to portray throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He became so well known for his role as Iron Man that the public eventually forgot about his arrests in The '90s, and he was even pardoned by the state of California in 2015. As of now, he's considered one of the highest-paid male actors of all time alongside Tom Cruise and Samuel L. Jackson (whom he has worked with in multiple MCU films.) While his first post-MCU project, Dolittle, was an infamous flop (with Downey getting a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for it), his next film, Oppenheimer, quickly saved his career when it became a huge hit. For his role as Lewis Strauss, Downey won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
• Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia. Dunst was an acclaimed child actress who managed to successfully negotiate her transition to adult roles, averting the Former Child Star trope in style with roles in The Virgin Suicides, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the Spider-Man Trilogy films, among others. She was considered one of Hollywood's most promising young actresses before depression and rumored substance abuse led her to check herself into rehab at the age of 25, and the rest of Hollywood to write her off as yet another party girl burnout. Three years later, she won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 for her turn as a depressed young bride-to-be in Melancholia. It's a pretty spectacular way to make a career comeback, as these things go. Even director Lars von Trier's inappropriate Nazi joke at Cannes wasn't enough to kill Dunst's momentum. Dunst kept that lucky streak active throughout The New '10s, branching out into television with her role in Fargo (for which she received her first Emmy nomination) and turning in a career-best performance in The Power of the Dog (for which she received her first Oscar nomination).
• Ralph Fiennes shifted from Shakespearean theatre to a film career in The '90s with Academy Award-nominated roles in Schindler's List and The English Patient, and he seemed to be on the way to being a star. However, the massive critical and financial failure of The Avengers (1998) killed his career for several years. Although Fiennes kept working sporadically in minor parts, it was only in 2005 that he truly had a resurgence with six releases that year. The most successful of those films were The Constant Gardener and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, with Fiennes playing Lord Voldemort in the latter and returning for later films that rank as some of his career's biggest hits. He later on joined the James Bond series starting with Skyfall as Gareth Mallory/M, returning for later entries Spectre and No Time to Die. Outside that and the Harry Potter franchise, Fiennes affirmed his repute as an actor when films like In Bruges, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Hail, Caesar!, and The Menu were critically acclaimed, especially for his performances. Plus, animated work like Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Kubo and the Two Strings, and The LEGO Batman Movie, made him a popular Celebrity Voice Actor.
• Jodie Foster in The Accused. After becoming a child star in The '70s, she was left shaken in 1981 by one of the most infamous Loony Fan moments in history, which caused her to go off to college and only do a handful of films. Her career dried up as a result, and by the late '80s Foster was desperate to get a role in a mainstream film, hence why she had no reservations about this film's graphic content, the reason why Kim Basinger, Demi Moore, Jennifer Beals, Meg Tilly, Rosanna Arquette, and Kristin Davis all turned it down. Even then, she almost wasn't cast, partly because they felt she didn't have enough sex appeal (in a film about a rape victim, mind) or box office clout. It was only after Kelly McGillis, at the height of her stardom from Witness and Top Gun, came on board to play District Attorney Kathryn Murphy that they let Foster play the lead role of Sarah Tobias. The subsequent Oscar win helped get her career back on track, and after another win three years later for The Silence of the Lambs, she was on her way to becoming Hollywood royalty.
• James Fox with A Passage to India. He was a prominent star of the British New Wave in The '60s with prominent roles in films like The Servant, King Rat, and Performance, while becoming recognizable among American audiences for his role in Thoroughly Modern Millie. However, Fox became heavily involved in drug culture, which (along with his father's death) precipitated a physical and mental breakdown. Fox left the film industry in 1970, became a born-again Christian, and disavowed his earlier career. In 1984, Fox appeared in the David Lean epic A Passage to India and experienced a major comeback, both as a leading man and as a popular character actor, appearing in films as varied as Patriot Games, The Remains of the Day, Sexy Beast, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sherlock Holmes (2009).
• Jamie Foxx in Django Unchained. Foxx first became prominent in The '90s as a cast member on the sketch comedy series In Living Color! Its success resulted in Foxx receiving his own sitcom, which was a big enough hit on television to last up to five seasons on The WB. He pivoted towards drama after The Jamie Foxx Show concluded its run: first with supporting roles in Any Given Sunday and Ali before 2004 certified his star power with two Academy Award-nominated performances in Collateral and Ray, soon winning the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Ray Charles in the latter. However, his career trajectory plummeted after his Oscar victory: first with his lead role in the notorious disaster Stealth opposite Josh Lucas and Jessica Biel, with most of his subsequent films (Jarhead, Miami Vice, The Kingdom, The Soloist, Law Abiding Citizen, Valentine's Day, and Due Date) failing commercially and/or critically. Luckily, Quentin Tarantino cast Foxx as the title protagonist of Django Unchained after his original choice Will Smith declined the role. The film became a commercial and a critical hit during the 2012 Christmas season, restoring Foxx's position on the A-list. Foxx's renewed success increased when he portrayed the Spider-Man villain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (while it got mixed reviews and became the lowest-grossing Spider-Man movie so far, it was still profitable), and in the MCU-set Spider-Man: No Way Home (which surpassed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in terms of both profit and reviews, being widely acclaimed while making almost $2 billion at the box office worldwide). He also starred in several hits between his Spider-Man films – such as Baby Driver, Just Mercy, and Soul – while returning to television via hosting the game show Beat Shazam.
• Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby. Gaining momentum in the late 1980s to early-mid 1990s, mostly for his role as a pimp in 1987's Street Smart, he grew to become a household name for African-American cinema and was known for his award-winning performances in Glory, Driving Miss Daisy, The Shawshank Redemption, and Se7en, until he was derailed with the flops of Moll Flanders and Chain Reaction. For the next several years, he would only play roles as narrators and other supporting roles until a shed of light appeared, when he was praised for his performance as God in Bruce Almighty. When he won an Academy Award for his role as a former boxer in Million Dollar Baby, he once again returned to A-list status and it seems he still isn't looking back.
• Richard Gere with Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman. He first gained notice in 1978 as a supporting actor before winning the lead role in Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, which made him a star overnight. Gere soon became a recognizable leading man in the early '80s, with American Gigolo and An Officer and a Gentleman being his biggest successes. Unfortunately, his career was then battered badly by the consecutive failures of The Cotton Club and King David. The Cotton Club was notorious for being an extremely Troubled Production and eventual Box Office Bomb, which overshadowed its muted acclaim (see Francis Ford Coppola's section on that page for more details). King David, on the other hand, flopped badly, with critics, in particular, noting how Gere was woefully miscast in the title role. The latter film's critical and financial failure led to Gere being passed over for many sought after roles for the next few years until 1990, when the consecutive successes of Internal Affairs and Pretty Woman put him back on the A-list. Gere later on garnered controversy for his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government, regarding its treatment of the people of Tibet. While his career slightly fizzled out amidst Hollywood formulating partnerships with Chinese production companies in the following decades, Gere, nevertheless, keeps getting significant roles in major Hollywood films like Primal Fear, Chicago, and Arbitrage.
• Hugh Grant is a two-folded self-inflected example - after gradually losing his boyhood looks and starhood status in the mid-naughties, he retired from acting to pursue more significant parts behind the camera as a producer and outspoken political activist. This worked well for him until Florence Foster Jenkins was offered to him, in part because the opportunity to work opposite Meryl Streep was just too good to pass up. The film was a flop, but the acting bug bit him hard and he began Playing Against Type in supporting roles, such as Paddington 2 (as a Large Ham actor).
• Jackie Earle Haley in Little Children and Watchmen. Known for his early role in The Bad News Bears, Haley's movie career was sidelined by a reputation as a Former Child Star. He all but retired from acting in 1993 and was forced to take menial work over the years (including a stint as a limo driver) until he started directing TV commercials in Texas. He was remembered by fellow actor Sean Penn (they co-starred in a play in the early 1980s), who got him a role in the remake of All the King's Men. It was followed by Little Children, which was critically acclaimed and gave Haley an Oscar nomination. And then Haley virtually became a fan icon overnight after landing the role of Rorschach in Zack Snyder's Watchmen in 2009, and he has since become the go-to actor for portraying disturbing anti-heroes and villains. While A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) received negative reviews, Haley's portrayal of Freddy Krueger was well received. He has since gone back to supporting roles (such as Dark Shadows, Lincoln, the 2014 remake of RoboCop), and later played a corrupt sleazebag villain with a tragic backstory in the TV adaptation of Preacher.
