Since movies began, the actors in them have been ranked. The popularity of some remains a mystery (Clark Gable? Tyrone Power? Jean-Claude Van Damme?), while others, in spite of delighting us with most every appearance, are somehow too offbeat to become major stars. Here are two such actors from the past and two from the present. All the names are probably familiar, but none of these four have earned the recognition I would wish for them.

Edmond O’Brien (1915–1985)
A graduate of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, O’Brien was a widely respected character actor and sometime lead. His first major role was in the 1939 Charles Laughton classic The Hunchback of Notre Dame. What’s striking about his performance is that it was both highly theatrical and surprisingly modern. O’Brien seemed to change height and age in every role, and even now I have only a vague sense of his face. Most “character actors” from O’Brien’s era were specialists in a single role—the snooty butler, wealthy patron, affable drunk. But O’Brien was one of the true chameleons of Hollywood, pushing his characterizations beyond the demands of the roles. In doing so, he became hard to identify. As he himself once pointed out, “Seldom does a producer say, ‘This is an Eddie O’Brien part.’” O’Brien played the lead in the original noir D.O.A., and won an award for best supporting actor playing Humphrey Bogart’s fast-talking press agent in the odd, otherwise unmemorable The Barefoot Contessa. He most often played tough cops, detectives, and military men, but he was best when he got a chance to be bigger than life. Here are some films you should see to get a sense of O’Brien’s expansive talent: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939); The Killers (1946); Seven Days in May (1964); The Wild Bunch (1969).

Jennifer Jason Leigh. (Courtesy photo)

Jennifer Jason Leigh (1962– )
The daughter of actor Vic Morrow and screenwriter Barbara Turner, Leigh has created an assortment of damaged women few can match. She’s a polarizing actor, and I’m always surprised to find out how many people find her hard to watch. I think she’s one of our finest actors, period, and from 1989 to 1995 gave the best performance of the year three different times. Leigh still wasn’t comfortable in front of the camera in her breakout performance in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and was among the least memorable of a cast of future stars. That, coupled with an outrageously bad performance in Paul Verhoeven’s dopey Flesh+Blood, established Leigh as a bland, pouty pretty girl. One year later she gave a performance that far outshined her material in The Hitcher, and she has not stopped challenging herself since. Leigh is not always photogenic, with her sharp nose and downturned mouth, and she often stumbles in mainstream films (like Dolores Claiborne). But she has refused to fight against her age, and no one can find more shades in hookers, hash slingers, and other trampled women than Jennifer Jason Leigh. Here are the films for which she should have been, but wasn’t, nominated for an Oscar: Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989); Miami Blues (1990); Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994); The Hudsucker Proxy (1994); Georgia (1995).

Gloria Grahame (1923–1981)
We all know and love Grahame as tarnished angel Violet Bick in It’s a Wonderful Life—“This old thing? This is what I put on when I don’t care what I look like.” It’s still my favorite performance of hers, but Grahame made a number of films better as the bubbly blond who isn’t nearly as dim as she seems. With a puckered-up face that was cartoonishly beautiful (and made her deeply insecure), Grahame was destined to be on the big screen. In an age when all actresses were put through etiquette training, Grahame bucked around movie sets like an unbroken horse. Most sultry femmes fatale seemed too beaten down by life to enjoy it, but Grahame’s women were always optimistic and full of spunk—even if the emotional bruises were just beneath the surface. Like O’Brien, she won an Oscar for best supporting actress for a good—but not exceptional—performance, in the Hollywood potboiler The Bad and the Beautiful. Once married to director Nicholas Ray, Grahame invited scandal by marrying Ray’s oldest son (he was 12 years her junior). After that, the best roles dried up. Some of her best films: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946); In a Lonely Place (1950); The Big Heat (1953); Oklahoma! (1955).

Jim Carey and Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber. (Courtesy photo)

Jeff Daniels (1955– )
I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like the easygoing, sweetly intelligent Daniels. And I suspect he has exactly the career he wants. But somehow he remains easy to forget. Daniels has played key roles in a surprising number of exceptional films. In fact, I think his breakout turn in Terms of Endearment is actually the best performance in that cast of heavy hitters. Daniels seems incapable of giving a dishonest performance, which might be why his less successful work comes in more stylistic pieces (he was miscast as the celluloid hero in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo). Daniels’s energy seems un-actorly, yet he can more than hold his own in comedies as well as dramas—he remains Jim Carrey’s best screen collaborator for his work in the hilariously moronic Dumb and Dumber. Academy Awards are not the only marker of recognition in Hollywood, merely the most significant. Somehow this guy has never been nominated. Other key Jeff Daniels films: Something Wild (1986); Arachnophobia (1990); Fly Away Home (1996); The Squid and the Whale (2005).

Alex Manugian lives in Sherman Oaks, California, and works for the Cartoon Network. He grew up in Groton and has reviewed movies for Harvard residents for many years.