Billy Zane

Zane's earliest credits are a joke about how careers begin: Match, one of Biff's henchmen, in Back to the Future and its sequel. Dead Calm (1989) was the real arrival, a three-hander on a yacht in which he plays a charming young man who is entirely wrong, and it earned him a Chicago Film Critics nomination as most promising actor. For about eight years the promise looked as though it would pay.

The specific gift is a smile that reaches nothing. Zane is superb at men who have been told their whole lives that they are owed something. Cal Hockley in Titanic (1997) is the definitive version, a fiance so petty and so wealthy that he becomes the most enjoyable presence in the film, and the ensemble took a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Tombstone gets a preening travelling actor out of him. The Believer hands him a soft-spoken fascist organiser and he plays it quietly enough to be genuinely disturbing.

The leading-man attempt was The Phantom (1996), a purple-suited pulp adventure far better liked now than it was on release, and it did not take. What followed was a long stretch of direct-to-video work, several Sniper sequels among it, and then a self-parody phase in which he plays a version of himself in Zoolander 2 and Holmes and Watson.

He is a more interesting actor than the last thirty years of his filmography suggest. Orlando, CQ and Demon Knight are all evidence that the taste was real. The industry simply stopped offering.