• Tom Hardy in The Dark Knight Rises. He fell into a deep depression after Star Trek: Nemesis crashed and burned at the box office, which he tried coping with alcohol and cocaine. Hardy eventually triumphed over his depression and addictions, remaining clean ever since. He then chose to pull an extreme form of reinvention when he bulked up to play an unrepentant, physically-imposing gangster in Bronson, which won him acclaim. He later played a small but important supporting role in Inception as suave con artist Eames, which brought him on the radar of director Christopher Nolan. Nolan decided to cast Hardy as the main antagonist Bane in the final film of his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises. Amidst the widely positive critical and audience reception the film received, Hardy's performance was hailed as a worthy successor to Heath Ledger's Joker from the previous film. He has also portrayed the titular Anti-Hero protagonists of Mad Max: Fury Road and Venom (a role he would later reprise in its sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage), while also reuniting with Nolan a third time for Dunkirk. His Oscar nomination for The Revenant has certainly boosted his stature too.
• Woody Harrelson, although pretty much always cast as a sidekick or character actor, had a solid run on Cheers for nearly a decade. During and after its run he turned in a steady string of solid performances in fairly successful films (L.A. Story, Doc Hollywood, White Men Can't Jump, Indecent Proposal, Natural Born Killers), and even earned several award nominations (among them an Academy Award) for his performance as "Hustler" magnate Larry Flynt in The People vs. Larry Flynt. He sort of vanished after that, turning up in bit parts in major films or as a guest star on a television series (including a memorable stint on Will & Grace). However, his career began to pick up in the mid-2000s; first, he obtained a minor but noteworthy role in No Country for Old Men, which revived the careers of Josh Brolin (see above) and the Coen brothers (see below in Directors). In 2009, he turned a memorable performance in Zombieland as gun-toting, Twinkie-seeking redneck Tallahassee; that same year, he also got critical acclaim and another Academy Award nomination for his supporting performance in The Messenger (2009). Harrelson was eventually cast as Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games, and stayed for all three sequels. These hits put Harrelson back on the A-List, often in a first- or second-billed role. He later starred alongside Julianne Moore in Game Change and alongside old friend Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, and received Emmy Award nominations for his work in both. Later on, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri netted Harrelson a third Academy Award nomination.
• Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. After winning an Oscar for 1933's Morning Glory and enjoying a box-office hit playing Jo March in that year's adaptation of Little Women, she seemed to be a star in the making. Unfortunately, between a string of box-office disappointments and her own controversial public image (known for being prickly and tomboyish in a time when it was not considered acceptable for women to act like that), her track record proved to be subsequently shoddy, aside from another Oscar nomination for Alice Adams (1935). 1938's Bringing Up Baby, despite positive reviews and later acclaim as one of her best films, was a Box Office Bomb that got Hepburn labeled "box office poison" by theater owners and "Katharine of Arrogance" by the tabloids, and she subsequently bought out her studio contract. She turned to Broadway and starred in a successful play called The Philadelphia Story, playing a stuck-up socialite who, in the opening scene, gets knocked over by Cary Grant and falls on her ass, and bought the film rights to the play so she could star in the film. A great risk that paid off, as The Philadelphia Story resurrected Hepburn's career overnight, and a Hollywood legend was born.
• Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Although it seems impossible looking back at his career over the past twenty years, there was a time when Hopper was anathema to studios and audiences. After a meteoric rise to the top in The '50s with appearances in Rebel Without a Cause and Giant as well later appearing alongside John Wayne in The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit, and after his directorial debut Easy Rider in 1969, Hopper was on top of the world. However, he became addicted to drugs and alcohol and had a dissolving marriage to boot. In 1971, Hopper released his second film as a director, The Last Movie, which was a complete flop with audiences and critics. Hopper would disappear into obscurity for years afterwards by hiding out in New Mexico and appearing in a number of low-budget films in The '70s, often as a "tormented maniac", an archetype that landed him a role in 1979's Apocalypse Now. After a failed "suicide" attempt in the early '80s (it ended up being a stunt), though, he went into rehab and subsequently started a run of critically-acclaimed performances, culminating in 1986 with his career-defining role as Frank Booth in David Lynch's Blue Velvet and an Oscar-nominated one in Hoosiers.
• Michael B. Jordan in Creed. Jordan was already doing quite well for himself until hitting the brick wall that was Fantastic Four (2015). Unlike his cast mates, Jordan suddenly hit his revival so soon after with Creed. He played the illegitimate son of the late Apollo Creed in this Rocky spin-off/follow-up, trained to follow in his footsteps by his father's former rival Rocky Balboa. This resurgence let him take up the role of the villain Erik Killmonger in Black Panther (2018), which redeemed him from his earlier comic book failure. He reprised his role as Adonis Creed in the sequels Creed II and Creed III, with the latter also marking his directorial debut.
• Michael Keaton in Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Known for comedic roles in The '80s, Keaton first hit it big playing the title role in Tim Burton's Batman (1989). However, his career fell into a slump once he left after the sequel and was finally destroyed by Jack Frost (1998). The 2000s saw Keaton pursuing a number of secondary roles in lesser films, though he still managed to do some good voice work for Pixar in Cars and Toy Story 3. Birdman, in which Keaton plays a washed-up actor known for a superhero role twenty years ago, earned him a Golden Globe win and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, setting him on the path to becoming a leading man once more. His following films, Spotlight and The Founder, also opened to excellent reviews (with Spotlight winning the 2015 Academy Award for Best Picture), before starring as the Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming. His performance was hailed by fans and critics as one of the best villain performances in not just the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but superhero movies in general. He then joined the ensemble cast of The Trial of the Chicago 7 with Sacha Baron Cohen (see above), and played the lead in the Hulu miniseries Dopesick. Both projects were praised, with Dopesick winning him an Emmy Award in 2022. He later finally donned the Batman cowl again, this time in the DC Extended Universe film The Flash (2023). Despite the film's box office underperformance and mixed reviews, Keaton's portrayal of the Dark Knight was widely praised once more and seen as one of its saving graces.
• Harvey Keitel was a rising star from The '60s until The '70s, with his performances in four early films by Martin Scorsese gaining him particularly favorable attention. He was then cast as Capt. Benjamin Willard in Apocalypse Now — and was promptly sacked after only one week of filming to be replaced by Martin Sheen. Though keeping busy via minor roles in several often negatively received films during The '80s, it wasn't until 1991 when Keitel regained some esteem with supporting roles in popular Oscar contenders Thelma & Louise plus Bugsy (with the latter getting him a Best Supporting Actor nomination). The next year, Quentin Tarantino cast Keitel as Mr. White in Reservoir Dogs whereas Abel Ferrara cast him as the eponymous Bad Lieutenant. These roles helped reacquaint audiences with his original image as a hard-boiled street hood while garnering him more attention than he got in years. He still acts just as much since then, but is more likely to be playing a key role (or, as in Pulp Fiction, getting a notable cameo).
• Deborah Kerr became a star in her native UK with notable parts in Major Barbara, Love on the Dole and Black Narcissus - the latter of which got the attention of Hollywood. Although she got her first Oscar nomination with Edward, My Son, she soon found herself typecast as an English Rose in Costume Dramas - in what she mockingly called "poker up the arse parts". The low point for her was Young Bess, where she lost out on the lead role and got stuck with the insignificant role of Catherine Parr - which led to her nearly leaving Hollywood altogether. But her next big project was a war drama called From Here to Eternity - which saw her going against type as a depressed adulteress. It broke her out of typecasting, got her another Oscar nomination and secured her status in Hollywood until she retired in the late 60s.
