6. Steve McQueen - An Enemy of the People
The Commitment: A personal project for McQueen, the star used his power as one of the highest-earning movie actors in the world following The Towering Inferno to get Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People onto the screen. McQueen would spend a long time trying to get it made, seeing him absent from films for four years, in the mean-time getting into character and growing his hair and beard until he resembled not the wolfman, but the wolfman's dad.
The Result: For proof of how in-deep McQueen was, just look at his beard - when a man sprouts so much fuzz from his face that it starts to look fake, that's dedication. When he does all that and Warner Bros just drops the film like a bag of hot spuds, refusing to release it domestically, that's unnecessary dedication. McQueen tried to make this the role that marked him out as more than just an action star, but that was hard to do when no-one got the chance to see his efforts. Remember, Steve McQueen was the man at the time, so throwing that away by walking around LA looking like a homeless madman was a bold move.