50 Handsome Leading Men Of The 80s And 90s, And Where They Are Today

For about fifteen years, the most reliable thing in Hollywood was a broad-shouldered, slightly ironic leading man who could carry a film without appearing to try. This collection follows fifty of them from the peak to the present. What happened to that job is a more interesting story than what happened to the faces.

For Fifteen Years The Charming Leading Man Was Hollywood's Safest Bet

The eighties and nineties produced a very specific breed of male movie star. He was on the poster, he was on the talk show, and audiences bought tickets because of him rather than because of the premise.

Harrison Ford is the extreme version of the type. He was paid ten thousand dollars for the first Star Wars in 1977; four years later Raiders of the Lost Ark was the highest-grossing film of 1981 and his fee had reached 5.9 million. His films have since taken roughly 5.65 billion dollars worldwide.

Then Franchises Took Over And That Job Simply Stopped Existing

It stopped working fairly suddenly. Franchises grew bigger than the actors inside them, superhero casting rewrote what a leading man was supposed to look like, and the mid-budget star vehicle largely vanished. A whole generation of actors who had been the entire reason a film got made found themselves in an industry that no longer needed that role.

What they did next splits into four fairly clean groups:

• Became character actors. Several did the best work of their careers once they stopped having to carry the poster.
• Moved to television. The timing was good - prestige TV arrived just as film stopped calling.
• Kept going on franchise work. Reprising a signature role decades later became a reliable second career.
• Quit entirely. Farmers, winemakers, full-time fathers. Sensibly and permanently.

The Recent Photo Tells You Which Group

This is the useful part of the format. A man photographed on a film set last year looks different from a man photographed at a family event, and the difference is usually visible before you read the caption.

The Double Standard That Becomes Obvious When You Compare Both Lists

Watch this collection immediately after the actresses of the same era. The men who have aged visibly are described as distinguished and characterful; the women rarely get that vocabulary. Nothing about the photographs justifies the difference.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Fifty faces, then and now, in about nine minutes. If you want the career detail behind the photographs, the Golden Era Files go through the peak years star by star.