Hart Bochner

For a decade Bochner was cast as the handsome one. Rod in Breaking Away, Doc in the slasher Terror Train, Chris Adams in Rich and Famous, Aron Trask in a 1981 television East of Eden. Canadian, well spoken, hired for the jawline. Nothing in that run suggests a signature role was coming.

Then Die Hard. Harry Ellis is one of the great supporting creations in American action cinema, a company man who sincerely believes his deal-making instincts will work on somebody holding an automatic weapon, and Bochner plays him without a shred of self-protection. It is very funny and completely unsentimental about its own stupidity, and the reason it lasts is that he never once signals the joke. He commits to Ellis's confidence exactly as far as Ellis does.

He never got another part that good, which is a story about casting rather than ability. Apartment Zero, where he plays Jack Carney, is the one to argue for. Otherwise it is Byron Henry across the enormous War and Remembrance, Arthur Reeves in Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and a long tail of professors, colonels and fathers of somebody.

So he went behind the camera instead. He directed PCU in 1994, then High School High and Just Add Water, and has drifted back to occasional acting since, including a Lieutenant in Too Old to Die Young and a small part in the 2013 Carrie. Directing is the more interesting second act, and PCU has outlived most of the films he acted in.