As a "straight" answer to the OP, it's hard to argue with De Niro. For a curveball answer, Brendan Fraser is a much better actor than most of the roles he takes. In the past decade of his major releases, only The Quiet American and Extraordinary Measures have really shown his dramatic range.
Oh, I got another! Forrest Whittaker wins the Best Actor Oscar... played a couple supporting cop roles... now he's on a tv show.
^ According to this article, doing General Hospital was just something he wanted to try as an experiment. He's still doing movies that are fairly high profile.
Doing a soap opera isn't slumming it. They have to shoot a lot more pages in one day that some primetime shows do in a week. The lack of rehearsal time and a limited number of takes is why some soap opera actors come across pretty bad on their soap but suddenly seem like much better actors on primetime.
Super Gandhi. Watch as he steps in and sorts out the mess that is the Commonwealth Games. He become puzzled when an incompetent criminal in a badly fitting wig keeps trying to prevent him from succeeding.
He's done very little recently, but what he has done has been high profile, even if not very successful. He has two yet to be released movies in post-production. Again: not slumming it. I vote that in the future, when we have threads like this, the OP defines the definition of what he or she is seeking from responses. Too many of these answers boil down to "I don't like that movie" and "I don't like that actor".
^ But he's had two major successes as a director. And slumming it would infer that he's starring in DTV productions, low-budget tv series or doing infomercials. He's not. He's just not doing very much work. He's quite happily sitting at home, smacking women and insulting Jews.
Since Matt Damon's made more movies in five years than Warren Beatty has made in his entire career, does that mean Beatty is slumming it too?
I watched Extraordinary MeasuresThe other day and it was very good, hes such a better actor than people realise.
Robert DeNiro currently seems unlikely to recapture his 1970s-'90s glory years, particularly since Scorsese dumped him for the younger, prettier DiCaprio. I don't know about Al Pacino's recent career overall. All I know is that 88 Minutes made me want to claw my eyes out (except during the all-too-brief lesbian scene). That probably has something to do with the fact that he's an insufferable prick that no director will ever work with twice. (I once knew a guy that was in a show with him on Broadway. He said that Kilmer never showed up to rehearsal not-hung over.) Well, in defense of Thunderbirds, he was a big fan of the TV show. Still, I gotta admit that the guy's got some temendous talent. He's able to go onto Tavis Smiley and talk about Prince of Persia as if it's friggin' Shakespeare and do it with a totally straight face. (I haven't seen such enthusiastic plugging of a lame movie since William H. Macy's hyperactive grinning while doing the talk show circuit for Jurassic Park III.) Another "will take any role that pays him" icon is Michael Caine. But then, that's not a recent thing. His entire career is peppered with shit that he only did because he likes to work. But he's doing pretty well recently since he's latched onto such a talented filmmaker as Chris Nolan. I now stay through every movie's end credits, just hoping that Nick Fury will make a surprise cameo at the end.
"I have never seen it (Jaws: The Revenge), but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
Oh, and good call about Christopher Lloyd. Back to the Future made him a legend, nay, a GOD! But now, I don't think I've seen him in anything since Interstate 60. (He's been pretty busy according to IMDB. It's just not in anything that's gotten much attention.) Jeff Goldblum was a really hot item during the 1980s-'90s when he did The Fly, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, & The Lost World. Frankly, he weirded me out when he did Cats & Dogs. That felt like the beginning of the end. Now, he's decent on Law & Order: Criminal Intent but he's leaving that show.
His film career for the last decade has been medicore to bad, apart from an excellent turn as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 2004. But he's done some great TV work on HBO, winning two Emmys, so that saves him from oblivion.
Yeah, I guess I must have thought I was in the actors who are washed up thread. I'll have to be more discerning in the future