Spencer Tracy 1937, 1938

Tough, honest and indomitable, a man of sober authority and good sense, Spencer Tracy, who has died at the age of 67, became a symbol on the screen of all those qualities which represented the pioneering spirit of America. There was nothing fancy about Tracy. He was never seen as the great lover or the debonair seducer. Throughout his career he was at his best when he represented the plain and solid citizen who spoke up for what he believed to be right. A man of the people. He was deservedly awarded two Best Actor Oscars in his career - for Captain Courageous in 1937 and Boys Town in 1938.

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Laurence Olivier 1948

Lord Olivier was probably the greatest actor of his generation and certainly the most handsome. He was the producer who became the first director of the National Theatre. He was 82. One of the great triumvirate Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson who dominated the British classical stage from the 1930s to the 1980s, Olivier was the only one to achieve a comparable film career, winning the Best Actor Oscar in 1948 for his portrayal of Hamlet. To a vast international audience who never set foot in the theatre, he was known as a film-maker and an actor of spell-binding power and versatility. Too much his own man, and too aware of the dangers of being devoured by the film-making system, he rarely aspired to the superstar rank after such popular successes as Wuthering Heights, Rebecca and Lady Hamilton.

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Clark Gable 1934

Clark Gable was one of Hollywood's most consistently successful actors, but his first real chance came through one of those purely Hollywood chances. His company, believing his popularity to be fading, lent him to a small company for an inexpensive film. That film was It Happened One Night (1934), which established Gable as the masculine ideal of his generation and won him a Best Actor Oscar. The character of the good-natured man of action recurred throughout the next decade and in 1939 he played his most famous role of all, Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind (1939), which confirmed once and for all his right to his Hollywood nickname of "King".

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Marlon Brando 1954 (and 1972 declined)

For the generation of cinemagoers who came of age in the 1950s, Marlon Brando was role model, icon and high priest. He had the fortune to arrive in Los Angeles when Hollywood was entering a period of serious movie-making. He had the talent to embrace the first half-dozen roles offered to him and he put an indelible personal stamp on each of them. He exuded a new kind of male sexuality, rough and sweating, as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). The Brando uniform of white T-shirt, often grubby, and jeans, often torn, became de rigueur for males in America and later in Europe. Some have even credited Brando with inventing the combination. He won the Best Actor Oscar in 1954 for his portrayal of Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront and was awarded another in 1972 for his unforgettable performances as Don Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather but declined to accept it.

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James Stewart 1940

Although James Stewart became an archetype of western heroes, and, as a more mature character player, could turn his hand to reprobates, psychopaths and spiky lawyers, the original small-town boy never quite vanished. He might have put on weight, but there was still the same disarming loose-limbed awkwardness, the hesitation and characteristic gulp in his talk, and the persistent air of slightly hurt bemusement. All of which served him well in The Philadelphia Story (1960) for which he won Best Actor.

He was regarded at the outset of his career as something of a challenge by casting directors. But this very awkwardness was eventually perceived as a tremendous asset, making him unique in acting style among Hollywood's leading men. His down-home manner and hesitant drawl soon became his hallmarks. Indeed they were so instantly recognisable that he began to ape his screen persona in his private life and it was impossible to detect where the man ended and the actor began. As his wife admonished him at a party one night when he was beginning one of his shaggy dog stories: "Now, dear, don't talk like Jimmy Stewart."

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Humphrey Bogart 1951

For more than 20 years — since his playing of the Dillinger-like part in The Petrified Forest, which won him much praise — Humphrey Bogart's seamed sardonic cast of countenance and mordant tongue had been familiar to cinema audiences all over the world.

Bogart seemed to do little more than project his film personality on to the screen and leave it at that, but it was astonishing how much he could convey with a suggestion of pathos in that husky voice of his, with a shadow of a smile wryly turned against himself, and in films which gave him a chance he showed that his acting could be positive, even though it never moved far away from the essential Bogart. He was arguably at his best when paired with a strong actress, winning the Best Actor Oscar for The African Queen in 1951, playing opposite Katharine Hepburn.

