11 Seemingly Unlikely Leading Men Who Made It Big
by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.John Wayne
The personally charismatic big guy, born Marion Morrison, ambled his way into Hollywood in the 1920s and was pegged for potential stardom by pioneering director Raoul Walsh, who put him in the lead of his 1930 Western, an early large-format widescreen experiment called The Big Trail. The movie flopped big, and Wayne got cozy in a series of mostly Western “programmers,” low-budget pictures that were short and sweet (his work in The Three Mesquiteers series is particularly prized by fans of small-scale genre pictures). In 1939 John Ford cast him in the lead of his own indie production, the groundbreaking Stagecoach, and that did the trick. But a third act awaited. After a long and dizzyingly profitable run playing he-man heroes, another pantheon director, Howard Hawks, cast Wayne in the challenging, often unsympathetic role of a ruthless cattle driver in 1948’s Red River. “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act,” Ford reportedly marveled to Hawks; newly apprised, Ford subsequently cast Wayne in his most complex role, vengeful Indian hunter Ethan Edwards, in The Searchers. The twilight of his career saw him reverting to a more grizzled iteration of his type.
by Sasha/Getty Images.Fred Astaire
A celebrated musical stage star in the 20s and 30s, Fred was famously (albeit at least somewhat apocryphally, according to Astaire himself) given a withering assessment after a screen test: “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.” (In Astaire’s version, recounted to Barbara Walters, the report read, “Can’t act. Slightly bald. Also dances.”) Once given a shot, Astaire’s dancing and insouciant acting charm, often in concert with partner Ginger Rogers’s knowing sexiness and assuredness, made him a genuine icon. Increasingly ambivalent about working as a dancer, he retired mostly from films in the late 40s, and after his comeback, diversified, eventually phasing out musical roles. He also got to display a surprising sensitivity as an actor, playing an Australian scientist grappling with the coming end of the world in 1959’s nuclear-warning picture On the Beach.
John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images.Humphrey Bogart
Well-born Bogart was a journeyman actor who toggled between stage and screen, never making much of an impression, until he landed the role of mad-dog escaped killer Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood’s super-allegorical The Petrified Forest. He was an electrifying counter to Leslie Howard’s poetic martyr Alan Squier, first in the Broadway production. When the time came to make a movie of it, the studio wanted Edward G. Robinson for Duke; Howard, who had a say in the 1936 production, insisted on Bogart, or it didn’t happen. (And Bogart never forgot, naming his and Lauren Bacall’s daughter after his friend years later.) Bogart again electrified in the role . . . but his reward was a Warner contract that saw him relegated to a slew of B pictures. It wasn’t until visionary debut director John Huston cast him as tough, but shaky private eye in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon that Bogart’s leading-man power was realized.
by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.Bing Crosby
Der Bingle’s early film career was predicated entirely on his popularity as a singer. He was essentially, believe it or not, the Justin Timberlake of his time. So as an “actor” he coasted for years on easy, breezy charm, and made a lot of money for the studios he worked for and for himself. Few thought he could handle the heavy stuff of real drama, so his turn as washed-up alcoholic actor Frank Elgin in 1954’s The Country Girl was a curveball many didn’t see coming. A de-glammed Grace Kelly played opposite Bing as Elgin’s wife, and she won a best-actress Oscar for the role. Crosby was nominated . . . but lost to Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, who really, anybody else would have lost to as well. For what it’s worth, Crosby never even attempted to essay quite so harrowing a role ever again.
by Photoshot/Getty Images.Richard Harris
Irascible Irishman Harris was among the angriest of the U.K.–bred Angry Young Men coming up on stage and screen from the mid-50s through the early 60s. He made such a great impression as the thoroughly disillusioned rugby player Frank Machin in Lindsay Anderson’s 1963 This Sporting Life that it was hard to imagine that he’d ever fit in to any kind of conventional leading man template. But Harris proved surprisingly versatile, even as he applied his personal idiosyncrasies to every kind of role he tackled—for instance, King Arthur in the musical Camelot. After that he parlayed his interesting method of not singing into an actual pop music career—Gen Xers might be shocked to know that it was he, and not Donna Summer, who originally sang that little ditty “MacArthur Park.” Sure, he had a bunch of does-not-play-well-with-others moments (his casting opposite Doris Day for the 60s spy spoof Caprice was unfortuitous), but his highs were remarkable.
