Following in the family footsteps of his father Lloyd Bridges and brother Beau Bridges, Jeff Bridges got an early start in acting as an infant in the 1951 film, The Company She Keeps. As a child, he grew more comfortable with the acting world as a guest star in his father’s series, Sea Hunt and The Lloyd Bridges Show, which allowed him to live every kid actor’s dream — an opportunity to miss school and spend days hanging around on movie sets. After leaving Los Angeles to join the U.S. Coast Guard as a young man, Jeff Bridges returned to California and acting in the 1970s.
Following a series of small roles in lesser-known fare like The Yin and the Yang of Mr. Go (1970) and Halls of Anger (1970), Jeff Bridges was chosen by highly respected director Peter Bogdanovich to costar in the 1971 film, The Last Picture Show. His character, Duane Jackson, struck a positive chord with audiences and critics and Bridges got his first Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor as a result. His work for top-level directors continued throughout the ’70s in projects like Fat City (1972) for John Huston, Bad Company (1972) for Robert Benton and The Iceman Cometh (1973) for John Frankenheimer. For Jeff Bridges, however, it was his Oscar-nominated role opposite Clint Eastwood in 1974′s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot that sealed his reputation as a dependable and gifted actor.
Jeff Bridges stars in starman and fearless
After somehow surviving the legendary 1980 flop, Heaven’s Gate, Jeff Bridges rebounded with a series of interesting and varied roles that further defined him as an actor without limits. He went the Disney route for the ambitious 1982 sci-fi adventure TRON as Kevin Flynn, a programmer who gets trapped inside a video game, and Bridges became part of a cult classic that later made the term “light cycle” a part of movie geek lingo. 1984′s Starman was a more restrained performance in a sci-fi drama, but, as usual, Jeff Bridges nailed it and became the first actor to be Oscar nominated for playing a character who wasn’t human. His biggest hit of the decade was the tense courtroom thriller Jagged Edge (1985) with Glenn Close, but he still found time to romance a crooning Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989).
1990′s Texasville was a reunion for Jeff Bridges and Peter Bogdanovich, but the belated sequel to The Last Picture Show proved to be a mistake. The actor would find better luck by teaming up with the Human Prozac known as Robin Williams for The Fisher King in 1991. In 1993, Jeff Bridges gave what some critics called the best performance of his career in Fearless as a man undergoing profound life changes in the aftermath of surviving a plane crash. Though his costar Rosie Perez received an Oscar nomination for her performance, Jeff Bridges did not.
Jeff bridges stars in the big lebowski and tron: legacy
If Fearless represented the best acting that Jeff Bridges had delivered at that point in his career, The Big Lebowski gave him the chance to create his most iconic character. As Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski in the 1998 film from the Coen Brothers, Jeff Bridges embraced every quality of The Dude and made a man who wasn’t much of anything into an underdog hero. Thanks to him, a bum could be incredibly cool and dialogue like “Well that’s just like, your opinion, man” could be repeated ad nauseam at Lebowski fests for years to come. Though he continued to show his range and role diversity in subsequent films like The Contender, K-Pax (2001) and Seabiscuit (2003), The Dude continues to stand tall as an audience favorite.
In 2008, Jeff Bridges got to tap into his villainous side as Obadiah Stane, the bad guy to Robert Downey Jr.’s hero in Iron Man. The following year, Jeff Bridges again delivered an award-caliber performance in Crazy Heart as a country singer in desperate need of some soul searching. The film earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and left audiences waiting in eager anticipation for his next project, Tron Legacy — a 3-D return to his favorite video game movie of old.
Buying a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?
