Jeff Bridges

A Hollywood leading man since the early 1970s and a four-time Oscar nominee, Jeff Bridges somehow retains his reputation as an unheralded movie actor. The son of actor Lloyd Bridges, Jeff grew up in showbiz: as a kid he appeared on his dad's underwater adventure series, Sea Hunt (1958-61). Then Jeff and his brother, Beau Bridges, became actors in their own right. Jeff's first big role was as the small-town Texas boy Duane in the 1971 Peter Bogdanovich film, The Last Picture Show, for which he was nominated for his first best supporting actor Oscar. His other Oscar nominations are for his supporting role in Thunderbolt & Lightfoot (1974, opposite Clint Eastwood); for his starring role in 1984's Starman; and for his supporting role in The Contender (2000, starring Joan Allen). An accomplished amateur photographer, painter and musician, Bridges is clearly not a regular guy, but that's how he often comes across on screen. His talent for playing a non-threatening everyman was especially useful for one of his best-known roles, as The Dude in the Coen brothers' 1998 comedy The Big Lebowski. Bridges's other notable films include the low-key thriller Cutter's Way (1981); the Disney-made, semi-animated Tron (1982); the Francis Ford Coppola-directed biopic Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988); the rueful romance The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989); the creepy thriller The Vanishing (1993); the heartbreaking drama Fearless (1993); the jittery bomb gripper Blown Away (1994); and the inspirational horse drama Seabiscuit (2003).