Matt Dillon had the edge on Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe, so why has his career languished in comparison?

Once heralded as the ‘James Bond of his era’, Dillon never rose to the prominence that was expected of him, says Geoffrey Macnab, but perhaps the actor’s greatest success was eschewing the limelight early fame afforded him – even if he did so to the detriment of his career

Matt Dillon will be feted with the lifetime achievement award at next month’s Locarno Festival (Getty)

Cinema’s rebellious outsiders tend to have a short shelf life. We can only guess what kind of career James Dean might have enjoyed had he still been working in his old age. Dean died in a car crash aged 24 in 1955. His fellow method star Montgomery Clift made it into his mid-forties before a fatal heart attack in 1966. Zbigniew Cybulski, the legendary leather-clad maverick of Polish post-war cinema, was in his thirties when he accidentally killed himself trying to jump on a speeding train on the set of one of his films.

One young rebel, though, who has continued acting well into middle age is the US star Matt Dillon. At the start of his career in the early Eighties, Dillon was regularly described as the James Dean of his era. He was mercurial, and very intense. Andy Warhol spoke of his “staggering good looks”.

Directors such as Francis Ford Coppola and Gus Van Sant turned to Dillon when they wanted to cast delinquents or gang leaders with a bit of charisma and swagger. He played bullies and jocks, but he did so with a soulful quality that meant audiences rarely took against him. Tom Cruise and Rob Lowe were his equally youthful co-stars in Coppola’s The Outsiders (1983) but Dillon’s was the face the camera loved. They paled in his presence.