10 Hollywood Stars That Let Instant Success Go To Their Heads

6. Steven Seagal

Early Success: Seagal started his professional career in martial arts and only got into acting by chance, after putting on an Akido demonstration to Warner Bros. chiefs as a favour to one of his students. Sufficiently impressed, they offered him a number of scripts, but he turned them down in favour of a producer-actor role in Above the Law. The film was a success and Seagal's performance received solid praise. His star would soon rise higher with his starring role in the Hollywood blackbuster hit Under Siege in 1992. The film grossed over $150m worldwide. What Happened Next? Seagal chose to make the massively preachy, massively pretentious On Deadly Ground, essentially convincing himself he could heal the world through acting. As a result of his early success in action roles, he was given almost total creative freedom for the film, featuring acting talent such as Michael Caine and Billy Bob Thornton in supporting roles. Intended as the moment he became a respectable actor/ film-maker, his performance, along with the movie's preachy content, was panned by critics, with the film also becoming a major turkey at the box office. It seems this was the moment Seagall began to believe his own hype, overestimating his acting chops and, as a result, he's been releasing straight-to-VHS duds ever since.