• Shah Rukh Khan in Pathaan. One of Bollywood's biggest superstars in the '90s and '00s, to the point that he was widely known by simply his initials, "SRK", his career went on the skids in the 2010s, largely for political and cultural reasons. Specifically, he was one of the most high-profile Muslim celebrities in India in 2014 when the Hindu nationalist politician Narendra Modi became Prime Minister of India, and he became an outspoken opponent of Modi's anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies. Modi's supporters turned against Khan and started boycotting his films, leading to declining box-office receipts that culminated in him taking a four-year hiatus from acting after the 2018 failure of Zero, and in 2021 his son Aryan Khan was targeted in a drug raid that many critics of the Modi government believed was politically motivated. Pathaan in 2023 was billed as his comeback, but given the controversies surrounding him as well as some of the content of the film itself, many of his critics, including politicians from Modi's party, called for another boycott. Instead, it broke box office records and became a cultural sensation, demonstrating that Khan was still one of India's biggest stars. After its opening weekend, he was quoted as saying "the last four days have made me forget the struggles of the past four years."
• Nicole Kidman first became famous in the '90s through a variety of performances in acclaimed films, the most notable being 1999's Eyes Wide Shut (where she co-starred opposite her then-husband Tom Cruise). Further successes came with Moulin Rouge! and The Others in 2001, which culminated with a Best Actress Oscar win for her role in 2002's The Hours. Starting around 2004, however, she began falling into a slump with flops like Bewitched, The Golden Compass, Australia, and Just Go with It. Her sole saving grace during this time was the 2010 adaptation of the play Rabbit Hole, which was an Acclaimed Flop that still earned her another Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Kidman's lowest point came in 2014 with Grace of Monaco, a film with a rather Troubled Production that was critically derided (with a glaring 9% on Rotten Tomatoes) and had its theatrical release revoked in the U.S. (ultimately being shunted to a debut on Lifetime). After that debacle, however, Kidman's luck began to turn for the better. First, she appeared as the main antagonist in the well-received children's film Paddington (2014). Her next notable role was in 2016's Lion, which was a financial Sleeper Hit that received multiple Oscar nominations (including another acting nomination for Kidman, this time in the Best Supporting Actress category). She branched out into television with HBO's Big Little Lies the following year, for which she won Primetime Emmy Awards for acting in and producing the miniseries. She then had three theatrical releases in 2018: Destroyer, Boy Erased, and most notably, the superhero film Aquaman as the titular character's mother, which became her biggest financial success. In 2021, she portrayed Lucille Ball in the Aaron Sorkin drama Being the Ricardos. While the film itself got mixed reviews, Kidman earned raves (and a Golden Globe) for her work. Her performance has once more put her into the contest for Oscar glory and she did get nominated for Best Actress, alongside Javier Bardem (see above) portraying Ball's husband Desi Arnaz (for which he got an Oscar nomination too).
• John Krasinski in A Quiet Place. He established himself in the mid-2000s with his role as Jim Halpert in The Office (US), and the success of that sitcom convinced studios to push him as a leading man in film comedy. That swiftly ended when he headlined the critically mauled License to Wed in 2007, which also hurt the rising film career of Mandy Moore (see Live-Action TV). Although he remained on The Office all the way until its run ended in 2013, Krasinski's film career was limited to supporting roles for the next ten years. Then he directed and headlined A Quiet Place (co-starring opposite his wife Emily Blunt, mentioned above), which was praised as one of the scariest horror films of 2018. Krasinski received much critical acclaim for his performance while emerging as a promising filmmaker. The film's financial success ensured a sequel was greenlit with Krasinski returning as a director. He also returned to television with Jack Ryan that same year, which was a huge hit on the Amazon streaming service Prime Video.
• Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. He was a hot young talent in The '90s, starring in such acclaimed films as Dazed and Confused, A Time to Kill, Amistad, etc. However, his perpetual shirtlessness, plus poor choice of film roles, mostly in middling romantic comedies, made him a walking punchline over the course of the 2000s, with critics lamenting his squandered potential as a serious actor. Then he got critical acclaim in 2011 for his roles in The Lincoln Lawyer and Killer Joe, and went on to astonish critics everywhere over the next few years with his turns in Mud, The Wolf of Wall Street, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, the TV series True Detective, and Dallas Buyers Club, which won him an Oscar in 2014. McConaughey's seeming overnight turnaround from rom-com pretty boy to one of the brightest stars in Hollywood was dubbed "The McConaissance", but it was unfortunately negated with a downslide post-2014. Most of his live-action films after that year haven't been successful, with his one major hit being The Gentlemen (which was also a mild success for its director Guy Ritchie; see below). Luckily, he's cultivated a good career as a Celebrity Voice Actor with his work in Kubo and the Two Strings (which opened to critical acclaim, but flopped); Sing, which got decent reviews and did fine at the box office, becoming his biggest hit domestically; and Agent Elvis, with McConaughey voicing the title character.
• Eddie Murphy went through this twice. Murphy was one of the biggest comedy stars of The '80s, but as time went on, films like The Golden Child and Beverly Hills Cop II tainted his reputation with critics. In the early '90s, they disappointed financially too (the vanity project Harlem Nights, Vampire in Brooklyn, etc.). He might have gone down as something of a relic of the '80s if not for his multiple-role performance in The Nutty Professor, which was a huge hit. Since then, the quality and financial success of his work has been wildly hit and miss, ranging from Bowfinger to The Adventures of Pluto Nash. He has a Rated G for Gangsta reputation now (due to doing many family films, most famously the Shrek franchise), but he was still an A-lister for much of the 2000s, even receiving an Oscar nomination for Dreamgirls. Unfortunately, in the late 2000s/early 2010s another string of financial and/or critical flops (Meet Dave, Norbit, A Thousand Words), combined with the end of the Shrek franchise, put him back on the scrap heap, outnumbering hits like Tower Heist. But then Murphy hit Netflix starring as Rudy Ray Moore in the biopic Dolemite Is My Name, which was acclaimed as a long-awaited return to the R-rated comedy that made him a star in the 80s as well as the prestige material that he was previously praised for in Dreamgirls. Earning a Golden Globe nomination, he followed this up with a well received return to Saturday Night Live that boosted the show's ratings to their highest in a decade.
• Leslie Nielsen in Airplane!. Nielsen had a long career in Hollywood, playing mostly bit parts in films, TV guest shots, with the occasional leading role in a low-budget project. Before 1980, he was probably best remembered for his leading role in Forbidden Planet. After 1980, he was best known as Dr. Rumack in Airplane!, where his deadpan performance made him one of the funniest things in the film. He would go on to play similar roles in an assortment of other, mostly similar comedies, notably Frank Drebin in Police Squad! and The Naked Gun film trilogy as well the lead roles in Spy Hard and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
• Gary Oldman was known throughout the '80s and '90s for films such as Sid & Nancy, The Fifth Element and Leon: The Professional, but by the early 2000s roles were getting scarcer. He took the role of Sirius Black in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban because he desperately needed the work, not having done a film in over a year, but this turned out for the best because he got to stay with the series for multiple films. He was sought out later by Christopher Nolan to play Commissioner Gordon in Batman Begins, resulting in him also returning for its sequels. The two franchises combined led to his name being known amongst a new generation of fans which thrust him back into the limelight. Other successes he was in during this period were Kung Fu Panda 2 and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, while he got his first Oscar nomination in his decades-long career playing British intelligence operative George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He finally got recognized by award committees in 2017 for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour and swept that year's awards season, capped with an Oscar win for Best Actor. He garnered more plaudits and another Oscar nomination for portraying Herman J. Mankiewicz in the 2020 biopic Mank, directed by David Fincher. In 2022, he starred in the Apple TV+ espionage drama Slow Horses. The show marked the first time he had a lead role in a television series after guest spots in the past, with his performance getting hailed once more.
