Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito was already thirty when he played Martini in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and the part that made him famous arrived three years later: Louie De Palma, the dispatcher in Taxi, a small man in a cage being vicious to everyone who walks past it. It won him an Emmy and a Golden Globe and fixed the public idea of him as a comic bully, which is about half right.

The film career ran on that energy for a decade, through Ruthless People, Twins, Junior and Batman Returns, where his Penguin is genuinely repulsive rather than cute. The better trick is what he does in drama. Sid Hudgens in L.A. Confidential is a tabloid parasite played with such relish that the film's rotten Los Angeles becomes credible, and Amos Calloway in Big Fish is warmth drawn from the same instrument.

He also directed, which is the most underrated section of the resume. Throw Momma from the Train (1987), The War of the Roses (1989), Matilda (1996) and Death to Smoochy (2002) are all comedies with something nasty running underneath, and Matilda has outlived nearly everything else he touched in the nineties. As a producer he backed Reality Bites, Pulp Fiction, Gattaca and Erin Brockovich, which is a better indie record than most producers who talk about it more.

Since 2006 he has played Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, a role with no dignity whatsoever, which he attacks in his eighties as though nothing had ever been asked of him before.