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.
Emilio Estevez
Known for: The Breakfast Club
Net worth: $18 million
This “Brat Packer” grew up in the midst of wild success. N.Y.C.-born Emilio Estevez went to the Philippines as a kid because his dad, Martin Sheen, was filming Apocalypse Now . His brother, Charlie Sheen, grew up on movie sets too. And Sean Penn and Rob Lowe were always around, like brothers. Estevez and Lowe were part of The Outsiders ensemble, with Emilio playing “Two-Bit” and Lowe as “Sodapop.” His career was preordained.
In The Breakfast Club , he played “the jock.” He was a law student and the waiter at St. Elmo’s Bar in the prominent coming-of-age St. Elmo’s Fire movie. It wasn’t the only movie he starred in with Demi Moore to whom he was once engaged. They met up again in Wisdom (1986) and Bobby (2006). Both of which he directed. Later he directed, wrote and starred in Men at Work (1990) with Charlie Sheen. In 2018 he released The Public . He starred in the film with Alec Baldwin and Christian Slater. Estevez is less willing to jump into TV or Netflix projects than some of his ilks. He doesn’t want the attention.
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.”
Michael Douglas
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.
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.