[MrMon]

Hollywood is very good at creating actor types, so when someone says that a role is a John Wayne- type, you instantly know what it means. If you start to think about it, most actors are a particular type, and they rarely cross out of it. Since actors get old and die, they need replacements, actors who fill the role the original is no longer able to fill. The most obvious example that everyone uses is Tom Hanks, he fits the role of Jimmy Stewart. You can easily imagine Hanks in Stewart's role in "It's A Wonderful Life" without too much imagination. Now Hanks seems to have more range than Stewart, he plays darker roles better, but at his core, he seems like the All-American everyday guy.

One unusual one I just picked up on is Anne Heche. She's Katherine Hepburn. I'm going through Men In Trees right now, and there are quite a few scenes where you could easily drop Heche into Hepburn's roles in Bringing Up Baby or The Philadelphia Story without missing a beat. Give her Hepburn's accent and tint the hair from blonde to brunette, and she would be scary, even better than Kate Blanchett in The Aviator.

So, which modern actors do you think fill the older star's roles? Is any modern actor a new type? (Schwarzenegger
maybe?) Are any old stars no longer in fashion, with no one really representing them? (I'm not coming up with any modern Clark Gable's, for example.)