Robert De Niro

Robert De Niro's breakthrough was Mean Streets in 1973, the film that began a working relationship with Martin Scorsese now running past fifty years. He had been appearing in films for most of a decade without anyone much noticing. What Scorsese gave him was room to build a character out of small physical detail rather than dialogue - a walk, a hesitation, the way a man holds a drink - and it turned out that this was the thing he did better than almost anyone else working.

The next seven years are the ones that get cited. He won Best Supporting Actor for The Godfather Part II in 1974, playing the young Vito Corleone almost entirely in Sicilian, a language he did not speak and went to Sicily to learn. Taxi Driver followed in 1976 and took the Palme d'Or at Cannes to a mixture of cheering and booing from the same room. The Deer Hunter in 1978 brought another nomination and won Best Picture.

Raging Bull in 1980 is where the preparation became the story. He trained as a boxer, then put on roughly sixty pounds to play Jake LaMotta in decline, and won Best Actor. The King of Comedy in 1982 and Once Upon a Time in America in 1984 were commercial disappointments that have since been reassessed sharply upwards. Goodfellas arrived in 1990, Cape Fear brought another nomination in 1991, and Heat in 1995 finally put him on screen opposite Al Pacino.

The then-and-now angle is unusually literal here, because the peak-era work was itself about bodies changing over time - Raging Bull is a film concerned with a man becoming unrecognisable to himself. What followed was a long second career in comedy that irritated purists, a film festival he co-founded in Lower Manhattan in 2002, and periodic returns to the old register. A nomination for Silver Linings Playbook in 2012, another for Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023, fifty years after Mean Streets.