Harrison Ford

The number that tells the whole story is his fee for the first Star Wars: ten thousand dollars. In 1977 Harrison Ford was a working actor who had done carpentry to pay bills, cast as a smuggler in a science fiction film nobody expected to succeed. The film became one of the largest box-office phenomena in cinema history and Han Solo acquired a following that has never gone away.

Four years later came the role that settled the argument. Raiders of the Lost Ark was the highest-grossing film of 1981. It opened modestly - around eight million dollars domestically - and then simply refused to stop, finishing at roughly 225 million in North America and 367 million worldwide. For that one he was paid 5.9 million, which is a fairly precise measure of how far four years had taken him.

What made Ford unusual among the leading men of the era was that he never seemed to be enjoying the fame part. The performances have a working quality to them: irritated, competent, faintly put-upon. He carried two of the largest franchises in film simultaneously through the eighties and into the nineties, and the persona barely shifted. Audiences trusted it precisely because it did not.

Across an entire career his films have taken roughly 3.18 billion dollars at the US box office and about 5.65 billion worldwide. Very few actors in the history of the medium have numbers in that range, and almost none of them got there while looking that unimpressed by the whole business.