Jude Law? Jude Law was in 17 different films in the last four months, all of them flops. I have a feelng that if we revive this thread in three years time Jude Law will be the headliner.
Edward Norton, on the other hand, will never be Tom Cruise or Johnny Depp - he’s just not that good looking. Norton is an Great Actor, not a Movie Star. I have a feeling he’ll be the next Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman or Sean Penn, none of whom ever reached Cruise-like levels of stardom.
I don’t know if this counts, but I’ve always thought Dennis Hopper should be a bigger star than he is. He’s been in some truly fantastic films (Easy Rider, Hoosiers, True Romance, etc.), but he never really made the transition to stardom. Pity, too. I think he’s great!
Alicia Silverstone comes to mind. When she did clueless, I was sure she was gonna become very famous. From IMDb it looks as if she’s still working, though nothing major.
Julia Ormond looked like she was gonna make it, starring or co-starring in some high profile projects, but then she just vanished.
Someone must have thought **Harve Presnell ** would be a big star, casting him in the lead in the big budget musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown (this was about the same time Hollywood refused to cast Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady because she wasn’t a big enough name). The film flopped, and Presnell vanished, until he made a comeback as a character actor, notably in Fargo and The Pretender.
Most people thought **Carrie Snodgress ** would have a long, successful career after starring in Diary of a Mad Housewife, but she quit acting to live with Neil Young and by the time she returned, she was only in supporting roles.
Candy Clark won an Oscar for her role in American Graffiti, but never reached stardom.
His excellent performance in if… caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick. He casted McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, which made him a big name and then…
He never really became a big name again. That is until he was in Caligula, but that was more a “WTF were you thinking?” type of attention than super stardom. It’s too bad, because he’s a great actor. He just chooses direct-to-video type of roles.
Juliette Lewis. I loved her early work. Claire Danes went off to uni but there is still time for her to be big.
Where is Christina Ricci lately? Ed Norton is an interesting choice. I disagree in saying that he is not good looking enough for superstardom, he just doesn’t seem to care. Sarah Polley was a huge child star in Canada and was touted as a cross between Uma Thurman and Jodie Foster when she first crossed over to American film but she seems content making movies no one ever sees these days.
What the heck happened to Christian Slater? From what I could tell, he had the acting chops to transcend the 80s-teen-actor quicksand that engulfed the likes of Corey Feldman and Molly Ringwald. This guy seemed destined to inherit Jack Nicholson’s role in Hollywood (and I guess he still could).
I know he’s been working and all, but Slater just doesn’t seem to be an A-lister anymore.
She seems to be content with mostly independent and smaller films. She definitely keeps working, and I noticed that the one she’s currently filming also stars Albert Finney, Liam Neeson, and Tim Robbins.
Well, she was the female lead in the remake of Dawn of the Dead.
After she did a story arc on the series, Wiseguy, I thought Joan Severance would have had a great career. Since then, she’s done mostly TV guest shots and direct-to-video crud. (OTOH, Kevin Spacey, who played her character’s brother, has done very well.)
Jennifer Beals was a Genuine Hot Patootie in Flashdance (1983), then tanked horribly in The Bride. She seems to have done mostly teevee stuff since then. The only thing on her post-1985 filmography that I’ve even heard of is Devil in a Blue Dress.
Wolf Meister… Yes, Michael Parks especially after, “Then Came Bronson”
Sir Laurence Harvey…Brilliant Actor! Should have received more leading roles here in the states. I’m not sure about his stardom in the U.K.
Kristine Kaufman…As a young man, I saw her in “Tauras Bulba” probably my first screen crush. I never saw her again. I know she married her leading man, Tony Curtis from the movie.
Ray Sharkey…Unfourtunately,he died too young. His re-occuring role in the Wiseguy showcased his talents.
He was big in the '80s as a comedy actor, and then made it big as Batman in the early 1990s. And then he started taking crappy role after crappy role and now he’s doing TV cameos and box-office bombs (Jack Frost and Desperate Measures to name a couple).
I just remembered Christophe Lambert, who started out good - Greystoke, Subway, Highlander… and lately Absolon, The Piano PlayerVercingétorix rating an abyssmal 2.7 at IMDb.