I think you can chalk some of it up to poor choices in scripts and directors. Michael Caine, for example, was an A-List star for years, then started cashing in by taking roles in increasingly bad movies. Some actors just have a knack for finding the directors and roles that make them look good and who know how to work around their limitations.
Sir Lawrence Oliver took a lot of bad roles toward the end of his career just for the money.
John Gilbert couldn’t adjust to the acting style of the sound era (his voice wasn’t that bad, contrary to legend, but the dialog was terrible*,)
** Singin’in the Rain* alludes to this.
Caine was reported to have said, about Jaws: The Revenge:
Maybe that explains Orson Welles, who in his younger days was said to be the next Tyrone Power.
Not that Welles’ later acting was all that terrible. He was an amusing Le Chiffre in “Casino Royale”.
Travolta once said Hollywood likes kicking him out so they can welcome him back.
He solely cashed in on bad roles in mediocre movies and advertisements to finance his own projects, which unfortunately almost never got finished the older he got.
Yes, but did their acting get worse (which is what the OP is talking about), or just their roles? They may have been dialing it in while still able to give a good performance if they chose.
Granted, but: Caine was in his mid-fifties then; and, with his best leading-man days behind him, he picked up yet another Oscar nomination (for Quiet American) and yet another win (for Cider House Rules) before he became Christopher Nolan’s good-luck charm in lucrative blockbuster after lucrative blockbuster and on and on without end. Since there was no way he could keep headlining the types of movies that made him a star in his thirties, what the hell else was the guy going to do with his sixties?
Linsey Lohan seemed to be a talented actress who’s had all the opportunities in the world to mature into a respected Hollywood regular but between her own actions and her parents turned herself into a joke of a talent that nobody takes seriously anymore.
Shia Lebeouf seems to be struggling with some personal issues.
Olivier had his share of bad acting toward the end – The Boys from Brazil or Inchon, for example. He still had the chops, but if he didn’t care for a project, he overacted blatantly.
I happened to catch American Graffiti on cable yesterday. I’ve seen the movie enough that I start looking for little things. Cindy Williams had the most amazing range of facial expressions throughout the film, particularly her being simultaneously angry at, devoted to, and afraid of losing Ron Howard’s character. She also got good reviews for her role in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Unfortunately, her next career move was* Laverne & Shirley*, which did not call for a subtle, nuanced performance.
That may be true but he has generally been praised for his acting.
Nicolas Cage was great in Kick-Ass, but that may have been partly because he was playing off Chloe Grace Moretz, who was amazing in that movie. He might be one of those actors who really needs a good co-star to bounce off.
Speaking of Cage and Travolta, I recently watched Face/Off, because it was one of the few 90s action movies I hadn’t got round to seeing at the time (because it sounded awful), and it has surprisingly good reviews. Most of it was awful because the storyline was ridiculous, but Travolta was not awful at all. You could really tell when he was the cop character and when he was the villain. Cage was meh (and miscast, which was one of the problems - other characters kept saying how amazingly hot he was), but Travolta really was good. The man can act.
Caine transitioned from an A-lister to a character actor, and became excellent as a character actor. The way he played the roles in Quills and The Dark Knight was very similar, but it still worked. If I see his name in a movie I’m likely to watch it and very unlikely to dislike him in it.
“You’re out of order!!! The whole system is out of order!!!”…is when Pacino turned.
You know for a two time Academy Award winner…wed don’t hear much from Kevin Costner.
Someone already mentioned Mickey Rourke.
I wouldn’t exactly consider Dwayne Johnson to be a great actor but the movies Jumanji and Journey to the Center of the Eartn were rather disappointing.
Mel Gibson.
The man could practically do no wrong for a solid two decades, then after winning the Oscars with Braveheart, he didn’t go fully off the rails right away, but the train was definitely teetering, even before his racist, misogynistic rants were made public. He made *another ***Lethal Weapon **sequel, made the legit great Apocalypto, but then apparently felt a strong need to assert his American patriotism with a pair of flag-waving schmaltz movies (**The Patriot **and We Were Soldiers) that were both pathetically transparent (and terrible) attempts to get back into the Oscar conversation.
After pumping out a series of bad B-movies he took another whack at the Oscar tree with Hacksaw Ridge and while more successful than the other two attempts, I personally found it to be boring as shit; it takes almost 90 minutes of bullshit to even get to the actual war.
I don’t know if anyone ever though of Dwayne Johnson as a “promising actor” but I think the guy knows exactly what kind of actor he is and is at the peak of his career right now. He’s getting the lead role in campy action blockbusters one after another that are making the studios rich and making him rich.
Depp hasn’t, imo, gone off the rails. He started his career as a teen heart-throb and deliberately steered into some weirder roles to avoid that label. He will still turn in a solid performance when asked. He did The Tourist and Alice In Wonderland the same year.
Nic Cage is a good actor with a very poor financial sense that led to him taking any role to meet his debts.
Terrence Howard was flying high after Hustle & Flow and got a lot of money to star in Iron Man. Then he didn’t make it to the sequel, and it depends on who you ask whether he got greedy or whether they fired him without attempting to negotiate. At any rate, he’s in a pretty successful TV show but it completely nuts, last telling people about the new math he invented.