A sudden breakthrough performance is a hard thing to live up to. I'm not talking the first performance in an actors' or actresses' career, but that first part which brought the star-in-question to wider attention. It's a double-edged sword: on the one side there is the fact that the performer is finally being recognised - on the map, as it were; on the other there is an immense pressure, one which can see the actor or actress in question forever shadowed by their big break. While most great performers manage to overcome and indeed better their breakthrough performance, those included on this list have never quite achieved the same feat. That's not to say that they haven't been good since then - and certainly in most cases everyone on show here has been great in a number of roles - but rather that they just can't quite match the performance which brought them their initial acclaim. All of the stars on this list still perform at least semi-regularly, so there's nothing stopping them from possibly topping their breakthrough role in the future, but, for now at least, they are a group yet to that breakout hit.
9. Russell Crowe As Bud White - L.A. Confidential
He might've won an Oscar for Ridley Scott's Gladiator - an effective if overstated performance - but Russell Crowe's best performance remains this one, his turn as Bud White in the film which introduced him to American audiences proper, L.A. Confidential. As Bud White, Crowe is an absolute force of a nature, an aggressive, unstable cop with a predilection towards brutal, no-holes-barred beatings. Throughout the film "Bud White" is used as a kind-of mantra for violent foreshadowing, and Crowe, with a an un-fancy buzz-cut and unblinking eyes, plays him as a hurricane, a destructive inevitability. In a film full of great performances from the likes of Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger, and James Cromwell, Crowe is arguably the standout, a true hard-man in a film full of people only playing them. The closest Crowe has come to matching his turn as Bud White is actually as the whistle-blower at the centre of Michael Mann's superb The Insider. That film booked his first Best Actor Oscar nomination - the first of three in a row, succeeded by Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind - and it's actually a technically superior performance to his one in LA Conf., but for sheer firebrand presence, L.A. Confidential just edges it out.