• Al Pacino has undergone several Career Resurrections throughout the years. After first making it big in The '70s with several of that decade's best films, his trajectory started dipping downward in the following decade. Cruising, released in 1980, was reviled by critics and condemned by the LGBT community for its homophobic undertones, while Scarface, despite being later reappraised as one of Pacino's best films, was poorly received and criticized for its graphic content upon its initial release. The utter disappointment of Revolution in 1985 led Pacino to take a hiatus from acting till 1989, when he appeared in a little film called Sea of Love. The film was a minor success, spurring Pacino to take roles in bigger films, culminating in 1992 with the consecutive successes of Glengarry Glen Ross and Scent of a Woman, the latter for which he won a long-overdue Oscar for Best Actor. Pacino had the pick of his roles for the rest of The '90s with a plentiful output of box office hits (The Devil's Advocate, Any Given Sunday), critical darlings (Carlito's Way, The Insider) or films that were both (Heat, Donnie Brasco). However, he would fall into yet another slump in the following decade, first by taking a supporting role opposite Ben Affleck in the aforementioned Gigli. He had a brief respite with his Emmy-winning performance in the HBO miniseries Angels in America and a supporting role as the villain in Ocean's Thirteen. His next lead film roles, unfortunately, were in 88 Minutes and Righteous Kill, which were eviscerated by critics, ignored by audiences, and garnered Pacino Razzie nominations for Worst Actor in 2008. Pacino would spend the next ten years afterwards slumming it in schlock (the most notorious of which, Jack and Jill, garnered him a Razzie win for Worst Supporting Actor), with his sole saving grace being the HBO television film You Don't Know Jack: for which he won another Emmy. In 2019, however, he appeared in two of the year's best films, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. Pacino's performance as Jimmy Hoffa in Scorsese's film has been deemed his best work in years, and it even garnered him his first Oscar nomination since his win for Scent of a Woman. He later appeared as Aldo Gucci in Ridley Scott's crime drama House of Gucci, which was released in November 2021.
• Deepika Padukone in Cocktail. Having made her Bollywood debut as the heroine in the hugely-successful 2007 film Om Shanti Om, the momentum of her career faltered when she starred in several lacklustre films in the late-00's and early-10's such as Chandni Chowk to China and Housefull, which were financial and critical failures, respectively. Apart from an appearance as a Ms. Fanservice in the 2009 film Billu, and her performance alongside Saif Ali Khan in Love Aaj Kal, she had no other notable successes, and was slowly beginning to be seen as a One-Hit Wonder. In 2012, however, Padukone's career took a turn for the better when she starred in Cocktail, a romantic comedy where her role as a party girl garnered her notable praise for her acting talents. This was subsequently followed by other hit films in the following year such as Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Chennai Express, and Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, which further cemented her status as one of the most successful leading actresses in all of Bollywood, and as one of the most popular personalities in all of India itself.
• Robert Pattinson in The Batman (2022). The Twilight Saga, despite making him a Teen Idol, also made him into a target of ridicule, with his detractors, particularly those who never liked Twilight to begin with, believing that he couldn't act. The series ending in 2012 seemed to kill his career prospects... at least until he, his meal ticket paid for by those teen vampire movies, realized that he was free to do whatever the hell he wanted and proceeded to go indie. He recovered when Good Time, The Lost City of Z, and The Lighthouse were critically acclaimed, particularly for his performances, surprising critics who wrote him off before. Director Matt Reeves later cast him as the title role in The Batman, a casting decision that met the typical reaction at first but which died down considerably once his defenders pointed out his entire post-Twilight career. Not only was this film critically acclaimed as well, it also became Pattinson's largest box office success ever since his Twilight days. This is no mean feat, given its release just as the COVID-19 Pandemic was easing up.
• Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking. Penn became popular in The '80s, with performances in wildly different films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Falcon and the Snowman. However, his career soon took a severe beating after he starred opposite his then-wife Madonna in the notorious disaster Shanghai Surprise. Her career remained intact with her music, but his career stalled for many years. Though Penn made several attempts to rev up his career again, it was unsteady for some time with a potential hit followed by a poor dud. His career finally got back on track after Dead Man Walking became both a financial and critical darling while he got a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance as an inmate on death row. He later won two Oscars in that category for Mystic River and Milk, while also getting two more nominations for Sweet and Lowdown plus i am sam.
• Robert Redford in All Is Lost. From The '60s to The '90s, Redford was one of the biggest stars in the world. He had roles in numerous hits (including his Oscar-nominated one in The Sting), and additionally pivoted towards directing with successful results like Ordinary People (which won Redford an Oscar for Best Director). But in the Turn of the Millennium, his career was killed off by several failures and seemed unlikely to recover. Then All Is Lost, where Redford played the sole role as a sailor stranded out at sea, premiered to critical acclaim at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, with Redford’s performance cited as one of his finest in years for how he was able to carry the film all on his own with minimal dialogue. Afterwards, he started receiving more prolific work. A Walk in the Woods, which saw Redford star alongside Nick Nolte, was a mild box office success despite mixed reviews, while Truth (2015) – where Redford played news correspondent Dan Rather – and The Old Man & the Gun opened to critical acclaim. Additionally, he reunited with Jane Fonda (with whom he previously made three films together) for the also well-received Our Souls at Night. Redford also branched out into more family-friendly territory with Pete's Dragon (2016), plus he appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe films Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers: Endgame.
• Keanu Reeves in John Wick. During The '90s and early '00s, Reeves made the successful transition from comedy to action, playing the lead roles in Speed and The Matrix series. However, a rising criticism was his lack of acting range, which got worse when the mid-late '00s saw him ruthlessly typecasted as The Stoic Action Hero, and his acting became the butt of many jokes by critics. His role as the Big Bad in Man of Tai Chi, which also served as his directorial debut, showed promise for him to finally break free of this typecasting, but he suffered a Star-Derailing Role in 47 Ronin shortly after. Initially expected to do poorly, the low-budget revenge thriller John Wick was instead a critically acclaimed, commercially successful Sleeper Hit, with critics and fans alike praising Reeves's performance as the titular hitman and for performing the action scenes himself. The film was successful enough to spawn a franchise, and the summer of 2019 was dubbed the "Keanussance", launched by the release of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (which quickly became the biggest hit of the franchise, immediately greenlighting a fourth installment upon its release), followed by turns in Always Be My Maybe (Adam Westing as himself) and Toy Story 4 (as the voice of Canadian action figure Duke Caboom), as well as the announcement of him portraying a character in the anticipated video game Cyberpunk 2077 at that year's E3.
• Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. Roberts looked like a rising star with critically acclaimed roles in Mystic Pizza, Steel Magnolias, and her Star-Making Role Pretty Woman. Sleeping with the Enemy was panned but did very well at the box office. However, her career hit turbulence when Dying Young and Hook were both trashed by critics, not helped by a Creator Breakdown as her relationship with Kiefer Sutherland fell apart – even fleeing the set of Hook to hide out in Ireland briefly. She took a two-year hiatus from acting, and when she returned, it was to flops like I Love Trouble, Michael Collins, and Mary Reilly. However, My Best Friend's Wedding heralded a return to form as her subsequent films did good business, thus ending her up as the highest paid actress of The '90s. An Oscar win later came for Erin Brockovich.
• Saoirse Ronan with Brooklyn. She first became famous as a child for her supporting role in 2007's Atonement, which netted her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress at just thirteen years old. She subsequently received a bigger push from Hollywood and starred in many films, but none of them garnered the same levels of acclaim as Atonement had. After the critical and financial disasters of The Host (2008) and Lost River, many feared Ronan would fade into obscurity as a Former Child Star and disappear from acting altogether. She soon dispelled that notion and turned things around for the better, first by making a small but important appearance in Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Then in 2015, she starred in Brooklyn, which landed her another Oscar nomination, this time in the leading category. She followed this up with a string of critical successes, and even garnered two more Oscar nominations for Best Actress in Lady Bird and Little Women.
• Mark Ruffalo with The Avengers. He was never derailed, but remained forever on the B-list in the 2000s. There even used to be a trope called "Mark Ruffalo Syndrome" that was used to describe an actor who is eternally stuck in secondary roles. Becoming part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, however, has made him more famous than he ever was, and led to him taking leading roles in films like Begin Again, while garnering critical acclaim for The Normal Heart. He later won an Emmy Award for I Know This Much Is True, and has garnered four Academy Award nominations (for The Kids Are All Right, Foxcatcher, Spotlight, and Poor Things).
