The Dude

Jeff Bridges made his uncredited movie debut as a babe-in-arms in 1950 in The Company She Keeps, recalled by its distinguished producer, John Houseman, as 'the only picture of which I am totally ashamed'. He went on to earn from Pauline Kael the tribute that he 'may be the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived'. He studied acting in his teens and took up photography at the same time, and after his wife gave him a Widelux camera in the late 1970s, he became one of those actors (Peter Sellers, Dennis Hopper and Diane Keaton among them) who became photographers of professional standing. His speciality has been pictures taken of the film-making process. 'I found that photography was a great way of relaxing on the set,' he has said. 'It was a kind of entertainment for me - shooting pictures of everyone else on the job.'

All his life has been spent in and around movie studios, and he has wryly described himself as 'the product of nepotism'. He was born in Los Angeles in 1949, son of Lloyd Bridges (star of B-movies, supporting actor in major films), and brother of Beau Bridges, eight years his senior. His father, briefly a member of the Communist Party, became a reluctant 'friendly witness' before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 to protect his family. He remained a man of liberal views, but the dark cloud of betrayal hung over him until his dying day. Beau, after attempting a career as a basketball player, became a glamorous juvenile lead, at least for a while. Meanwhile Jeff made a couple of appearances in his father's TV series Sea Hunt, did his military service in the Coast Guard and studied drama in New York. He surfaced in the cinema aged 21, as a small-town Texas teenager in Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show (1971), for which he received an Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.

With this role the six-foot-two Jeff eclipsed his father and brother and became a star. Playing a boy notable for his decency and ordinariness, desperate to lose his virginity and ready to serve in the Korean War without protest (the film's setting is 1951), he set a pattern for the kind of Americans he was to impersonate over the next 35 years. Admittedly, he was Oscar-nominated in 1984 as an extraterrestrial who crashes to earth in Starman (1984). But immediately on landing, his alien adopts the appearance and demeanour of an average US citizen.

In the four years after The Last Picture Show he was a young boxer pathetically hooked on getting ahead in the fight game in John Huston's superb Fat City; leader of a band of Civil War draft-dodgers out west in Robert Benton's directorial debut Bad Company (a Vietnam War allegory); the alcoholic young drifter in the John Frankenheimer film, The Iceman Cometh; a juvenile criminal drawn into an intense relationship with Clint Eastwood in Michael Cimino's debut Thunderbolt and Lightfoot; the innocent who comes to 1930s California to make his name as a writer and becomes a B-movie actor in Howard Zieff's Hearts of the West; and the eccentric Atlanta millionaire who takes up with local body-builders in Bob Rafelson's offbeat Stay Hungry. All were highly individual pictures, deep in the American grain, involving no conventional heroics.

This remarkable beginning led critics to compare him with Gary Cooper and Robert Mitchum for the charm, presence and low-key acting he brought to his roles in these cult classics. There followed three decades of constant employment. His performances deepened, occasionally he'd shock audiences when turning out to be the villain, hiding behind that open face (as in Jagged Edge), but he never indulged in protective egotism. Few of his pictures were sensational box-office successes, several were celebrated failures, but most were of considerable interest. Bridges never gave a bad performance, in several cases he was quite brilliant and usually projected a curious and very American combination of hope and puzzlement.

His best known later roles are the troubled US president in The Contender (2000) and the imperturbable slacker in the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski, though no single scene is as memorable as that in which he played the piano in The Fabulous Baker Boys as Michelle Pfeiffer sat on top of it singing 'Makin' Whoopee'. Perhaps his greatest performance, however, is his portrayal of a Californian beach bum seeking redemption by exposing an upper-class murderer in Ivan Passer's thriller Cutter's Way (1981), a critical and box-office failure now widely regarded as a masterpiece.