a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Henry IV in 1981 and his Broadway debut a year later in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts. After working with the young actor on the Broadway production of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, in which a versatile Spacey served as the understudy for all of the play's male parts, director Mike Nichols cast him in his first film, 1986's Heartburn, as a thief, then again two years later as a wealthy businessman in Working Girl. Although roles seemed to come easily from there, crossing over to leading man proved a challenge -- for the simple reason that Hollywood prefers movie stars who look like other movie stars. When Devlin wrote Independence Day, he intended the role of the president for Spacey. The studio balked, andit was rewritten for Bill Pullman. "We literally had an argument," says Devlin, "and the executive, who's no longer there, said he just didn't think Kevin Spacey was a movie star."

But Spacey simply was too talented and too driven for Hollywood to ignore, and he established himself once and for all when he won the best supporting actor Oscar for The Usual Suspects, which he followed with strong performances in Seven and L.A. Confidential. None were quite as memorable as his portrayal of the depressed suburban father in 1999's American Beauty. Here again, Sam Mendes had to fight the studio to cast Spacey as his star. "They wanted a more conventional leading man, and they felt he was a supporting actor," says the director, who had been struck