A Hollywood leading man since the early 1970s and a four-time Oscar nominee, Jeff Bridges finally won an Oscar in 2010 for his performance as hard-living country singer Bad Blake in Crazy Heart. The son of actor Lloyd Bridges, Jeff Bridges 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; for his supporting role in The Contender (2000, starring Joan Allen); and for his grizzled, be-eyepatched role as Rooster Cogburn in the 2010 western True Grit (with Hailee Steinfeld). An accomplished amateur photographer, painter and musician, Jeff 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, the philosophical bowling-friendly slacker in the Coen Brothers' 1998 beloved cult comedy The Big Lebowski. Bridges sang his own part as fictional country music star Bad Blake in the 2009 film Crazy Heart, the role that won him the Academy Award as best actor. 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); the inspirational horse drama Seabiscuit (2003); the action blockbuster Iron Man (2008); and the Coen brothers western True Grit.

Extra credit: Jeff Bridges married the former Susan Geston on 5 June 1977; he told Reader's Digest in 2006 that they met when he was filming Rancho Deluxe in 1974. They have three daughters: Isabelle (b. 1981), Jessica (b. 1983), and Haley (b. 1985).