• Adam Sandler by signing to Netflix. Sandler's career was reeling in the early 2010s after the flops of Jack and Jill and That's My Boy, with the final straw seemingly coming in 2015 with Pixels. When, after that film's failure, he signed a distribution deal with Netflix to have his forthcoming live-action comedies released exclusively on the streaming service, many saw it as a symbol of how far his star had fallen; at the time, streaming exclusives were still seen as the equivalent of the Direct to Video market. Little did anybody know that Sandler would become one of Netflix's breakout stars as the streaming service invested in original films in a major way. The tipping point came in 2019 with Murder Mystery, a film that, had everybody who streamed it seen it in a theater, would've enjoyed a $120 million opening weekend, as well as a well-received guest hosting gig on his old Saturday Night Live stomping grounds that earned him an Emmy nomination for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy Series as well as being selected as the show's submission for Outstanding Variety Sketch Series (ultimately winning). He followed this up with the lead role in Uncut Gems, which earned him rave reviews for what many consider the best performance of his career. The further success of films such as Hubie Halloween and Hustle (2022) cemented his place back on the A-List.
• Peter Sellers in The Return of the Pink Panther. Already huge in his native England, he achieved international megastar status over 1963-64 with the first Pink Panther films and his work with Stanley Kubrick. Still, he was so difficult to work with on Casino Royale (1967) that he was fired midway through the shoot, and the disjointed effort to cover up his absence resulted in an over-budget mess he was blamed for. From then on, most of his films flopped. By 1974, some of them weren't even making it to theaters; he barely got by making commercials and television appearances. When he was approached to reprise his Inspector Clouseau character in 1975, he took the opportunity. Return proved so popular that he was immediately back on the A-list. With two more Panthers, Murder by Death, and especially Being There (which netted him a Best Actor nomination, his second), he remained there up until his death in 1980.
• Amanda Seyfried in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. Seyfried was one of Hollywood's biggest "it girls" at the Turn of the Millennium with roles in Veronica Mars and Mean Girls, before she seemingly became a big star with the mega-popularity of Mamma Mia! However, three critical and/or financial flops released between 2011 to 2012 (Red Riding Hood, In Time and Gone) snuffed the momentum Seyfried accumulated. She got a minor boon when Les Misérables (2012) became a major success later that year, but most of the praise was heaped upon Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway for their acting. Her next film, Lovelace, was an Acclaimed Flop in 2013; while her next attempt at a major blockbuster, Pan, instead became one of the most notoriously hated Box Office Bombs of 2015. Seyfried's career prospects seemed like they couldn't get better before she reprised her role for the sequel to Mamma Mia! It came out in 2018 to a much better critical reception than its predecessor and did well at the box office. Two years later, Seyfried played Marion Davies in David Fincher's widely praised drama Mank. Her performance was noted by many critics as a standout, leading her to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Then in 2022, she played disgraced former medical entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout. Her performance as Holmes is viewed by many as her finest work yet, and she won an Emmy Award for it.
• Sylvester Stallone in Rocky Balboa and Creed. Technically, his first resurrection was with Cliffhanger, that helped him Win Back the Crowd after two horrible comedies. But then his career choices were rather unfortunate (besides the critically acclaimed Cop Land, Demolition Man, and a voice acting role in Antz). After some self-parodying in Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, he decided to go back to what started his career. Rocky Balboa was a critical and commercial hit, and allowed Stallone to finally make a fourth Rambo, and follow it with the action film with a dream cast The Expendables. Stallone went through another comeback with Creed, after starring in much-maligned bombs in the last few years, and garnered him critical respect he hasn't seen in a long time, including a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination.
• Terence Stamp with Superman: The Movie and Superman II. By The '70s, his acting career waned after some attention in The '60s. After playing General Zod so memorably in those blockbuster superhero films, Stamp found himself having the pick of roles for the rest of his career.
• Hailee Steinfeld in Pitch Perfect 2 and The Edge of Seventeen. After garnering acclaim plus an Academy Award nomination at the age of thirteen for her performance as Mattie Ross in the 2010 remake of True Grit, she was one of Hollywood's most heavily hyped child actors. However, she instead took time off from acting. Upon returning three years later with a new adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, critics tore the film to shreds and criticized Steinfeld's performance in particular for feeling too childish to properly relay Juliet's coming of age. A string of later failures resulted in many writing her off as a flash in the pan. However, Pitch Perfect 2 in 2015 became both a big hit and also gave Steinfeld the means to start a successful second career as a pop singer. The next year, The Edge of Seventeen was widely hailed and restored her critical stature. She got another hit with the Transformers spin-off Bumblebee, while making her television debut portraying American poet Emily Dickinson on the Apple TV+ series Dickinson. By the end of the decade, Steinfeld became one of the biggest Teen Idols active in both film and music. She also voiced animation work as Spider-Gwen in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (returning for its sequel Across the Spider-Verse) and as Vi in the Netflix adult show Arcane. In late 2020, she was cast as Kate Bishop / Hawkeye II in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – making her first appearance in the Disney+ series Hawkeye.
• Jimmy Stewart with It's a Wonderful Life. He first established himself in The '30s as a supporting actor before gaining bigger exposure as the title role in 1939's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, for which he got nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. He subsequently won an Oscar the following year for The Philadelphia Story, which also revived Katharine Hepburn's career (see above). However, when the U.S. entered World War II in 1941, Stewart opted to partake in the effort as a military pilot and served until the war's end. After finishing his service, Stewart, having lost a good chunk of recognition after being away from the screen for so long, struggled to find roles in Hollywood. Luckily, Frank Capra, his director on Mr. Smith, offered him the lead role of George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. While the film did fine enough at the box office, Stewart's performance was widely praised. It was nominated for five Academy Awards, including another nomination for Stewart as Best Actor. The film has since been Vindicated by History, and signaled a new beginning for Stewart, who would go on to have an extensive, fruitful career in Hollywood.
• Kristen Stewart in Spencer. Just as it was for her co-star (and then-boyfriend) Robert Pattinson, The Twilight Saga was a double-edged sword that, while making her rich and famous, limited her career prospects afterwards, earning her a reputation for Dull Surprise performances. Snow White & the Huntsman in 2012 knocked her off the A-list, especially after she was caught cheating on Pattinson with the film's director Rupert Sanders, which caused Twilight fans to turn against her. However, she responded to her exile from Hollywood by, like Pattinson, going indie and demonstrating that she could actually act. With her performance in Clouds of Sils Maria, she became the first American actress to win a César Award (the French version of the Oscars). Stewart also did a 180 on her public image from The Ingenue to a bisexual, semi-butch Good Bad Girl that turned out to be a much better fit for her. Whereas in 2012 she was one of the most disliked young actresses in Hollywood, by the end of the decade it seemed as if all was forgiven. In 2021, she played Princess Diana in Spencer. Her performance has been acclaimed as her finest work yet, and she even earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
• Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. After winning an Oscar for Monster, Theron had nowhere to go but up, even getting nominated again for North Country in 2005, but the same year, she starred in the critically and financially unsuccessful Æon Flux. After that, she was relegated to starring in many forgettable movies. The critically acclaimed 2011 film Young Adult wasn't a huge hit, but she was nominated for a Golden Globe. 2015 would prove to have a massive start for her with heaps of critical acclaim bestowed on her for her performance as Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road, so much so that most will say it's really her film and Max is just along for the ride. Hers has been oft-cited as one of the greatest Action Girl performances, alongside Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games. She further solidified her credentials as an action star with roles in Atomic Blonde and The Fate of the Furious, while a string of other performances – including an Oscar-nominated turn as Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in Bombshell – ensured she would remain in the critics' good graces.
