Dennis Quaid

Quaid spent the 1980s as one of American cinema's great grinners. He came out of Houston into a string of studio pictures that all traded on the same asset, a wide and slightly untrustworthy smile plus a physical ease that made him plausible as an astronaut, a pilot or a rock and roll lunatic. The Right Stuff (1983) is where it lands best, Gordon Cooper played as pure appetite.

The grin is also the trap. For twenty years Hollywood asked him to be likeable and he obliged, through Innerspace, DragonHeart, The Parent Trap, The Rookie, The Day After Tomorrow and Yours, Mine and Ours, a long line of fathers and captains who will do the right thing by the third act. He is genuinely good at that, and it is not very interesting.

Then somebody asks him to switch it off. Far from Heaven (2002) is the performance of his career and earned him a Golden Globe nomination: a 1950s husband whose entire life is a maintained surface, played with the charm still running and nothing behind it. Traffic uses him the same way, as an amiable lawyer with no floor. The Substance (2024) pushes the idea to its grotesque conclusion, a television executive eating shellfish while he describes a woman's obsolescence.

The recent run mixes faith-based hits, disaster films and dog pictures, which is a livelihood rather than a plan. The ceiling is still there, though, on the rare occasion a director is willing to use the smile against him.