How much is Jeff Bridges worth?
| Net Worth: | $100 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Professional Actor |
| Date of Birth: | December 4, 1949 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 1.85 m |
About Jeff Bridges
Among actors, Jeff Bridges stands out. Bridges, who has received widespread praise for his unassuming approach and talented performances, is the man who, when he eventually won a Best Actor Academy Award after receiving multiple nominations and having a storied 38-year career, received a standing ovation from the entire film industry.
Jeff will always be remembered for playing The Dude in The Big Lebowski, which is his most well-known role despite his numerous Oscar nominations.
The Family Enterprise
For the most of his life, Jeffrey Leon Bridges has been an actor. Jeff’s first job was as an uncredited newborn in The Company She Keeps when he was less than a year old. He was the middle child of three born to successful actors Lloyd and Dorothy (and though few have seen the film, you can be sure he nailed the performance). Bridges, who playfully referred to himself as a “product of nepotism,” recalled learning the fundamentals of acting from his father Lloyd while sitting on his parents’ bed. When the producers needed another b-roll extra or drowning victim, he and his brother Beau would show up on their dad’s popular TV show Sea Hunt.
Jeff never really liked going to school, so when he was a teenager, he rebelled and was sent to a military academy to start high school. The aspiring hippie, unsurprisingly, detested it and eventually returned to public school to continue his degree. He served in the Coast Guard for a while before attending acting classes and returning to Hollywood. Bridges didn’t take it too seriously because it was still just a family business and instead focused on music, art, and a general love of women. His attitude was startlingly blasé, even in retrospect. He didn’t decide to fully pursue acting as a career until 1973 with The Iceman Cometh, two years after he received his first Academy Award nomination for The Last Picture Show.
Building Bridges
Bridges was advised by his family to play a variety of roles to avoid being a typecast. He therefore chose a dizzying diversity of parts, some good and others not, after he actually made the decision to become an actor. In 1975, he received his second Oscar nomination for the film Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. Then came a run of failures, beginning with Rancho Deluxe the following year (completely forgettable except for the fact that Bridges had met Susan Geston on set, whom he would later marry in 1977), and concluding with Heaven’s Gate, which had a $44 million budget but only made $3.5 million at the box office. Ironically, Michael Cimino, a director who has won an Academy Award, directed the film.
Jeff Bridges recalls the stunned stillness of the spectators. He sighs, “After all that work.” It was bad, I know. And things got worse before they got better. reviews the following morning. In The New York Times, Vincent Canby sounded the death knell for it.
“Heaven’s Gate fails so completely,” he wrote, “that you might suspect Mr Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect,” according to BBC.
Bridges, though, persevered throughout it all and recovered swiftly and successfully. He appeared in John Carpenter’s Starman, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Fearless, which some consider to be his best performance.
Others, possibly the less certain group, would consider The Dude in the Coen brothers’ cult classic The Big Lebowski to be his best performance. This was a role that turned out to be one of his most enduring, which is noteworthy since his career also included King Kong and Tron.
Why did he receive a standing ovation at the Academy Awards when he won for Crazy Heart when there are so many performers with incredible talent and impressive resumes? Because a three-decade headliner who has avoided laziness and self-caricature, kept picking tough roles, and kept giving poignant performances is a rare thing. Film critic Pauline Kael dubbed him “maybe the most natural and least self-conscious screen actor that has ever lived” Jeff Bridges is and has always been an actor, despite the fact that he is billed as a star.
“Part of what I do is all about love and intimacy. Most movies are about love in one way or another.”