• Henry Thomas in Ouija: Origin of Evil. For decades, Thomas struggled to shed his image as "that kid from E.T.". While he never exactly disappeared (unlike most Former Child Stars), it seemed for ages that he was forever doomed to minor roles and the (very) occasional major or even leading role in poorly received films. In 2014, though, he had a supporting turn in Mike Flanagan's prequel to the critically reviled Ouija. It was a surprise critical success (especially compared to the downright abysmal reception the first film was met with) that led to Flanagan (who had already gained notices for his work with Absentia and Oculus) becoming an increasingly hot commodity whose every project seems to be even better received than the last. Since then, Thomas has been one of the most frequently recurring members of Flanagan's Production Posse, with roles in Gerald's Game, The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Doctor Sleep, The Haunting of Bly Manor, and Midnight Mass. His roles are still usually of the supporting variety, but they're all quite meaty and varied parts that gave him more of an opportunity to show off his chops and have earned him more attention than he's had in decades. While his part in E.T. will likely always be his signature role (to the point he reprised it for a heavily publicized ad for Xfinity in 2019), he no longer has to worry about his career being defined solely by that one film.
• Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. She became an "it girl" after Pulp Fiction, only to watch her career crash and burn after Batman & Robin and The Avengers (1998). Fortunately for her, Quentin Tarantino still saw something he liked in her, and gave her the lead role in what turned out to be one of the biggest action flicks of the year. Motherhood dented her career a bit - selling an embarrassing eleven tickets on its opening night in the UK. But she still got an Emmy nomination for her role in Smash, got critical acclaim for The Slap miniseries, and doesn't seem to be disappearing without a fight. Unfortunately, as she would reveal years later, a neck injury on the set of Kill Bill not only damaged her working relationship with Tarantino but prevented her from taking the action roles that might have otherwise become her bread and butter in the wake of that film's success.
• John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. His career started with iconic roles in Saturday Night Fever and Grease, a respectable run on the very successful sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter and even critical acclaim with Blow Out. He spent most of The '80s in hiding, reemerging briefly in the narmish Look Who's Talking (which was a hit) and its two sequels (the first which was only a minor success and the second which failed). However, Travolta made his comeback with the iconic Quentin Tarantino Academy Award-nominated hit and followed up with Get Shorty, cementing him as an A-list actor for the next few years. Then, of course, came Battlefield Earth, a passion project based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard that badly battered his career. He's mostly fallen into Direct to Video hell following that flop, although occasionally he'll star in some hits like Hairspray or Bolt. He also got an Emmy Award for producing and a nomination for acting in American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson.
• Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland. Whitaker, a well-regarded character actor for many decades, got started in The '80s with supporting roles in films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Color of Money, Platoon, and Good Morning, Vietnam, before netting critical acclaim for his first lead part as jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker in the biopic Bird, directed by Clint Eastwood. More high-profile work followed, notably the title role in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Then Battlefield Earth, where he starred with the aforementioned John Travolta, was utterly ravaged in 2000, sending his career into a downward spiral, which was ironic since it was meant to be his first big blockbuster. Whitaker's input, besides a brief spell of luck with supporting roles in Panic Room and Phone Booth, comprised of duds for over six years before he played Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. It received a widely positive reaction, with Whitaker's performance praised especially and winning many accolades like the Academy Award for Best Actor. He has gone on since then to star in a lot of high-profile projects: most notably Arrival, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, and Black Panther. Whitaker also proceeded to forge a respectable career in television beginning with a critically hailed guest run on The Shield, followed by his stint on Empire. He currently stars on Godfather of Harlem as Bumpy Johnson and also reprised his Star Wars role on the Disney+ series Andor.
• Reese Witherspoon in Wild. Witherspoon was a critical darling with films like Freeway, Pleasantville, and Election, with film magazines praising her as "the next Meryl Streep". She became a genuine star in Legally Blonde, culminating with an Oscar win for her highly acclaimed performance in Walk the Line. After that, she became in a string of films that either were bombs (Rendition, Penelope), critically panned (Four Christmases), or both (This Means War (2012), How Do You Know), later being "honored" by Forbes and one of the "most overpaid actors" in Hollywood, three years in a row, due to the businesses of those films. Even modest success, like Monsters vs. Aliens and Water for Elephants, didn't do much for her. She attributes this to her divorce from ex-husband, Ryan Phillippe, and a simple lack of passion about the job. What happened next? After garnering great reviews for her small roles in much-praised films such as Mud and the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed Inherent Vice, she started a production company that produced Gone Girl, a commercial and critical success, and starring/producing Wild, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, giving an Oscar-nominated performance that has been acclaimed as the best of her career. She later starred in/produced the HBO miniseries adaptation of the national best-seller, Big Little Lies, also directed by Vallée, which garnered her critical acclaim once again, with critics praising her performance as even better than what she accomplished in Wild. She would later go on to win her first Primetime Emmy Award as a producer when the project won Best Limited Series in 2017 and additionally earned a nomination for Lead Actress. Unfortunately, her film career after Wild hasn’t been too good, suffering critically panned, box office flops such as Hot Pursuit (which she also produced), Home Again, and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), although she did have a voice role in the box office hit Sing. However, while her film career is in doubt, with the second season of Big Little Lies, the new Apple TV+ series The Morning Show starring her and Jennifer Aniston, and the Hulu miniseries Little Fires Everywhere starring her and Kerry Washington, her newfound career in television will ensure she’ll be getting high profile work for years to come.
• Natalie Wood, after The Searchers, appeared in a string of failed films. According to Elia Kazan, by 1960, she was considered as "washed up" at just 22 (she had been acting since age 5). Kazan still cast her in Splendor in the Grass, which came out in 1961, received critical acclaim, and brought Wood her second Oscar nomination. Also in 1961, she starred in West Side Story, which was the biggest hit of the year and won the Oscar for Best Picture. This one-two punch shot her straight back to the A-list.
• Michelle Yeoh in Crazy Rich Asians. Yeoh moved from her homeland Malaysia to China so she could try acting after establishing herself prior as a model. She quickly became a major figure of Hong Kong action cinema who frequently did her own stunts. Yeoh then made her Hollywood debut as Wai Lin opposite Pierce Brosnan in the James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, with her performance and role praised as a good foil to his 007. Her biggest role came when Ang Lee cast her in his wuxia epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which truly established her in the eyes of international audiences. Yeoh's screen career afterwards, however, sagged with a string of failures like Memoirs of a Geisha (which got mixed reviews, especially for casting non-Japanese actors like Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi in Japanese roles, perpetuating the racist perception in Hollywood that Asians are interchangeable), The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (which became both the lowest-grossing and worst-received entry in the Brendan Fraser series), Babylon A.D., and Morgan, with her sole hit for almost a decade being a voice role in Kung Fu Panda 2. Her popularity, fortunately, recovered around the tail end of The New '10s, starting with Strike Back, Marco Polo, and Star Trek: Discovery on TV. She then got her first major Hollywood role in years via the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians, playing the imperturbable matriarch Eleanor Young. The film was notable for being the first American film in nearly 25 years to feature a predominantly Asian cast, following The Joy Luck Club in 1993. It received widely positive reviews and was a surprise box office success in 2018, later on becoming the highest-grossing romantic comedy of the decade. Yeoh's performance was particularly hailed, with talk of her possibly nabbing an Oscar nomination circulating which ultimately didn't come to fruition. Yeoh eventually went back to her action movie roots with a supporting role as Ying Nan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ^note following a cameo as a different character in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, which was a decent hit in 2021. In 2022, she finally played another lead role as multiversal traveler Evelyn Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once (which co-starred Jamie Lee Curtis, who's also listed on this page above). The film surpassed expectations to become the biggest financial success of indie studio A24 and got even better reviews than Crazy Rich Asians, while Yeoh's performance in it has been described as her finest yet. She ultimately won the Oscar for Best Actress for it, making history as the first Asian actress to be nominated and win in this category.
