Rise to Fame
He was born into it. Lloyd Bridges was his father, and Jeff was doing TV on Sea Hunt before he was ten. The Last Picture Show in 1971 changed the math: Bogdanovich cast him as a small-town Texas teenager, and Bridges played it with enough raw vulnerability to earn an Oscar nomination at 22. The big-star moment never really came. Instead, he became the actor you trusted, racking up serious roles and Oscar nominations before The Big Lebowski arrived in 1998 to disappointing box office and became a genuine cult phenomenon over the next two decades.
In the Spotlight
He won the Oscar for Crazy Heart at 60, overdue by about four nominations. Then came a bigger fight: diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in October 2020, a 9-by-12-inch tumor. He went through chemo and then contracted COVID while immunocompromised. He's said the virus made the cancer look manageable by comparison. By 2021 he was in remission. By 2024 he was back filming The Old Man Season 2 on FX and lining up Tron: Ares and a Terry Gilliam film. The public perception is somewhere between beloved and bulletproof.
Side Notes
The Big Lebowski now has its own religion, Dudeism. His band, The Abiders, takes the name from The Dude's catchphrase. He met his wife Susan on the set of Rancho Deluxe in 1975, where she was working as a ranch hand; they married in 1977. He also photographs every film he works on and released a 2015 ambient album, Sleeping Tapes, donating all proceeds to No Kid Hungry. The career got the Oscar. The reputation earned something harder to manufacture.