Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis was born on an American base in West Germany in 1955, started out on the off-Broadway stage in the 1970s, and became famous on television with the detective comedy Moonlighting from 1985. He won a Primetime Emmy for it. Nobody at the time thought of him as an action lead, which is exactly why Die Hard worked in 1988: John McClane bleeds, panics, talks to himself and spends most of the film barefoot and losing.

That single choice reset a genre. The eighties action hero had been an unkillable slab of muscle; Willis played a tired New York cop who was frightened and sarcastic about being frightened, and most of the following decade borrowed the tone. His best performances sit in a narrow band of amused fatalism: the boxer in Pulp Fiction, the time-displaced prisoner in Twelve Monkeys, the cab driver in The Fifth Element, the child psychologist in The Sixth Sense who is the calmest man in a horror film.

Volume is the complicating factor. He appeared in over a hundred films, and a large number are interchangeable action pictures where he turns up for a few days and is visibly not engaged. That makes the good work harder to find rather than any less good. Away from film he released the album The Return of Bruno in 1987, made his Broadway debut in a stage version of Misery in 2015, and collected a Golden Globe and two Primetime Emmys across his career. He has since retired from acting.