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As always, timing is everything. Nicholson was not the first choice for “Easy Rider” — Rip Torn turned the part down when the producers refused to pay him $4,500 (the entire budget of “Easy Rider” in 1969 was less than $400,000 — it went on to make hundreds of millions). Throughout his career, Nicholson has consistently reinvented himself, and the image forged by those roles — whether it’s his breakthrough lead performance in “Five Easy Pieces” or a supporting part (another kind of breakthrough, after his career hit a rough patch) in “Terms of Endearment” or the romantic lead in “About Schmidt” in 2002 — all represent a kind of ongoing acting challenge.

When actors have the opportunity to make their own choices in material, it’s easy to cast narrowly and protect the franchise. If you think of Bruce

Willis, he’s still playing the role he did in “Die Hard,” his breakthrough film, and even Harrison Ford has never strayed far from men like Indiana Jones.

George Clooney, meanwhile, could have stuck with some version of the debonair Danny Ocean in the “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Twelve” and “Thirteen” franchise, but he chose, instead, to pack on weight and play a self-destructive C.I.A. operative in “Syriana” in 2005. The film was his artistic breakthrough, but Clooney has been subverting his leading-man image for years — goofing on his good looks in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and, in this year’s “Michael Clayton,” showing the underbelly of a man who would, on the surface, seem to have every advantage.

Appearance has a way of dictating character, especially in the movies.

Johnny Depp, whose breakthrough performance was in “Edward Scissorhands,” in which he wore kabuki makeup and had long gardening shears for fingers, has continually hid his ridiculously beautiful face beneath layers of foundation and wigs. In “Sweeney Todd,” he is cadaver-pale, and the gray streak in his hair seems to extend to his eyes. Depp has managed to integrate his extreme maquillage with his characters. But most aspiring leading men, like this year’s James McAvoy in “Atonement” and Jim Sturgess in “Across the Universe,” would be discouraged from hiding their physical assets. In fact, Ryan Gosling, who was nominated for an Oscar for his breakthrough performance in “Half Nelson” last year, was recently fired from the cast of “The Lovely Bones” when he showed up for work carrying the extra weight he felt was appropriate to the character.

It’s tricky: great acting requires some element of submersion in the life of another, and yet audiences also gravitate toward beauty. “It’s naïve to think that wearing prosthetics and gaining weight is acting,” Charlize Theron told me recently. Theron won an Oscar for her performance in “Monster,” in which she wore prosthetics and gained weight to play Aileen Wuornos, a prostitute turned serial killer. “Monster” was Theron’s artistic breakthrough — her initial star-is-born moment had a lot to do with her endless legs being prominently featured on a billboard on the Sunset Strip for her first major role, in “Two Days in the Valley.” But Theron, like Clooney or Depp, was hungry for a challenge, a chance to be seen differently.

“Looks alone won’t get you that far,” Theron told me. “It may get you in the door, but there’s always somebody younger, somebody prettier. You have to rely on something else. And by that I do not mean prosthetics.”

Makeup or not, if Sturgess, who is British, or McAvoy, who is Scottish, can perfect an American accent, their options will probably be limitless.

Sturgess, who managed to reinvent classic Beatles songs in “Across the Universe,” has a relaxed charm that is reminiscent of Paul McCartney circa “A Hard Day’s Night.” And McAvoy, who showed off his boyish intensity in 2006’s “Last King of Scotland,” has a subtle touch with heavy dramatics. The movie world is short right now on leading men in their 20s, and these two would seem to be poised for a still-larger breakthrough, if they can massage their accents.

Language may also be an obstacle for Marion Cotillard, who played the legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose.” In what is a particularly striking breakthrough performance, Cotillard shifts in age and mood from Piaf’s early days as a hustling street urchin to her death at 47.

Cotillard has starred in hit films in France and appeared opposite Russell Crowe in “A Good Year” in 2006, but “La Vie en Rose” is, much like Penélope Cruz’s performance in “Volver” in 2006, a breakthrough, because suddenly she was seen as a serious actress. Yet no French actress — including Catherine Deneuve or Isabelle Adjani — has ever cracked the accent barrier in America. Cotillard is determined to try: she has taken intense Berlitz classes to learn pitch-perfect English, and she has already been cast in a big-screen adaptation of the musical “Nine,” which will also star Javier Bardem.

