But by the early 1990's, he found himself "falling between the cracks" of leading-man roles and those of character actors.

Bowyer handled leading-man roles; Hugh Clark was a boy player taking female roles, who later switched to adult male parts.

"Big Night," which Tucci shot for $4 million in just 35 days, also gives the actor his first leading-man role.

"It's against type in relation to the leading-man roles I've played in this short time that all this has happened to me," he says.

The series was ground-breaking for the casting of an Asian male in an attractive leading-man role.

His star waned in the late 1930s when singing cowboys became the rage and Jones, then in his late forties, was uncomfortably cast in conventional leading-man roles.

A leading-man role, to be sure.

Mr. Nouri, in long ponytail, does get to stretch considerably beyond the brooding leading-man roles he usually gets on television.

Mr. Weaving, with his teardrop-shaped face and slightly satanic eyebrows - he looks vaguely hostile even when he's hurt - deserves leading-man roles.

His first leading-man role came three years later in the chamber drama "I Never Sang for My Father" (1970), and he had trouble with it.