Dennis Quaid

Dennis Quaid's difficulty for most of the eighties was that he was extremely good at appearing to have a lovely time. Breaking Away in 1979 established the grin. The Right Stuff in 1983 put it to work: as Gordon Cooper he plays the most conspicuously pleased-with-himself man in the astronaut corps, and the film is content to let him. By any reasonable reading it should have made him a major star that year. It largely did not.

The recovery ran through smaller pictures. The Big Easy reached American cinemas in 1987 and brought him the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead the following year - a New Orleans detective, a considerable accent and a performance of real charm. Innerspace arrived the same year. Then Great Balls of Fire in 1989, where he played Jerry Lee Lewis at a pitch somewhere past the point of comfort, and Postcards from the Edge in 1990.

Wyatt Earp in 1994 was the demonstration piece. Quaid lost a substantial amount of weight to play a tubercular Doc Holliday and delivered the best work in a long and largely unloved film. After that the parts got broader - The Parent Trap in 1998, Any Given Sunday in 1999 - before Far from Heaven in 2002 handed him the hardest role of his career and a second Independent Spirit Award in 2003, that one for supporting work.

Quaid is the one from this group whose face has changed most and mattered least. He has worked continuously for five decades without ever quite becoming an event, which has left him free to take whatever interested him - an Emmy nomination in 2010 for playing Bill Clinton, a long run of character parts since. The photographs from 1983 show a man convinced that something enormous is about to happen. The recent ones show someone who got on with it regardless.