Tommy Lee Jones

Tommy Lee Jones read English at Harvard and graduated cum laude in 1969. He played offensive guard on the undefeated 1968 football team, was named first-team All-Ivy, and roomed with Al Gore. The 29-29 draw with Yale that November, the one the Crimson headlined as a Harvard win, was among his last games. He was on Broadway the following year and in Love Story, his first film, in 1970. None of this is the standard route into American character acting, and it explains a quality he has always had of not appearing to need the work.

The 1970s were largely television and the 1980s were where things turned. He played Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song, which brought the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a limited series in September 1983, and Woodrow Call in Lonesome Dove in 1989. Then Oliver Stone cast him as Clay Shaw in JFK in 1991 and the Academy noticed for the first time - a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and the start of the stretch in which he seemed to be in everything.

The Fugitive is the one. Samuel Gerard is a deputy US marshal with no interior life on display and a considerable amount of impatience, and Jones won Best Supporting Actor for it at the ceremony in March 1994, along with the Golden Globe. Men in Black in 1997 took the same flat register and pointed it at comedy, to considerable commercial effect. In 2005 he directed and starred in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and took Best Actor at Cannes, which is not a route American action leads usually take.

The then-and-now comparison for Jones is a joke he has been in on for some time, since the face at forty-five already looked weathered and has not altered a great deal since. He was nominated for Best Actor for In the Valley of Elah in 2008, and for Best Supporting Actor for Lincoln in 2013, where he played Thaddeus Stevens and took a Screen Actors Guild award for it. Four Oscar nominations, one win, an Emmy and a Cannes prize. None of the late work reads as a comeback.