Cotillard’s ability to mesh utterly with the life of Edith Piaf is not unlike the sense of commitment and attention to detail that dominates Daniel Day-Lewis’s work. “I remember when I first saw ‘My Beautiful Laundrette,’ ” Paul Thomas Anderson, the writer-director of “There Will Be Blood,” said. “I thought, Wow that guy is amazing! And then I saw ‘A Room With a View’ and ‘In the Name of the Father.’ It took me a very long time to realize that Daniel had been in all three movies. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy — the men were that different.” When “My Beautiful Laundrette,” in which Day-Lewis played a gay street punk, was first screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the audience reaction was not unlike that of viewers to Jack Nicholson in “Easy Rider” when it played at Cannes. Day-Lewis became a star as the film unspooled.

It took a little longer for the world to catch up — probably somewhere around the time Day-Lewis won the Oscar for “My Left Foot” — but that sort of audience delay was also true for one of Day-Lewis’s heroes, Robert De Niro. In “Mean Streets,” which was his fifth major role, De Niro is captivating as Johnny Boy, a self-destructive small-time gangster. Like Day-Lewis, who works infrequently and with great intensity, seeming to rearrange completely his molecules for every character he plays, De Niro, in all of his early screen appearances, had the impact and excitement of a cinematic breakthrough. That’s no longer the case — De Niro seems to work for the money now rather than for a burning desire to tell a story.

Nevertheless, his legacy of roles, from the young Vito Corleone to Jake LaMotta to his more recent role as a master thief in “Heat,” are clearly inspiring to generations of actors, just as Brando’s breakthrough performances in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Last Tango In Paris” were once thrilling to De Niro.

Paul Dano, who had a breakthrough performance this year in “There Will Be Blood,” is an inheritor of that cinematic legacy. In 2001, he played a messed-up teenager who is willingly seduced by a pedophile in “L.I.E.” It is a stunning performance: Dano manages to show both the boy’s power and his vulnerability. In “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” a few years later, he exuded a dark, almost Goth sexuality, and in 2006, he remained mute for much of “Little Miss Sunshine” but still filled out every scene he was in. In “There Will Be Blood,” he plays a small-town, very ambitious evangelist, and his main adversary is not the devil but Day-Lewis. Dano replaced another actor three weeks after filming began, and yet it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. With his pale, almost spectral face and tall, lanky frame, Dano can seem haunted.

The audience hasn’t quite caught up to Paul Dano yet — he’s still too different for immediate acceptance. It can take a while — as it did for Ellen Page — for a screen persona to find its home. In this issue, we aimed to document the cinematic year through that prism. Most of the performances we decided to spotlight were those of newcomers — from Tang Wei, who was torn between a sense of duty and longing in “Lust, Caution,” to Michael Cera in “Superbad.” But there were other breakthroughs, like the 82-year-old Hal Holbrook, who serves as the voice of reason in “Into the Wild,” and, in “Away From Her,” Julie Christie, who last won the Oscar for Best Actress for “Darling” (1965). Christie works so infrequently these days that the director, Sarah Polley, had to spend eight months wooing her before she said yes to the part. In the film, Christie dropped her British accent to play a happily married woman who is afflicted with Alzheimer’s. As the disease strips her memory, she forgets her husband and falls in love with another patient.

Like all breakthrough performances chosen for this issue, there is something singular and timely about Christie’s work in “Away From Her.” Similarly, Casey Affleck’s depiction of Robert Ford, the man who killed Jesse James, reworks the mythology of the West in present-day terms, while Sienna Miller, long a gossip-column staple herself, turns the glare of the media inside out in “Interview,” a meditation on the vagaries of celebrity culture. Our goal in spotlighting these 15 breakthrough performances was to combine the shock of the new with a sense of history. It’s important to remember that change can occur at any age — it requires a complex cocktail of talent, opportunity and, most of all, a particular part at a particular moment.