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Alec Guinness 1957

Alec Guinness lacked many of the advantages of his theatrical peers. He could not claim Olivier's outstanding good looks and pure animal magnetism: he was bald by the time he reached 32, which emphasised his pointy, puckish ears. Unlike Gielgud he was not steeped in theatrical tradition: his childhood was disrupted and unhappy and his most vivid memory was of Nellie Wallace in music-hall at the Coliseum. He lacked Richardson's ability to be a "card", and he certainly did not have the Richardson ruthlessness, which ensured that Ralph was never upstaged: late in his life Guinness remarked, a little ruefully, "I'm not a very confident person, never have been."

But he had one great gift denied the others: anonymity. On stage or on screen Olivier was always Olivier, Gielgud always Gielgud and Richardson always Richardson. Guinness had the ability to obliterate himself completely within each character he played. Although known to generations of younger fans as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars films, his Best Actor Oscar was won for his performance in The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957.

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John Wayne 1969

John Wayne was for many years the most reliably popular of all Hollywood stars and the acknowledged king of action drama, particularly westerns. "Duke" Wayne, with his strong masculine presence, had played fliers, soldiers and hard men of all kinds, but in the public eye he remains the archetypal Westerner — tough, resilient, but not without a certain kind of sensibility. He was, in fact, John Ford's conception of the embodiment of the true, American pioneering spirit. He appeared in dozens of films over the next decades, taking up directing himself in the 1960s, and receiving a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in True Grit in 1969.

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Henry Fonda 1981

Henry Fonda was one of America's most distinguished screen actors. Though occasionally cast as the villain, his screen image was essentially heroic; he was the voice of integrity, the man of reason, the upholder of justice. He brought to his work an intelligence and quiet emotional power that marked him off completely from the men of action such as John Wayne. Even if they had done wrong, like Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, his characters were basically sympathetic, and were often victims in turn. Despite outstanding performances including that of the juror who tries to talk his colleagues out of their prejudices in Twelve Angry Men (1957), it was not until 1981 that he was given a Best Actor Oscar, for his performance in On Golden Pond, playing opposite Katharine Hepburn and his real-life daughter Jane Fonda.

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Paul Newman 1986

Paul Newman and glamour were indivisible. It was sometimes said of him, even by those who purported to admire him, that his good looks carried him effortlessly through his screen career, without any tangible application of talent. “Handsome”, and therefore “limited”, were the epithets often waspishly applied to diminish his achievement when measuring it against that of other “serious” actors. A preternaturally modest man despite his star status —“I had the privilege of doing the worst motion picture filmed during the Fifties,” he recalled of his 1955 screen debut in The Silver Chalice — Newman was quick to agree with his critics that he was often typecast. And he springs to mind most readily through such stylishly genial romps as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973) — both with Robert Redford — which nevertheless remain enduring classics of their genre. But he was an actor of far greater variety and range than this might suggest, winning a Best Actor Oscar in 1986 for The Color of Money, having been nominated six times previously.

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Jack Lemmon 1973

Jack Lemmon was the master of a nervous, brittle comedy that made him a brilliant farceur, but at a deeper level enabled him to capture the neurosis of American urban man, obsessed with sex and status and one step from the psychiatrist's couch. While Some Like It Hot (1959) was sheer romp, films such as The Apartment (1960) and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) gave Lemmon the chance to fashion a humour of pain and angst. With his expressive speech and rapid gesticulation, he mastered the manic man trying to straighten things out, and failing. In doing so, he managed to honour the last words that his father spoke to him: "Spread a little sunshine." Yet he disliked being thought of as just a comedy actor, for some of his most accomplished work was done in straight roles, such as an alcoholic in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) and a father looking for a son in Missing (1982), while his Best Actor Oscar was won for Save the Tiger (1973).

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Burt Lancaster 1960

A durable star of American action cinema for many years, Burt Lancaster in later years revealed another side to himself. In a new incarnation he showed himself to be a distinguished actor capable of tackling far more demanding roles than the run-of-the-mill stereotypes that were his early screen fare. A big, wide-shouldered man who spent his early career as a circus acrobat, he was inevitably cast by Hollywood as the conventional tough-guy hero. Indeed, so granite-like was his early image that one producer called him ``an alp with no chips to flake off''. But, helped by having his own production company, he was able to secure more demanding parts which often revealed him as an actor of depth and sensitivity, winning a Best Actor Oscar in 1960 for Elmer Gantry .

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