Sylvester Stallone

Sylvester Stallone has had a number-one film in six consecutive decades, a record shared with exactly one other actor, and all three of his Academy Award nominations trace back to a single character. Rocky arrived in 1976 and did something American cinema had briefly stopped doing: it took an unglamorous, barely articulate man seriously and asked the audience to want something on his behalf.

He is a better filmmaker than he is usually credited with being. He directed Rocky II, III and IV himself, along with Rocky Balboa and the 2008 Rambo, and he understands montage, iconography and the exact correct length of a training sequence better than almost anyone alive. What he does not do is dialogue, and the eighties films built entirely on posture, Cobra and Over the Top and the later Rambo sequels, are where the limitation sits fully exposed.

The best straight acting is in First Blood, a quiet and damaged film about a veteran nobody will leave alone, made before the sequels turned Rambo into a poster. Cop Land is the other one: a passed-over small-town sheriff surrounded by better-connected men, played with almost no volume at all.

Late Stallone is a genuine second act. The Expendables was his own nostalgia machine, assembled from the cast of his youth. Creed and Creed II handed Rocky to a younger fighter and brought a third Oscar nomination forty years after the first. Tulsa King put him on television as a lead for the first time, and he is looser there than he has been in decades.