Martin Scorsese’s breakthrough year was 1973 with the release of Mean Streets as was Robert De Niro’s.
Snoop Dogg in 2024. That guy seems to be everywhere now.
Andy Gibb (the younger brother of the three Bee Gees), sure.
The Bee Gees had been extremely successful for years prior to Saturday Night Fever (the soundtrack to which was where those 1977/78 hits of theirs appeared) – prior to that album, the Bee Gees had eight songs reach the top 10 in the U.S. (as well as numerous hits in their native Australia, the UK, etc.) If the Bee Gees had a “breakthrough year,” it was 1967, when they released six hit songs.
The massive success of Saturday Night Fever absolutely did help to reinvigorate their career, but it also painted them as the poster boys for disco, and when disco music rapidly declined in popularity in 1980, along with their appearance in the absolute bomb movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1878), it took years for their popularity to rebound.
Truly a film ahead of its time.
Lordy, nice typo, kenobi! 
Sorry, the topic of this thread is artistic breakthrough years, not artistic sellout years 
Some actors with longevity had massive years. Edward Norton’s first three movies came out in 1996: Primal Fear, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Everyone Says I Love You. All three were critical successes, and he got an Oscar nomination from one of them. It was a pretty notable introductory splash for Hollywood.
Jessica Chastain had a few acting credits already, but in 2011 she was in six released movies, including Coriolanus, Take Shelter, Terence Malick’s The Tree of Life and the big hit and Oscar-winner The Help. That one year put her on the map in a big way.
Dylan 1963 is a good example. He got a rave review from the NY Times in 1961, but that was his break but not any kind of breakthrough, and then he put out his first album but he wrote only two songs on it. In 1963, his Freewheelin’ album was released with many now-classics on it, and he was the talk of the–well, everywhere.
I’d like to nominate Somerset Maugham for 1908. He’d written some novels, and some plays before that, but he was basically your standard starving artist, In 1908, he got four plays running simultaneously in London, and became rich and famous.
All of that, and even before releasing “Freewheelin’”, that year he had had his breakthrough as a songwriter with Peter, Paul and Mary’s hit version of “Blowin’ In The Wind”.
The other Elvis - Costello.
He had been around for years, trying and failing, achieving nothing. There’s an industry story that the first item of mail that Stiff records ever received was a Declan McManus demo. Stiff renamed him Elvis, envisioned him as the house songwriter, but he made an album anyway.
1977 was his year.
j
The Elvis Costello post reminded me about Ric Ocasek and Benjamin Orr of The Cars. They first met in the mid-60s, then formed a band in 1968. For the next ten years, they performed as a duo and as part of a few different groups. Finally, after forming The Cars in 1976, they broke through with The Cars in 1978. Ocasek was 34 at the time, which was pretty old to be making such a big debut album.
David Bowie had been knocking around for a while, recorded a bunch pf albums, and even released a hit single (“Space Oddity”) in 1969 - which he completely failed to translate to gigs or album sales. It was only three years later in 1972, when he made Ziggy Stardust, that he suddenly catapulted into superstardom.
In hindsight (I was only three in 1971), it’s a mystery to me that “Hunky Dory” wasn’t his breakthrough, it’s my favorite Bowie album and had a strong single with “Changes”, and several other now classics like “Life On Mars?” and “Oh! You Pretty Things”, but it tanked. I like it better than “Ziggy”.
Not an artist, but Albert Einstein published four physics papers that vaulted him from obscure Swiss patent clerk to famous scientist, all in 1905, sometimes referred to as his annus mirabilis.
Well, let’s not get carried away. If we open this discussion up to non-artists, we’ll get flooded fast. I can think of a dozen Presidents, for example, who were close to unknown before beginning their campaign and were the most famous person in the world at the end of it. And virtually every Supreme Court Justice. An artistic breakthrough of that sort is surprisingly rare, I’m finding.
Agree with every word. The only thing I would add is that at the time of its release, Hunky Dory got quite a few very positive reviews, so anyone reading the music press had been put on notice. (Not that I was old enough to be reading NME* and Melody Maker)
j
* - New Musical Express
Oh, and PS - Oh! You Pretty Things was a pretty big hit at the time for (of all people) Herman’s Hermits
Really? I had no idea. I’ve always considered Herman’s Hermits the most lightweight and vanilla band of the so-called British invasion, and they had a hit with “Oh! You Pretty Things” of all songs? I didn’t even know they still existed and had hits in 1971.
Oops - my bad. It was former HH frontman Peter Noone.
j
OK—here’s what we have so far. Chime in if I’ve left anyone’s pick off the list so far, feel free to chime in to settle years for which we have multiple nominations (who was the more sensational hit, or who had the more successful career), and please nominate a few more years and artists, particularly of the non-musical type. When was Robin Williams’ breakthrough? Meryl Streep’s? John Irving’s? Washington Irving’s? Denzel Washington’s? Bogart’s? Tolstoy’s? Dustin Hoffman’s? Not all will have had sensational breakthroughs but I think many of these did.
1497 Michelangelo
1908 Maugham
1913 Stravinsky
1926 Hemingway
1947 Brando
1948 Mailer
1949 Arthur Miller
1953 Beckett
1956 Elvis
1963 Dylan
1964 The Beatles
1967 Hendrix or Bee Gees
1969 Vonnegut or Led Zeppelin?
1972 Bowie
1973 Scorsese or Pink Floyd?
1975 Spielberg or Springsteen?
1977 Elvis Costello
1978 Andy Gibb or The Cars?
1991 Nirvana
1996 Norton
Ha! My mom and I were just talking about this! She knew who he was before the Olympics but now she sees him everywhere as he is invading the places where old white ladies are, it seems.
This actually should be a post in a new thread about resurgences. I do think he had his breakthrough many years before.