• Renée Zellweger in Judy (2019). After winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2003's Cold Mountain, her movies became less financially and critically successful as her career went into The New '10s. The nadir arrived with Case 39, a movie that was delayed twice and, when it was finally released in 2010, received negative reviews and flopped at the box office, opening at #7 in its first week. This resulted in a six-year hiatus from acting. A brief return to the carpet in 2014 saw a drastic change in her looks, which was claimed to be due to extensive plastic surgery to the point she was almost unrecognizable (though she has denied this) which many deemed the final nail in the coffin for her career. However, she returned to acting in 2016 with films including Bridget Jones's Baby, a Surprisingly Improved Sequel critically speaking but not commercially successful otherwise. She would eventually reclaim her profile in 2019 after her role as Judy Garland in the eponymous biopic won rave reviews from critics, topped off with an Oscar for Best Actress.

Directing

• Robert Altman with The Player. He was one of the biggest directors of The '70s, having directed acclaimed hits such as M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville. His career was then derailed by an adaptation of Popeye released in 1980, after which his output consisted of flop after flop. Released in 1992, The Player was a critical success and was nominated for 3 Oscars – including Best Director for Altman. He would be nominated for Best Director again the following year (for Short Cuts) and in 2001 (for Gosford Park, which also served as a second comeback as his career post Short Cuts began to lag). Altman would remain well-regarded by the time he died in 2006, with his final film A Prairie Home Companion being warmly received by both audiences and critics.
• Kathryn Bigelow with The Hurt Locker. She first found recognition in The '80s with the Western-vampire medley Near Dark, which was an Acclaimed Flop. Her following films, the cop drama Blue Steel starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and the action film Point Break (1991) starring Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze, did just as well at the box office as they did with critics. Her momentum halted when the 1995 cyberpunk sci-fi flick Strange Days became an Acclaimed Flop too, except its rather steeper budget compounded with meager box office returns proved more damaging than the low-cost production of Near Dark. For comparison, while Near Dark grossed $3.4 million on a $5 million budget, Strange Days cost $42 million to produce yet only made a mere $8 million at the domestic box office. Afterwards, Bigelow failed to get any directorial projects off pre-production until 2000's The Weight of Water, a French-American co-production that never got a wide release in the US. Her following film, the 2002 submarine drama K-19: The Widowmaker, also sunk, and she fell off the radar for some years afterwards. By the end of the decade, however, she received newfound recognition when The Hurt Locker became near-universally hailed and did decently at the box office. The film would win six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Bigelow. Her next films, Zero Dark Thirty and Detroit, were also positively reviewed, with Zero Dark Thirty becoming her highest-grossing film.
• Shane Black with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. He started out hot with Lethal Weapon, and his unique take on the cop movie, filled with Casual Danger Dialogue and mismatched protagonists trading barbs as they investigated crimes, was quickly imitated by Hollywood action movies in the late '80s/early '90s. However, the failure of 1996's The Long Kiss Goodnight brought his success to a screeching halt. Black came back swinging with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang after spending nearly a decade in retirement, which also served as his directorial debut and the beginning of its lead actor's own Career Resurrection. Although Black didn't direct another film for eight years, said feature (Iron Man 3) reunited him with Robert Downey Jr. and became his highest-grossing film with over a billion-dollar gross at the box office. His following film The Nice Guys was a lower-budget affair that was closer in style to Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and earned positive reviews. While it turned in an adequate profit, The Nice Guys has found renewed attention as a Cult Classic on home media.
• The Coen Brothers went through this twice.
  • The first was in the 1990s. After The Hudsucker Proxy very nearly killed their careers entirely, they made Fargo, which not only revived their momentum completely but was nominated for several Oscars (including Best Picture) and won for Best Original Screenplay.
  • Again in the 2000s. After the runaway success of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they followed it up with the commercially unsuccessful The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), the less distinctive Intolerable Cruelty, and the coolly received The Ladykillers (2004). Critics had begun to believe that the brothers had lost their touch and they didn't make another film until three years later. That movie? No Country for Old Men, which won the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay.
• Sofia Coppola had a rough beginning to her film career thanks to her abysmally received performance in The Godfather Part III, when she replaced Winona Ryder after the latter abruptly dropped out of the project. Coppola, however, pivoted from acting in to directing films, which proved to be a better avenue with hits like The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation (while the latter won her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). Then the divisive Marie Antoinette (2006) placed her career on the skids for four years, and she did nothing major in the interim. Fortunately, she rebuilt her stature in The New '10s. First, 2010's Somewhere premiered in the Venice Film Festival and won its coveted Golden Lion. Then, The Bling Ring, The Beguiled and On the Rocks each garnered glowing praise. Priscilla, her biopic chronicling Priscilla Presley's relationship with Elvis, was released in November 2023 to even more acclaim, including a nomination for the Golden Lion and a win at the Venice Film Festival for actress Cailee Spaeny’s performance as Priscilla. Many consider it Coppola’s best work in over a decade, and pointed out the culmination of themes that have been present throughout her directing career, such as the isolation of fame, femininity, and "privilege without power".
• Jules Dassin with Rififi. Dassin initially emerged as one of the most promising Hollywood filmmakers of The '40s after directing successful noirs like Brute Force and The Naked City. But while abroad in London making Night and the City, he was discredited as an alleged communist and subsequently blacklisted amidst the anti-communist hysteria sweeping America. Although he had finished filming Night and the City, he was unable to oversee post-production and prohibited from editing the film. Following its release in 1950, he couldn't attain a filmmaking job for four years in the U.S. and thus moved to France to make Rififi. The caper film became a Trope Codifier for the genre and a major hit in Europe, with Dassin later on winning the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival. It also was released in America with Dassin's name in the credits and made him one of the first filmmakers to break from the blacklist. He continued having a thriving career in Europe for the rest of his life, with successes like the Greek film Never on Sunday (which won an Oscar for Best Song and received several other nominations, including two for Dassin for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay) and the heist flick Topkapi.
• Spike Lee with BlacKkKlansman. Lee first established himself in The '80s as a confrontational force tackling heavy matters of race with his classic Do the Right Thing. While his films left white audiences divided, he experienced critical if not always commercial acclaim through the 1990s. That acclaim faded over the course of the 2000s and early 2010s, as his films (with the exception of Inside Man) either weren't well received or flopped at the box office. Lee instead became more notorious for his controversial statements and off-set behavior, including his lawsuit against SpikeTV over his name and a public feud with fellow director Quentin Tarantino following the release of Django Unchained. It wasn't until BlacKkKlansman surpassed expectations that he became mainstream again and truly returned to his social commentary roots. Many consider it Lee's best film since Do the Right Thing, and it led to him winning a long overdue Oscar (for Adapted Screenplay). The positive reception towards 2020's Da 5 Bloods further solidified his resurrection.
• Richard Linklater had several. He first made a name for himself with Dazed and Confused and Before Sunrise before spending the years of 1997-2003 making low-key indie projects that got minimal attention, the lone exception being Waking Life. All that changed when he made School of Rock, his only movie that was a box office smash that helped establish Jack Black as a major star in the process. But a So Okay, It's Average remake of The Bad News Bears and an adaptation of Fast Food Nation for which he was criticized for changing the tone of the novel to an anti-meat Author Tract grounded his career to a halt. Critics and fans began to feel that he had lost his touch. With Me and Orson Welles being under-distributed, many critics thought his career was good and done for. That is, until he reunited with Jack Black for Bernie and made the final part in the Before series, Before Midnight (receiving an Oscar nomination in the process). With his 12-year project, Boyhood, being released to overwhelming acclaim in 2014 with many critics calling it a modern classic, it seems he's back in their good graces.
• Sidney Lumet also had several throughout his decades-long career. After making a spectacular debut with 12 Angry Men in 1957, Lumet sustained a good career for the rest of The '50s and into the following decade with acclaimed adaptations of the stage plays A View from the Bridge and Long Day's Journey Into Night. Then after Fail Safe in 1964, he suffered a decline lasting the rest of The '60s while his next films didn't nab critical or audience attention. Upon Serpico becoming a big hit in 1973, his career promptly rebounded when his following films in The '70s like Murder on the Orient Express, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network collectively received his best reviews ever since 12 Angry Men. His luck lasted into the early '80s with Prince of the City and The Verdict, only to sink in the latter half of the decade as his input from the time premiered to indifferent and sometimes harshly negative reception. Lumet occasionally had hits like Running on Empty and Q & A, but most of his films for the next few decades (Family Business, A Stranger Among Us, the 1999 remake of Gloria, etc.) tanked. It wasn't until 2007 that he found new success with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which got his best reviews since The Verdict and was a decent financial hit. It also was his final film before his death from lymphoma in 2011.
