John Travolta

John Travolta has had two of the most famous comebacks in film, which means he has also had two collapses, and the career only makes sense if you hold both. Television made him first. Then Carrie in 1976, Saturday Night Fever in 1977, which brought an Academy Award nomination while he was still in his early twenties, and Grease in 1978: three films in three years that made him the biggest young star in America.

Blow Out in 1981 contains the best acting of that period and almost nobody saw it. The eighties went badly, and by the end of the decade he was making Look Who's Talking sequels. Pulp Fiction rebuilt him in 1994, and the reason it worked is that the film cast him for stillness rather than charisma. Vincent Vega is slow, dim and physically heavy, and Travolta plays every beat half a second behind everyone else in the room.

The run that followed is genuinely strong, Get Shorty, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, A Civil Action, Primary Colors, and it includes a Golden Globe. Then Battlefield Earth in 2000, received so badly it functions as a second collapse, followed by two decades of thrillers of steeply varying quality. Hairspray in 2007 is the reminder of what he can still do when a film asks him to perform rather than glower. Cannes gave him an honorary Palme d'Or. He is a movie star of a kind that barely exists now, and roughly a third of the filmography is worth your evening.