Five of the best… acting comebacks

Mel Gibson is trying to make a comeback... again. The Beaver may have been greeted with less enthusiasm than a dose of tuberculosis but he's giving it another go with a new film, Get the Gringo. JOE looks at five actors who could offer him advice on how to rebuild a shattered career.

By Dermot Keys

John Travolta
At the end of the seventies, Travolta had the world at his feet. The dimple-chinned wonderkid had managed to make disco dancing look vaguely heterosexual in Saturday Night Fever and followed it up with another massive hit in Grease. Then the eighties landed and Travolta was in more turkeys than sage and onion.

His career was hurtling into oblivion when Quentin Tarantino cast the newly bulked-up actor in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino's magical pixie dust did the job. We all forgot about Travolta's weird Scientology beliefs and those terrible, terrible films and suddenly he was cool again.

Mickey Rourke
The mercurial Brat Packer was winning rave reviews when he ditched acting to become a professional boxer. As you do. In fairness, he managed eight undefeated fights but his face did get mangled in the process. Several reconstructive surgeries left him resembling a matinee idol again, albeit one who had been repeatedly punched in the face.

He returned to acting but an unremarkable decade suggested that his fall from grace was irreversible. However, Rourke seized his opportunity when he got a part in Sin City before producing an acting tour-de-force in The Wrestler in 2008. Audiences lapped it up and he has been pumping out films every since.

Drew Barrymore
Drew Barrymore became the ultimate cautionary tale for child actors after starring in ET at the age of seven. She was drinking at the age of nine, taking drugs at 11, and was in rehab at the age of 13. She was a washed-up actor with a drug habit at an age when most people's biggest concern is puberty.

From ET to rehab and back to success

Everyone's favourite teenage delinquent somehow went on to engineer a Lazarus-like resurrection in the nineties. She has since carved out a very successful career, started directing, and produced films that have grossed hundreds of millions of euros.

Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando changed the acting landscape in the fifties but the troubled genius had become box office poison by 1972. Francis Ford Coppola saw him as the perfect choice for Don Corleone in The Godfather but had to battle with the studio to cast him.

Brando duly turned up, stuffed his cheeks with cotton wool, and mumbled his way to a Best Actor Oscar which he then refused. His next film was Last Tango in Paris, which earned him another Oscar nomination and scandalised audiences with an innovative use of butter. Brando then drifted away from acting, having proved his point, popping up now and then for a lucrative cameo.

Robert Downey Jr
There was a time when Downey Jr only popped up on camera in mugshots or before a judge, apologising for whatever drug-related shenanigans had resulted in his latest court case. His undoubted talent was gradually being wasted because he was, eh, generally wasted.

Downey Jr eventually sobered up and rebuilt his career with a series of indie films, before Zodiac put him back on the radar as a bankable star. Then a role in a small film called Iron Man sent his stock through the roof and proved that Hollywood loves nothing more than a hell-raiser who finds redemption.