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“I HAD MAYBE 10 MOVIES UNDER MY BELT BEFORE I THOUGHT I COULD DO THIS FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.”

— Jeff Bridges

Bridges Show.” He caught his feature film stride right out of the gate, though, with Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 “The Last Picture Show.” For his performance as Duane Jackson, a teenager searching for direction in the dust of 1951 North Texas, Bridges earned his first of seven Oscar nominations. He marvels today at how low-key the occasion was then. There was no campaigning or interviews building up to the big day. Just a phone call with the happy news.

Bridges would become a vital ingredient for directors throughout the 1970s. He scored raves opposite Stacy Keach in John Huston’s “Fat City” in 1972. He took on the role of Don Parritt in John Frankenheimer’s 1973 adaptation of “The Iceman Cometh” and landed yet another supporting actor nomination opposite Clint Eastwood in Michael Cimino’s “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” in 1974. By mid-decade he was already headlining such major spectacles as John Guillermin’s “King Kong.”

Things would be taken up a notch on that score with 1980’s “Tron,” which launched Bridges into the pop-cultural realm. In a dual performance as computer programmer Kevin Flynn and hacker program Clu, Bridges was at the forefront of evolving, large-scale, effects-heavy Hollywood filmmaking. He’d revisit the property 30 years later with “Tron: Legacy.”

Bridges soon racked up a third Oscar nomination, and his first for a leading per- formance, for John Carpenter’s 1984 scifi classic “Starman.” As an alien being who comes to Earth and takes on the guise of a human, Bridges went to great lengths to conjure something special. He worked with a dancer friend to craft odd movements for the character that conveyed an unsettling sense of artifice. “It was almost like imagining that I was somebody in a human body, like I was driving it around,” he once said of his approach.

The 1980s saw Bridges tackling different genres, from Joe Eszterhas and Richard Marquand’s 1985 thriller “Jagged Edge” to Francis Ford Coppola’s 1988 Preston Tucker biopic “Tucker: The Man and His Dream.” He would wrap up the decade starring opposite his brother, Beau, in Steve Kloves’“the Fabulous Baker Boys.”

The ’90s began with a touch of nostalgia as Bridges took on the role of Duane Jackson for Bogdanovich once again in 1990’s “Texasville.” Top-tier filmmakers continued to come calling, from Terry Gilliam (“The Fisher King”) to Peter Weir (“Fearless”) to Ridley Scott (“White Squall”). But it was the 1997 Coen brothers comedy “The Big Lebowski” that really tied things together for a legend ready to be immortalized.

As “The Dude,” a Southland stoner fashioned in part after film producer Jeff Dowd, Bridges constructed, perhaps, his masterpiece. It’s certainly the character that will outlive everything else he’s done, one that