Richard Gere

Richard Gere arrived through the theatre, which is not how the 1980s usually managed these things. He was working on stage in Seattle by 1969, played Danny Zuko in the London production of Grease in 1973, and took a Theatre World Award in 1979 for Bent on Broadway. The screen work came in fragments: Looking for Mr. Goodbar in 1977, then Days of Heaven for Terrence Malick in 1978, a film shot in fading light that largely treated him as part of the landscape.

American Gigolo in 1980 did the rest. Paul Schrader gave him a wardrobe, a Los Angeles of hard surfaces and almost no interiority to play, and the result made him a commercial proposition. An Officer and a Gentleman followed in 1982 and brought his first Golden Globe nomination. Then the misfires: Breathless in 1983 and The Cotton Club in 1984 both underperformed badly, and by the late eighties the working assumption was that his moment had been and gone.

Pretty Woman in 1990 corrected that with some force. Gere plays the film almost entirely on stillness, which is the right choice opposite Julia Roberts and was widely mistaken for doing nothing at all. Sommersby in 1993 and Primal Fear in 1996 kept him in circulation. Then Chicago in 2002 produced the oddest late turn of the lot - he sang, he danced, and he took the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy in 2003.

He has never been nominated for an Academy Award, which is the fact that follows him around, and he appears to mind rather less than the people who raise it. Gere went grey early and did nothing whatever about it, then built a second career in smaller films alongside a public life in Tibetan advocacy that predates the fame by decades. The then-and-now comparison barely registers as change. He looked composed at thirty and he looks composed now.