![This is a nostalgic look back at the era of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and co. Pictures supplied, Getty Images This is a nostalgic look back at the era of Stallone, Schwarzenegger and co. Pictures supplied, Getty Images](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Z4Q6sUEHdcmw72MBPYgZkU/18175f61-76b4-4043-817a-63d14f2dc403.png/r0_0_3612_2031_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Any fan of 1980s action movies can reel off the stars' names - Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean Claude Van Damme, Jackie Chan, Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren and Bruce Willis. These men and their movies - full of guns, fights, explosions, stunts, wisecracks and general mayhem - are given their due in this entertaining book from the editor of Empire magazine.
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While the timeline ranges from the 1970s to the 1990s, author Nick de Semlyen focuses particularly on the 1980s when action movies were a sort of umbrella genre that could include others - cop movies, war movies, science fiction movies - and US president Ronald Reagan was a fan, bringing lots of free publicity. When Jurassic Park beat Schwarzenegger's The Last Action Hero at the box office in 1993, the glory days for these macho men were all but over.
De Semlyen at one point or another interviewed most of the stars as well as people who worked with and knew them and many of the stories he tells are fascinating. Stallone began acting in a 1970 soft-porn movie, The Party at Kitty and Stud's (no prizes for guessing which character he played) and made $200 for two days' work.
A few years later he wrote Rocky and resisted offers to sell the script without him as the boxing underdog. The low-budget 1976 film won Oscars for best picture, director and editing and launched his career. Stallone's unrealised pet project was a biopic of Edgar Allan Poe.
One thing these men - foreigners or native-born Americans - had in common was determination and grit: they wanted stardom and they pursued it and the development of their bodies relentlessly. But they also got lucky breaks and took advantage of them. Why did Seagal, Van Damme and Norris make it big and not, say, French kickboxer Olivier Gruner, who toiled in straight-to-video movies while the others commanded big bucks on the big screen?
There's something of a hierarchy, with (choose your own order) Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Willis and (internationally) Chan on top, others in the middle and Lundgren on the bottom: he was able to parlay a villain role in Rocky IV into a decent, if not spectacular career.
Willis had only made a few unremarkable films and was the star of TV's Moonlighting when he landed Die Hard, a film that, unbelievable as it seems in retrospect, was turned down by every established action star, and was able to get $5 million for it. Playing the everyman cop trapped in a building with baddies launched his action career but, being a more versatile actor than most of his action film cohort, he also had success in other movies, including The Sixth Sense and Pulp Fiction.
Schwarzenegger, a former Mr Universe, moved from Conan the Barbarian to The Terminator and, alongside action movies like Predator and Total Recall showed a flair for comedy in such films as Twins and Jingle All the Way.
Stallone also tried comedy but without much success.
His two big characters, to whom he kept returning, were boxer Rocky Balboa and Vietnam veteran John Rambo (he floated the idea of having the two be brothers and meet).
While Jackie Chan was and is a huge star in Asia - and did more of his own stunts than anyone - he took longer to make it big in the US.
De Semlyen doesn't deal much with some action stars, like Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson who were around at the same time. They both also starred in dramas and comedies so perhaps that takes them out of the straight action-man category. But he does well in covering the stars who are his focus, with their rivalries and trash-talking providing some bursts of humour.
It seems obvious he likes some more than others, even if he acknowledges that they all, perhaps inevitably, developed big egos as their stardom, income and power rose.
Norris is dealt with in a particularly sympathetic way, coming across as a much gentler man off screen than on. But all the stars have moments that highlight their humanity as well as their hubris (it doesn't take long for the egos to swell wen they become successful).
Willis, of course, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and has retired. But all these action stars are getting older, and we can only wonder how long they can go on fighting their good fights on screen.
Action movies have changed: women have gained a place in the genre as fighters, not sidekicks or wives or damsels in distress, and superhero movies are huge. There are still action stars and franchises (Jason Statham, Fast and the Furious) but the particular era that De Semlyen is celebrating is fading: Stallone's Expendables series, trading as much on nostalgia as action, might be its last gasp.
- The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage. By Nick de Semlyen. Picador/PanMacmillan. $36.99.
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