Liam Neeson

Being nobody was the best thing that happened to him. Steven Spielberg cast him as Oskar Schindler specifically because Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson had already circled the role, and Steven Spielberg didn't want a movie star's baggage competing with the character. Neeson had been grinding stage work for years, spotted at Dublin's Abbey Theatre before landing bit parts in Hollywood. Schindler's List earned him an Oscar nomination and proved he could carry a film built entirely on moral weight, not marquee value. He followed that with Qui-Gon Jinn in Star Wars and a decade as the actor Hollywood called when they needed gravitas without box office certainty.

At 55, he took a role Jeff Bridges had dropped, in a film everyone assumed would go straight to video. Taken grossed $226 million on a $25 million budget and turned him into an action franchise unto himself. He reportedly made $15 million for Taken 2 and $20 million for Taken 3, then spent the next decade making variations on the same film, some better than others. Now 73, he's told People magazine 'You can't fool audiences,' while showing up in The Naked Gun reboot. The man who spent the 1990s being cast for moral weight now sells tickets on the promise he'll break someone's neck.

His wife Natasha Richardson fell on a beginner ski slope at Mont Tremblant in 2009, waved off the ambulance, walked back to her hotel room, and died two days later from a brain hemorrhage. Neeson has said he still hears her walking through the door. Before any of this, he spent his teens as a regional boxing champion in Ballymena, Northern Ireland, worked as a forklift operator for Guinness, and flunked out of Queen's University. The physicality that makes his action films work isn't a Hollywood invention. He had it long before anyone was paying attention.