Jeff Goldblum

Goldblum studied acting in New York under the legendary teacher Sanford Meisner before building a career through the 1970s and 80s as a distinctive, offbeat supporting player in comedies and dramas, developing the rapid, digressive verbal style that would become his trademark.

Chaos theory in human form, Goldblum's Ian Malcolm turned a lecture on nonlinear dynamics into a leather-jacketed rock performance. He improvised much of Malcolm's distinctive verbal cadence and physical mannerisms on set, and his now-iconic reclining pose became one of the most parodied images from the entire film.

He reprised the role in two sequels, and his performance is widely credited with popularizing chaos theory as a mainstream pop-culture reference point — an unusually direct instance of a blockbuster performance shifting how a scientific concept entered everyday conversation.