Known for: Fatal Attraction and Gordon Gekko
Net worth: $300 million
Oliver Stone’s iconic Wall Street definitively encapsulated an epoch of American capitalism. It was ugly and dark, and its antihero didn’t fare well, but Michael Douglas absolutely nailed it as the ruthless stock market titan Gordon Gekko. Fierce delivery of a line such as, “When I get a hold of the son-a-bitch who leaked this, I’m going to tear his eyeballs out! I’m going to suck his f***ing skull!” made his performance an epic gift to cinema. The Academy agreed. Douglas took home the Oscar for Best Actor.
Opening at the peak of the materialistic me-generation in 1987, Wall Street was synonymous with the times, it was like an incisive snapshot of wealth and power inside the dark entrails of American financial markets. At a time when “downsizing” was like a euphemism meaning, ‘hundreds of people will lose their job,’ Gekko depicts a merciless Wall Street trader. Questioned about why he wants to wreck a major company, Gekko, pictured above in slicked back hair (hair gel was huge in the ’80s), barks back, “Because it’s wreckable!! Alright!!” Michael Douglas has plenty of other epic films under his belt. He produced One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for chrissakes, winning the Best Picture Oscar. And, in Fatal Attraction, his character’s travails left viewers with an indelible fear of a new kind of terror. Romancing the Stone was huge, as was Basic Instinct. Currently, he’s active in humanitarian and political activism and stars in The Kominsky Method.
Sigourney Weaver
Known for: Ghostbuster and Queen of Sci-FI
Net worth: $50 million
Though not an official member of the “Brat Pack,” Sigourney Weaver was a hot ’80s movie star with a sizzling following. Back in the late-Seventies, Woody Allen set her up in a role in Annie Hall . It was a small part, all of six seconds on screen, but it got her noticed! Before long, Sigourney co-starred with Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously It received a Palme d’Or-nomination at Cannes. Ghostbusters wasn’t far behind. In 1983, it took over the nation, a monster-blockbuster. That summer, N.Y.C. looked like an unofficial movie tie-in gift shop, vendors on every corner peddling Ghostbuster merch.
Since then, Weaver’s become a royal deity of the sci-fi genre. She’s the destroyer of aliens, reptilian humanoid warlords, and the Carpathians. She’s survived every alien assault, including being cloned eight times in Alien Resurrection. She’s a gorilla lover. Weaver is an honorary chairperson to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. She’s also into helping those in extreme poverty and protecting the environment. Women’s, and other people’s rights are also a focus of her charitable side.
Sissy Spacek
Known for: Coal Miner’s Daughter
Net worth: $15 million
Sissy Spacek was born Mary Elizbeth, but her brothers called her “Sissy,” and the name stuck. She hoped for a career in the music business but settled for film instead, after the music gig sputtered out. She enrolled at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and found her way into Andy Warhol’s Factory as an extra. At that point, small film parts began rolling in.
She played the teenage girlfriend of Charlie Sheen’s mass murderer character in Badlands. But it was the supernatural horror movie Carrie that gained her enough praise to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. In Coal Miner’s Daughter, she truly nailed it with an Jennifer Greyscar win playing Lorretta Lynn. Loretta Lynn personally approved the role, and Sissy got to do some singing. Other popular films she starred in are JFK, In the Bedroom and Crimes of the Heart.
Jane Fonda
Known for: Antiwar activist, Feminist, Klute and On Golden Pond
Net worth: $200 million
Born into a Hollywood family dynasty, Jane Fonda was destined to cinematic greatness. Her father was Henry Fonda, and her mother was socialite Frances Ford Seymour. Jane’s marriages were equally influential. She married politician Tom Hayden and billionaire media mogul Ted Turner, in that order, but then divorced them both. Her first husband was French film director Roger Vadim. In the 1980s, Ms. Fonda added: “fitness expert” to her curriculum vitae. She released Jane Fonda’s Workout video in 1982. You may be asking yourself: Did it sell well? Yes. Resoundingly. It was the best-selling VHS video—ever. It sold something like seventeen million copies.
As a serious anti-war activist during the Vietnam War era, she traveled to Vietnam to support P.O.W.s. Photographed sitting on top of a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun, she came back with the nickname “Hanoi Jane.” Other unflattering epithets greeted her as well. "Hippie scum" comes to mind, for one. Her efforts landed her on the Hollywood blacklist. The 1972 image in Vietnam was as ubiquitous as the iconic "victory" image of the man she was protesting, President Richard Nixon. Besides being a 1970s counterculture renegade, a fitness guru, and a fixture in Hollywood, the Academy Award-winning actress is also a long-time feminist, active with causes such as V-Day.
Robert De Niro
Known for: The Godfather Part II , Raging BullI and “You Talkin’ to me?”
Net worth: $300 million
Cinematic “tough-guy” titan Robert De Niro is known for working closely with legendary director Martin Scorcese. His lucrative career revved for takeoff with Copolla’s The Godfather Part II where he played a younger version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. It secured him a nomination for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. It was then he hooked up with Scorsese for Mean Streets , Good Fellas , Raging Bull , and, of course, Taxi Driver . The latter gave us De Niro’s mostly improvised Travis Bickle monologue with the classic, “You talkin’ to me?” line. He was nominated for Best Actor in Taxi Driver , but he won the Oscar in 1981 for Scorsese’s Raging Bull . He was also nominated for Scorsese’s Cape Fear . Suffice it to say the pair is a legendary team. A 2019 Netflix project, The Irishman , is their latest collaboration.
He’s also known for extreme conditioning for roles. He spent four months perfecting his Sicilian dialect for Vito Corleone’s dialogue, he learned to play the saxophone, for Cape Fear he paid a dentist $5,000 to make his teeth look terrible, and he worked as a cabbie to prepare for Taxi Driver . De Niro is a long-time liberal. So, what does he think of Trump? Here goes: “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a mutt who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he doesn’t do his homework, doesn’t care, . . . doesn’t pay his taxes, he’s an idiot.”