9. Jean Claude Van Damme
Once there was a time when all audiences wanted to see was Chuck Norris giving a spinning roundhouse kick to some guy in the face. Then audiences evolved so that we wanted to see a guy do the splits and kick two guys in the face simultaneously. Jean Claude Van Damme did that (JCVD to his friends) to a great extent in the late eighties and early nineties. Taking the less talk/more action route of such action luminaries before him as Schwarzenegger and Stallone, he broke out in 1988's Bloodsport, followed that by Kickboxer (aka Bloodsport 2) then a series of action movies that involved mullets, kicking people in the face and co-starring with himself. Much like the attempts to explain his Belgian accent as the product of the Louisiana bayou or French-Canadian parents became tired, so too did the audience.
So what happened? Sometime in the mid-nineties, after the creative peak of the cult Time Cop and his guest role as himself in Friends in 1996, he fell into a pile of cocaine and failed to find his way out until years later. Rumors abounded of his $10,000 a week cocaine habit in '96. It was so bad he co-starred with Dennis Rodman in Double Team (a sports reference, not a porn one). A short-lived stay in rehab did nothing and although he has managed to continue a steady string of straight-to-video movies and the critically acclaimed JCVD in 2008, he is steadily trying to build a path back towards respectability. Despite bowing out of The Expendables in 2009, he signed on for the sequel finally giving us all a chance to see JCVD and Sly fist to face. However, roles will remain scarce as long as he avoids joining the Screen Actors Guild, regulating him to Gerald Depardieu status.