Jeff Bridges
Born: 4 December 1949
Where: Los Angeles, California
Despite appearances in any number of high-profile movies - from the Fabulous Baker Boys to The Big Lebowski - Bridges has never made the Hollywood box office A-list.
The New York Times review of 1992's American Heart went as far as branding him the "the most underappreciated great actor of his generation".
He made his first screen appearance at the age of four months, playing the infant in Jane Greer's arms in The Company She Keeps in 1950.
He and his brother Beau (also an actor)grew up playing drowning victims and the like on their actor father Lloyd's popular syndicated TV series Sea Hunt.
He emerged as a boyishly charming lead after bursting from the talented ensemble of The Last Picture Show in 1971 for which he earned a Best Supporting Oscar nomination.
Bridges enhanced his image in a series of quality projects, beginning with John Huston's Fat City as a struggling boxer and Robert Benton's directorial debut Bad Company.
He also brought a three-dimensional believability to moonshining, stock-car racing legend Junior Jackson in The Last American Hero.
He also starred in John Frankenheimer's The Iceman Cometh and was a revelation in Michael Cimino's debut Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
Although he appeared in small critical favourites like Rancho Deluxe and Cutter's Way things only turned around with Against All Odds.
Bridges earned his first Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his low-key portrayal of the Earth-bound alien Star Man.
He earned his greatest box-office success (to date) in the legal thriller Jagged Edge co-starring opposite Glenn Close.
Bridges also convinced as the all-American entrepreneur in the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Tucker: The Man and His Dream.
Following this he delivered a complex performance as Jack Baker, a once celebrated piano prodigy reduced to entertaining in hotel lounges with his brother (played by Beau) in The Fabulous Baker Boys.
For Texasville, the sequel to The Last Picture Show set 30 years later, he reprised the role of Duane Jackson, Texas roughneck turned millionaire.
He provided an effective counterpoint to Robin Williams in Terry Gilliam's gentle fantasy The Fisher King in 1991.
While he won raves for his portrayal of a man transfigured by his survival of an air disaster in Fearless, Bridges fared less well as a bomb squad cop pitted against Irish terrorist Tommy Lee Jones in Blown Away.
Bridges next did what he does best and made a 180 degree turn, transforming himself into the overweight, greasy-haired, burnt out, beach bum cum bowler of the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski.
Next came the guise of rumpled professor for the effective thriller Arlington Road but was underused in The Muse.
In 2000, he played the seemingly simple but actually shrewdly manipulative US President in the political thriller The Contender.
The actor next played an earnest psychiatrist who doubts his own diagnosis of Kevin Spacey in the sci-fi feature K-Pax.
In 2003, Bridges narrated Lost in Mancha, a documentary on Gilliam's doomed Don Quixote project.
Bridges was especially enjoyable in his next role as grief-stricken millionaire Charles Howard in Seabiscuit.
Almost simultaneously, Bridges appeared in the quirky comedy-drama Masked & Anonymous, starring and co-written by Bob Dylan.
In 2005, he starred as a drunken cuckolded husband in the big screen adaptation of John Irving's A Widow For The Year, The Door in the Floor.