• Guy Ritchie with Sherlock Holmes (2009). After directing Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch., he was pegged to direct the 2002 remake of Swept Away, which is considered one of the worst movies of all time. Sherlock Holmes (which served as another success for Robert Downey Jr. after his comeback began with Iron Man) became one of the highest grossing movies of 2009, and its sequel experienced similar success. Even though The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword bombed, he followed them up with the live-action remake of Aladdin (which earned $1B worldwide, becoming his highest-grossing film) and The Gentlemen (which brought him back to his gangster cinema roots).
• Martin Scorsese has had several:
  • Raging Bull was not a wide commercial success, but on a personal and professional level, it was important in making Scorsese both continue to commit himself to narrative film-making and make himself more disciplined in both his personal and professional life (such as kicking his drug habit) — and in due time, it would be Vindicated by History as one of the greatest films of The '80s and of his career. The Color of Money, made in the middle of The '80s, likewise became his first major commercial success since Taxi Driver and helped get his career back on track; before then, it had stalled with the first version of The Last Temptation of Christ being canceled and his other movies getting mixed reviews at the time.
  • While the latter half of the 1980s was a rough spot for him, GoodFellas gave him his Auteur License back. Its success restored Scorsese's commercial cache and critical reputation, allowing him to make films with bigger budgets that tackled uncommercial subject matter like The Age of Innocence, Kundun, and Hugo. Scorsese continues to thrive today, bolstered by the mainstream success of films like The Departed and The Wolf of Wall Street.
• M. Night Shyamalan: Once hailed as the next Steven Spielberg with The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan's reputation went into the gutter as he became more and more known for being a self-absorbed and pretentious filmmaker with the increasingly ridiculous uses of his Twist Ending that was one of the reasons why he was successful in the first place. Then came the quadruple bogey of Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth which bombed critically and/or commercially with most of the film industry thinking his career was over. There was talk of a comeback when, with his back to the wall and $5 million of his own money invested, he made The Visit and received mixed-to-positive acclaim. However, with the release of Split, his career seems to be back in full force, as the movie not only received glowing reviews, but also ended up making four times its budget on its opening weekend. Despite the follow-up Glass (2019) not critically meeting up to the expectations set up by Split, Glass was a Critic-Proof hit that grossed twelve times its budget. His next film, 2021's Old, was a modest box office success despite getting mixed reviews and its release during the COVID-19 Pandemic, as was his follow-up in 2023, Knock at the Cabin.
• Robert Stevenson with Old Yeller. Stevenson began his career in 1932 directing English films such as Tudor Rose and the first film adaptation of King Solomon's Mines. His work caught the attention of Gone with the Wind producer David O. Selznick, who was so impressed that he offered Stevenson a contract in 1940, which Stevenson agreed to. However his first American film Tom Brown's School Days was a flop and he spent the next five years bouncing around various Hollywood studios, his movies ranging from the Academy Award-nominated Joan of Paris to doing collaborative work on Forever and a Day. After World War II he spent the next seven years doing a run of crime dramas and film noirs, most of them for RKO and all of which were box office bombs. For most of the 1950s, he was stuck doing television work and his story looked set to become a cautionary tale of European auteur directors being swayed by the allure of Hollywood during the golden age... until he was tapped by Walt Disney to direct a two-part episode of the Disneyland television show centered around the story of Johnny Tremain. Disney liked the way that the episodes turned out so much that he released them into theaters as a single film, and proceeded to sign Stevenson to direct Old Yeller. The film became Stevenson's biggest hit at the time and it led him to spend the remainder of his career at Disney, where he directed some of the studio's most famous films of the era including The Shaggy Dog, The Absent-Minded Professor, Mary Poppins (for which he received an Oscar nomination), The Love Bug and Bedknobs and Broomsticks until his retirement in 1976.
• Agnès Varda with Vagabond. Varda, a major pioneer of the French New Wave in The '50s and The '60s, directed several of its influential films, like La Pointe Courte, Cleo From 5 to 7, Le Bonheur, etc., as a part of the Left Bank Group, a collective which comprised directors Alain Resnais and her husband Jacques Demy. But in the late '60s and The '70s, her feature output steadily became rare and obscure. From that period and continuing early into The '80s, she primarily worked on shorts. Vagabond was her first big feature in decades. Its unanimously positive reception, with Varda eventually winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, reaffirmed her status as one of cinema's best, and led to a string of masterpieces afterwards, such as Kung-Fu Master! (1988), The Gleaners and I, and Faces Places, with the last one getting her an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. She also received an Honorary Oscar in 2017. By the time she died in 2019, she was widely revered as, in the words of Martin Scorsese, "one of the Gods of cinema."
• Joss Whedon with The Avengers (2012). The success of his Breakthrough Hit Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel proved to be a Tough Act to Follow for much of the '00s, with Firefly getting Screwed by the Network, Dollhouse proving to be divisive, and The Cabin in the Woods (co-written with director Drew Goddard) winding up on The Shelf of Movie Languishment for three years thanks to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's financial woes. He spent much of the late '00s and early '10s working in comics, web shows, and gun-for-hire TV directing gigs, which allowed him to maintain his fanbase but didn't become anything close to the mainstream sensation that the Buffyverse had been. Whedon himself described his career as having been "on the skids" during this time. However, Kevin Feige decided to take a risk on him, sensing that he was the right man to direct the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first Crisis Crossover. The result paid off handsomely, not only turning the MCU into a pop culture colossus but also (together with The Cabin in the Woods finally getting a theatrical release and becoming a modest hit while winning the acclaim of horror fans) restoring Whedon's mainstream profile, and for a good chunk of the early-mid 2010s, he was renowned as geek royalty. It also gave him the Auteur License to make his low-budget, personal passion project Much Ado About Nothing (2012), an adaptation of the play of the same name by William Shakespeare that was well-received in arthouse circles. Unfortunately, later in the decade the failure of Justice League (2017) (which many fans blamed him for, especially after the release of the much-better-received "Zack Snyder cut"), combined with reports of adultery and Prima Donna Director behavior on his part, knocked him back down.

Other

• In 2015, the Razzies (the anti-Oscars) introduced a new award called the "Razzie Redeemer Award", where a past nominee or winner had transitioned into a far more critically successful movie. The years below are the film release years, as awards are normally handed out the following year.
  • 2014: Ben Affleck won for his roles in Argo and Gone Girl
  • 2015: Sylvester Stallone won for his role in Creed
  • 2016: Mel Gibson won for directing Hacksaw Ridge
  • 2018: Melissa McCarthy won for her Playing Against Type performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
  • 2019: Eddie Murphy won for Dolemite Is My Name
  • 2021: Will Smith won for King Richard
  • 2022: Colin Farrell won for The Banshees of Inisherin
  • 2023: Fran Drescher won, but not for a film role. Instead, she won for her work as president of SAG-AFTRA during its 2023 strike, playing her part in bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion.
• A film scoring example is Elmer Bernstein. Once a notable name for action films and dramas in the 1950s and 1960s, Bernstein had found himself reduced to scoring mostly TV shows by the 1970s (although even in the 1950s and 1960s he was happy to work in television, a medium he never considered himself above). Then, John Landis, who was Bernstein's neighbor as a child, needed someone to score Animal House after the first score was rejected. He suggested Bernstein and the film's success resurrected Bernstein's career, later going on to score many successful comedies as well as thrillers and dramas (he was not only a regular composer for Landis but for Ivan Reitman and Martin Scorsese as well) until his retirement in 2002 and eventual passing in 2004.
• A truly unique example comes from the film Amadeus. Before the film, composer Antonio Salieri and his music were mostly forgotten, but the film revived interest in his work. Wikipedia notes how many of Salieri's operas and compositions have since been produced and recorded by modern artists, and festivals and theatres have been named in his honor.

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