Richard Dreyfuss

Dreyfuss began acting as a teenager in Los Angeles community theater before building a career through television guest roles in the late 1960s, developing the anxious, motor-mouthed everyman persona that would define his biggest 1970s roles.

Spielberg's everyman of the 70s — an ordinary lineman sculpting mountains out of mashed potatoes, wrecked and exalted by wonder — had already worked with Spielberg on Jaws two years earlier, and reportedly agreed to Close Encounters partly because he wanted to keep collaborating with the director he considered the most exciting of his generation.

He won the Academy Award for Best Actor the same year the film was released, for the comedy The Goodbye Girl, making 1977 an unusually decorated year for an actor already appearing in one of the era's biggest science fiction films.