7. Tom Hanks
What He Was Doing Ten Years Ago: Working with big directors on the back of the nineties. Tom Hanks defined movies in the nineties. If you compile even a short list of classics hes bound to pop up at least a couple of times and dominated the runners up. Once that decade ended, however, so did his magic touch. There was some good stuff after, but most of it was surfing his previous success The Terminal, The Da Vinci Code, The Ladykillers all were films where it was Hanks doing something differently familiar.
What Hes Doing Now: Working with big directors on the back of the nineties. What has Tom Hanks done recently? Toy Story 3 had him reprising a role from his heyday (back when the film wanted him rather than the other way round) and Cloud Atlas saw him team up with another nineties relic, The Wachowskis. Neither of those films were bad, but Hanks involvement was purely aping off his former glory. The man only had a handful of credits before Big put him on the map and after ten years of interesting development hes gone nowhere. Hes still one of the greatest actors of all time, but could do with taking a leaf out of (the admittedly younger) Brad Pitts book and go in a few, different directions.