A lot to comment on here, I'll only handle the more recent posts:
I totally agree. At this point it is essentially conventional wisdom that Cage is a bad actor who does bad movies. He certainly has some content control issues (probably related to the IRS) but he's absolutely a better actor than his rep would indicate. Bad Lieutenant POC:NO shows he's still got it.
but Harry Dean Stanton is also underated
There's a pretty well-known Roger Ebert quote that applies here. "No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad."
He's a cult actor, not actually a good actor. Tremendous difference.
Hasn't had as lucrative a career as many people think. His work on Roseanne is amazing.
no love for actresses? I think emma stone is underrated...she seems like a cool girl
Seriously?
If he got the credit, he would be in more movies imo. Until recently, Waltz has been a ghost in American films.
Please. Waltz won virtually every acting award on the planet (this is barely an exaggeration btw) less than two years ago and prior to Inglorious ******** was almost exclusively a foreign television actor. He is literally scheduled to have FIVE 2011 releases (and has already had two) which is an insane workload and the product of having tremendous buzz following ********.
Plus he's supposedly slated for Tarantino's next film, Django unchained. Dude is getting plenty of respect.
My entry is along the lines of Nic Cage: a very well known actor who has a popular and critical rap for being affirmatively bad that is probably undeserved. Keanu Reeves.
In many ways I think Keanu had the wrong career. There is a lot of evidence from his early career that he's got a very legitimate comedic instinct (Bill and Ted, Parenthood, etc) and had some roles where he displayed some real range and fragility (i.e. Point Break, My Own Private Idaho, etc).
Instead he got pegged as a big budget star for Speed and later typecast as being "The Matrix guy" and got cast in a bunch of roles where he was asked to continue playing "The Matrix guy" (Constantine, A Scanner Darkly, etc). In some sense I think he's been punished almost for being too good looking. If he was a little uglier I suspect his film offerings might have been a little meatier and less popcorny.