John Stamos

Daytime television made him. Stamos played Blackie Parrish on General Hospital and was nominated for a Daytime Emmy for it in 1983, at an age when most actors are still doing scene study. Then came Full House in 1987 and Jesse Katsopolis, the cool uncle with the leather jacket and the Elvis records, a part so precisely fitted to him that it worked as both a career and a cage.

What Stamos is genuinely good at is playing vanity without asking you to forgive it. Give him a man who believes he is the best-looking person in the room and he will let the belief curdle on camera: Dr. Brock Holt in Scream Queens, a character named Jean Hamm in the musical comedy Galavant, which tells you the register on its own, and the disgraced college coach reassigned to a girls' high school in Big Shot. He is also willing to play himself as the punchline, which he does in Private Parts and, with far less mercy, in Clone High.

The long middle of the career is television repair work. He joined ER as Tony Gates well into that show's run, worked through a run of network comedies, and returned to Jesse Katsopolis for Fuller House, which he also produced. The Disney voice work of recent years, Iron Man in Spidey and His Amazing Friends and in the LEGO Marvel specials, is the comfortable version of the same instinct.

He never had the film career the 1980s seemed to promise. He got something more durable instead, which is decades of being welcome on television.