Peter Fonda

The surname arrived with terms attached. Son of Henry, brother of Jane, later father of Bridget and Justin, Fonda spent the early sixties in respectable pictures like The Victors and Lilith and then walked away from all of it into Roger Corman's shop at American International. The Wild Angels in 1966 and The Trip in 1967 were cheap, fast and disreputable, and they gave him a persona that no amount of family prestige could have bought.

Easy Rider followed in 1969, with Fonda as Wyatt. He earned an Academy Award nomination for co-writing it, one of two Oscar nominations across his life, the other coming decades later for his performance in Ulee's Gold. The film made him the face of something enormous, which is a mixed inheritance for an actor. For most of the seventies and eighties he was hired to sell that face: Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, Race with the Devil, High-Ballin, and a bit part in The Cannonball Run where he is credited simply as Chief Biker.

The reappraisal came in the nineties. Ulee's Gold won him the Golden Globe for Best Actor, and The Passion of Ayn Rand later brought a second Globe for supporting work on television. Better still, directors started using the icon rather than the image. Terry Valentine in The Limey is the great late performance: a man who got rich off the sixties and knows precisely what he traded for it, played by the person the audience most associates with that decade. Steven Soderbergh cast the biography, not the actor, and Fonda understood the assignment.

He kept working steadily until his death in 2019, doing sharp supporting turns in 3:10 to Yuma and The Ballad of Lefty Brown alongside the paycheque jobs. The last of his films, The Last Full Measure, reached audiences after he was gone.