They say being a star or a recognizable actor is a fickle thing. You have your moment of stardom, you have your second chance if your lucky(John Travolta, Mickey Rourke) but lots of time after bad career decisions your second chance is over and you never get it back. So who were the actors who seem to keeping having 9 lives in terms of career successes? My choices are:

Keanu Reeves: Had a hit with Speed, and nothing else caught on until The Matrix. The Matrix sequels did well, but after Constantine which made some money, he had 9 years of bombs with 47 Ronin being his last grasp. He even gave an interview complaining about how no studio would touch him and he hates doing independent movies. Then he agreed to do a movie as a favor to his stunt double on the Matrix and John Wick became an unexpected decent performer. Then John Wick 2 was even bigger. Then John Wick 3 was bigger than 1 and 2 combined. Now he is back being a star again all thanks to John Wick.

Sylvester Stallone: One of the biggest stars of the 80's who's career with the exception of Cliffhanger and Demolition Man barely survived the 90's and was put to death in 200-2001 with the combination of Driven and Get Carter. He even did an appearance on TV for Las Vegas and was desperately trying to get a role on The Soprano's. Then he somehow got MGM to finance Rocky Balboa and it's success got him relevant again enough to get another Rambo made, then the Expendables and finally Creed which got him a Golden Globe.

Dolph Lundgren: Ok this one is a bit of a stretch but hear me out. Dolph became a name off Rocky 4 in the 80's. His first big screen solo role Masters of the Universe underperformed, and his next movies went straight to video either due to financing issues, studios going bankrupt, or studios not liking the final cut. He got another theatrical release with Universal Soldier in 92 which was a modest hit, but that did more for Van Damme then him. More straight to video movies followed before he got one more theatrical release with Keanu Reeves in Johnny Mnemonic. Then he did a long string of low budget movies filmed in Canada and some mainly consisting of stock footage from other movies. He even quit movies because he was tired of doing films like that. Then in 2010 Stallone called him up and asked him to be in the Expendables and he was back in theatres. Then last year he got Creed 2 and Aquaman which grossed a billion dollars, and it seems like his name recognition now is higher than its been since, well Rocky 4.

Leslie Nielsen transformed himself from a rugged hero actor to a comic lead after he and some other over-the-hill rugged hero actors appeared in Airplane. He got a whole 'nother career while Peter Graves and Lloyd Bridges faded away.

Lloyd Bridges continued to have a pretty solid career after "Airplane", doing both broad comedy (he was in Jim Abraham's "Hot Shot!" films) and more traditional character parts. Peter Graves kept going, but he didn't turn "Airplane!" into a comedy career, sticking to the mostly stolid roles he was best known for, as well as hosting A+E's "Biography".

Robert Downey Jr.

Fred MacMurray, Dick Powell, John Payne. They went from light-leading men/musical leads in the 1930s to tough guy noir roles in the 1940s to westerns in the 1950s and then to TV series leads. MacMurray, who started out as a saxophone player, went even further and reinvented himself in the '60s as both a Disney leading man (THE SHAGGY DOG, SON OF FLUBBER) and a TV sitcom star ("My Three Sons"), eventually popping up in Irwin Allen disaster movies (THE SWARM) as well. Few Hollywood stars had as many career shifts as MacMurray. And he wound up one of the richest men in Hollywood thanks to his real estate investments.