David Caruso

The 1980s used him in ten-minute doses as a New York hothead: Deputy Mitch in First Blood, Topper in An Officer and a Gentleman, a candy-bar-codenamed henchman in Hudson Hawk, Dennis Gilley in Abel Ferrara's King of New York. The red hair and the coiled stillness made him memorable long before anyone offered him a lead.

NYPD Blue did, and briefly he was the most argued-about actor on American television. His John Kelly was quiet, wounded and unusually interior for a network cop, and the first season was built around him. He left in 1994, a few episodes into the second, for a film career that arrived as Kiss of Death and Jade and then stopped arriving. It became the standard cautionary tale of the decade, retold so often that the performances underneath it got buried.

The second act is the interesting part. After a stretch of smaller work, including the genuinely excellent asylum horror Session 9, he took CSI: Miami and played Horatio Caine for a decade with total, unembarrassed commitment: the tilted head, the sunglasses, the one-liner delivered sideways before the theme song. The internet made that a joke. He made it a global franchise, which is the better punchline. He has since retired from acting altogether.