Tom Berenger

Tom Berenger, born Thomas Michael Moore in Chicago, spent the late 1970s and early 1980s as a handsome young actor in films that were often about how little that helps: Looking for Mr. Goodbar, The Sentinel, then The Big Chill, where he plays a television star quietly embarrassed to be one. He was being groomed for leading-man work and he was fine at it. Then Platoon happened.

Sergeant Barnes is one of the great screen soldiers because Berenger refuses to make him a monster you can dismiss. The scars, the flat voice, the total absence of doubt: he plays a man whose logic is coherent and appalling, and he plays it without a single wink to the audience. It brought an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe, and it permanently changed what he was cast as.

What followed was a long, prolific, wildly uneven career at the exact center of American genre film. He was the aging catcher in Major League, the married cop out of his depth in Someone to Watch Over Me, and from 1993 he was Thomas Beckett in Sniper, a role he has now played for three decades across a run of sequels that went straight to video. That stretch is easy to sneer at, and his own work inside it stays disciplined. He kept turning up in bigger films too, small and effective, as Peter Browning in Inception and as one of the department power brokers in Training Day. His Jim Vance in Hatfields & McCoys won him a Primetime Emmy, a quarter century after Platoon, and it is the best late work he has done.