Gage Skidmore · CC BY-SA 3.0

Jeff Goldblum spent the 1970s in small parts for Robert Altman and Woody Allen before becoming, almost by accident, a face of the summer blockbuster — Ian Malcolm's nervous chaos-theory patter in Jurassic Park and David Levinson saving the world with a laptop virus in Independence Day. He kept working with directors who valued his particular cadence over box office, becoming a fixture of Wes Anderson's films from The Life Aquatic onward, and returned to blockbuster scale late in his career as the Grandmaster in the Marvel films and the Wizard of Oz in Wicked.