Wesley Snipes

Wesley Snipes came up through Spike Lee's films, playing a jazz musician in Mo' Better Blues and the married architect at the centre of Jungle Fever, and then took the part that made him unavoidable: Nino Brown in New Jack City, a drug lord played with a courtly politeness the film itself never quite matches.

The decade that followed is one of the strangest good runs in American action cinema, because he refused to settle into a lane. White Men Can't Jump is a comedy built on his timing. Passenger 57, Demolition Man and Rising Sun are three completely different registers of tough. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar has him in drag playing it with total sincerity, and One Night Stand, a small drama, won him the Volpi Cup for best actor at Venice.

Then Blade, in 1998, before the modern superhero film existed. Snipes played the half-vampire hunter as a martial artist first and a comic-book character a distant second, and that decision is why the fights still look better than most of what came after. Two sequels followed and the trilogy remains the spine of his reputation.

The 2000s thinned into a long stretch of direct-to-video action pictures with interchangeable titles, work that pays and quietly costs. The return has been on other people's terms and none the worse for it: a very funny supporting turn in Dolemite Is My Name, and picking the sword back up for Deadpool & Wolverine, twenty-six years after the first film.