Celebrities Who Returned with Their Strongest Work

Marianne Faithfull was a 1960s pop singer whose career collapsed amid addiction, and she spent part of the early 1970s living on the streets in London. Broken English (1979), with her voice deepened and roughened, was a startling new wave record that earned a Grammy nomination and began a long second career as an interpreter of dark, literate songs.

After leaving Ike Turner in 1976 with almost nothing, Tina Turner spent years playing cabaret venues and fighting to be taken seriously as a solo artist. Private Dancer (1984), made with several British producers, sold millions and won four Grammys, and What's Love Got to Do with It gave her a first solo US number one at forty-four.

Bonnie Raitt was a respected slide guitarist with modest sales when Warner Bros. dropped her in 1983. She got sober, signed to Capitol and made Nick of Time (1989) with the producer Don Was, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year and turned a cult favourite into one of the best-selling artists of the 1990s.

John Travolta's late-1970s stardom faded through the 1980s, with the Look Who's Talking comedies the main exception. Quentin Tarantino cast him as the hitman Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction (1994), a performance that earned an Oscar nomination and led straight into Get Shorty and Face/Off, his most varied run of work.

Johnny Cash was dropped by Columbia in 1986 and spent several years on a smaller label with little attention. Rick Rubin signed him to American Recordings, and the spare, acoustic American albums from 1994 onwards, culminating in his version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt and Mark Romanek's video for it, became some of the most powerful music of his career.

Bob Dylan's records of the 1980s were widely seen as a slump, and in the early 1990s he released two albums of old folk songs played alone. Time Out of Mind (1997), made with the producer Daniel Lanois, won the Grammy for Album of the Year and began a late run including Love and Theft and Rough and Rowdy Ways that many critics rank with his 1960s peak.

Loretta Lynn had largely stopped recording new material when Jack White produced Van Lear Rose (2004), an album of her own songs played by a rock band. It won two Grammys and some of the best reviews of her career, and later records made with John Carter Cash kept her writing into her late eighties.

Robert Downey Jr.'s drug arrests and jail time around 2000 left him effectively uninsurable, and he rebuilt slowly through smaller films such as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Zodiac. Iron Man (2008) made him the centre of the Marvel films, and his Oscar-winning turn as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer (2023) was widely called the finest acting of his career.

Mickey Rourke left acting in the early 1990s for a professional boxing career that damaged his face and his prospects, and spent years in small roles. Darren Aronofsky cast him as a fading wrestler in The Wrestler (2008), and the performance won him a Golden Globe and a BAFTA and earned an Oscar nomination.

Leonard Cohen spent years at a Zen monastery in the 1990s, then discovered in 2004 that his former manager had taken most of his savings. Touring again from 2008 out of necessity, he found a huge new audience, and the late albums Old Ideas, Popular Problems and You Want It Darker (2016), released weeks before his death, are among his most admired.

By the late 2000s Matthew McConaughey was known mainly for romantic comedies, and he has described deliberately turning them down until serious offers came. The run that followed, from Killer Joe and Mud to Dallas Buyers Club, which won him the Oscar, and the first series of True Detective, was nicknamed the McConaissance.

Michael Keaton worked steadily but quietly through the 2000s after his Batman years. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman (2014), about an actor haunted by a superhero role, won him a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, and Spotlight and The Founder followed in one of the strongest runs of his career.

Jennifer Coolidge spent two decades as a scene-stealing supporting player, best known as Stifler's mom in American Pie, and has spoken about long gaps between good parts. Mike White wrote Tanya McQuoid in The White Lotus (2021) with her in mind, and the role, both comic and tragic, won her two Emmys and a Golden Globe.

Ke Huy Quan was a child star in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies but found few roles as an adult, so he worked behind the camera for years, including as a stunt coordinator and as an assistant director for Wong Kar-wai. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) brought him back as an actor and won him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Brendan Fraser, the star of The Mummy films, saw his career slow in the late 2000s after injuries from years of stunt work required several operations. He returned with supporting roles in the early 2020s, and his performance in Darren Aronofsky's The Whale (2022) won him the Oscar for Best Actor.

Pamela Anderson was long treated as a tabloid figure rather than an actor. She made her Broadway debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago in 2022, and Gia Coppola's The Last Showgirl (2024), in which she plays an ageing Las Vegas dancer, earned her a Golden Globe nomination and the best reviews she has ever had.

Demi Moore was one of the highest-paid actors of the 1990s but worked mainly in smaller roles after the early 2000s. Coralie Fargeat's body horror The Substance (2024), in which she plays a fading television star, won her a Golden Globe and her first Oscar nomination, and many critics called it her best performance.