Kurt Russell

Russell began acting as a child in the early 1960s and spent years afterward under a long-term contract with Walt Disney Pictures, appearing in a string of family comedies that made him a familiar, wholesome face to an entire generation of young television viewers.

Carpenter's favorite leading man, a former Disney kid reborn as the bearded, whiskey-drinking face of paranoid genre cinema, he deliberately reinvented his image starting in the early 1980s with John Carpenter's grittier, R-rated genre films, a transformation few former child stars have managed so completely.

Their collaborations across Escape from New York, The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China remain one of the most fruitful director-actor partnerships of the era, and Russell has said in interviews that Carpenter's trust in him to carry those films helped permanently change how the industry saw him.