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Notable individuals
Actors & Actresses
Actors from the 1950s and 1960s such as John Wayne,
Steve McQueen and Lee Marvin passed the torch in the
1970s to actors such as Charles Bronson, martial artist
Chuck Norris, and Clint Eastwood. In the 1980s, Mel
Gibson and Danny Glover had a popular string of "buddy
cop" films in the Lethal Weapon franchise. Beginning in
the mid-1980s, actors such as the burly ex-bodybuilder
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone wielded
machine guns in a number of action films. Stern-faced
martial artist Steven Seagal made a number of films.
Bruce Willis played a Western-inspired hero in the
popular Die Hard series of action films.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Asian actors Chow Yun-Fat,
Jet Li, Hrithik Roshan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan and
Jackie Chan appeared in a number of different types of
action films, and US actor Wesley Snipes had many roles.
As well, several female actors had major roles in action
films, such as Michelle Yeoh, Lucy Liu, and ex-model
Milla Jovovich. While Keanu Reeves and Harrison Ford
both had major roles in action sci-fi films (The Matrix
and Blade Runner, respectively), Ford branched out into
a number of other action genres, such as
action-adventure films.
European action actors such as Belgian-born
Jean-Claude Van Damme and French-Born Jean Reno and
British-born Jason Statham appeared in a number of 1990s
and 2000s-era action films. US actor Matt Damon, who was
nominated for an Academy Award for his sensitive
portrayal of a math genius working as a janitor in Good
Will Hunting, metamorphosed into an action hero with the
car chase and gunfire-filled Bourne Identity franchise.
For a longer list of action film actors, see the List of
action film actors article.
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