Patrick Duffy

Patrick Duffy, born in Townsend, Montana in 1949, got his first lead playing the sole survivor of a lost undersea civilisation. Man from Atlantis was the kind of network science fiction that usually leads nowhere; instead it put him in front of the producers casting a new CBS serial about a Texas oil family.

Bobby Ewing is the role, and the reason it held for thirteen years is that Duffy played the decent one without letting decency turn dull. On a show whose engine was his brother's appetite, somebody had to be the moral centre and stay watchable, which is a harder acting job than the villain's and gets a fraction of the credit for it. He carried it through the original run of Dallas from 1978 to 1991 and again in the TNT continuation from 2012 to 2014.

The second act was the family sitcom. Step by Step made him Frank Lambert from 1991 to 1998 in a blended-family format that was already old when they started, and he underplayed it, which is why it still works. Since then he has been a working television actor rather than a star: Stephen Logan on The Bold and the Beautiful, the father in Welcome to Sweden, voice roles as Steve Trevor and in Goof Troop, and a steady supply of Christmas movies, which is where American television keeps its familiar faces warm.