by Warner Brothers/Getty Images.Al Pacino
Then–Paramount head of production Robert Evans had a great idea for who should play Michael Corleone in the upcoming movie adaptation of Mario Puzo’s bestselling Mafia novel The Godfather: his buddy Alain Delon. Yes, Alain Delon the French guy. In his ever-entertaining memoir The Kid Stays in the Picture Evans never addresses how he would have, for instance, dealt with the fact that what English Delon spoke, he spoke with a very pronounced French accent. But that’s not the point. The point is that he was dead set against director Francis Ford Coppola’s choice for the role, an intense and unknown New Yorker named Al Pacino. Too quiet, too obscure, and also, by Evans’s light, too short. Coppola wouldn’t budge, and in the course of negotiations Evans got behind his director in the bargaining-chip department, telling Coppola he’d let him have Pacino on the condition that his guy, James Caan, play Sonny. After which Evans had to go to another Paramount biggie, who reluctantly told Evans, “The midget’s yours.” And the rest is movie history
Bruce Willis
Believe it or not, there was once a time when the news that Bruce Willis would star in a big-budget action movie was greeted by show-biz insiders and observers with a derisive noise followed by the question, “THAT smirky lightweight?” This would be around the time of, yes, the first Die Hard movie, in 1988. True, Willis’s television series, Moonlighting, on air since 1985, was a quirky hit. But this was well before the whole “Television is as good as, if not better than, movies” idea started taking hold. And Willis, cashing in on such popularity as his, yes, smirky television persona had earned him, had ill-advisedly tried to restart a pop-music career, and had engendered a fair amount of pre-Internet snark with his 1987 faux-soul debut album The Return of Bruno (don’t ask). So, yeah, the notion that he could top-line a state-of-the-art, high-tech thriller DID seem a little ludicrous. Not for long though.
by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.Dustin Hoffman
Committed theater person Hoffman was wrong for the role of Benjamin Braddock in 1967’s The Graduate for a host of reasons: he was about a decade older than most college graduates in real life, he did not have the physical appearance of a native Californian, and he certainly did not have the appearance of a WASP native Californian, etc. But cinematic wunderkind Mike Nichols had his say, and his say said Hoffman. Still, it was Hoffman who made the role work, by committing to it absolutely, and also by realizing the way director Nichols identified with Benjamin’s alienation, and bringing some Mike to the character as well. (We should remember that Nichols first made a sensation as part of a stage comedy team with Elaine May, honing an improvised riot of hip commentary on the modern world that still resonates today.) It locked up his status as both Master Thespian and Major Star instantly, an even more impressive feat if you can ever see the few desultory films he was featured in before the breakthrough.
by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.Walter Matthau
The basset-hound-featured Matthau had what used to be called a great face for radio. His character roles in 50s pictures were either dry, sadistic villains or been-around-the-block cynics, and while he always livened up a picture, he never carried one. As with Humphrey Bogart, his breakthrough was in a stage role that he got to carry through to film: playing uber-slob Oscar Madison in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. It was the 1965 play that helped get him noticed by Billy Wilder, who cast him opposite long-established star Jack Lemmon in 1966’s The Fortune Cookie, which so established the Matthau–Lemmon chemistry that when the film version of Couple came around, Lemmon wound up replacing the play’s Art Carney. After that the implausible Matthau got to woo a kooky young Goldie Hawn in 1969’s Cactus Flower, and go on to romance the likes of Elaine May, Jill Clayburgh and Glenda Jackson through the 70s. Nice work if you can get it.
- by Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Belmondo’s long face and super-prominent schnozz suggest the opposite of a movie star; the lean former boxer seemed, on the surface, to be made of the stuff for character roles. But his turn as the hapless thug Michel in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 Breathless proved he had sexual swagger to spare. The following year, he demonstrated deep, quiet acting chops playing the title role of a Resistance hero in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Léon Morin, Priest. While often antic both on screen and off, Belmondo’s insouciance matured over the years to the point where he’s now the Grand Old Man of French acting.
by Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.ice Cube
Not to bring up old business, but it’s indisputable that Ice Cube’s fame as a rapper derived not just from his skill and flow (of which he had, and probably still has, vast quantities) but from his willingness, nay, eagerness, to make some of the most outrageous and outrageously offensive pronouncements ever committed to any popular music form. We won’t repeat them here; suffice it to say that if you think “No Vaseline” is a hair-raising title, you ought to hear the whole song. His hip-hop persona as AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was no joke, which makes his cinematic conversion all the more staggeringly impressive. Galvanic as the street-tough Doughboy in 1991’s Boyz n the Hood, credible in action maestro Walter Hill’s 1992 Trespass, and he was downright . . . well, likable in the 1995 African-American stoner comedy, Friday. These days he’s more than comfortable sending up his very badass former image in the likes of Ride Along and 22 Jump Street.
