Built to Last (2): Most Stars Last One Year

From sitcom curses to tennis courts, the hidden mathematics of staying power

Here is a number Hollywood would rather you didn’t know: for most people who act on screen, the career lasts a single year.

That is the finding of the largest study ever made of acting careers. Mathematicians at Queen Mary University of London analysed IMDb records for about 2.4 million screen actors, stretching from 1888 to 2016, and found that around 70 per cent never worked beyond their first year, according to the university’s summary. At any given moment, roughly 90 per cent of actors are out of work, Yahoo reported.

The rare long careers follow a pattern the researchers called rich-get-richer: the best-known actors get the most work, so anyone who survives the early years tends to keep building. To study those careers, the team worked with about 20,000 actors whose working lives ran 20 years or more, ABC News in Australia explained, out of a database of millions.

Music is even more unforgiving. By the end of 2025, streaming services hosted 253 million tracks, and more than 120 million of them were played fewer than 10 times all year, according to Luminate data reported by Dynamoi. Just 0.2 per cent of all tracks accounted for nearly half of global listening, Music Business Worldwide found.

And today’s new artists aren’t only competing with each other. They’re competing with every song ever recorded, sitting in the same app. In 2025, for the first time, more than three-quarters of US streams were of older catalog music rather than new releases, Music Business Worldwide reported. Every new single now goes head to head with Thriller.

The curse of the hit show

If you want to see the gap between a hit and a career, look at television’s two biggest sitcoms of the 1990s.

When Seinfeld ended in 1998, its stars were among the most recognisable faces in America. Then their new shows started failing, one after another, so reliably that the press gave it a name: the “Seinfeld curse.”

It took Julia Louis-Dreyfus to break it. First came The New Adventures of Old Christine, which won her an Emmy. Then came Veep, which won her six consecutive Emmys as lead actress in a comedy. Jerry Seinfeld, meanwhile, simply went back to the thing he had always done best: standing alone on a stage with a microphone.

The cast of Friends scattered in different directions. Jennifer Aniston built a long film career and returned to television as the star and producer of The Morning Show. Matt LeBlanc’s spin-off, Joey, lasted two seasons, and he later won a Golden Globe for playing a version of himself in Episodes. Courteney Cox has spent three decades running from a masked killer in the Scream films.

A hit show, it turns out, is a launch pad, not a landing.

Point after point

The best way to understand staying power may not come from entertainment at all. It comes from a tennis court.

A champion doesn’t win once. They win the point, then the next one, then the game, the set, the match, the tournament, and then they have to do it all again the following week, for years. One great fortnight makes a headline. Twenty years of them make history.

That is what Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams did. Federer won 20 Grand Slam titles and held the No. 1 ranking for a record 237 straight weeks. Nadal won 22, including 14 French Opens. Djokovic has won 24. Serena Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most of the Open era, the first in 1999 and the last in 2017, at the Australian Open, while she was pregnant.

They didn’t just win. They dragged each other higher. When Nadal retired in 2024, Federer wrote him an open letter remembering how the early buzz about the Spaniard as “a generational talent” proved to be more than hype, Outlook India reported. “You challenged me in ways no one else could,” Federer wrote, CBS Sports reported.

Even legends can’t hold the line forever. Djokovic was still competing at 39 in 2026, but in September he slipped out of the world’s top ten for the first time since 2018, PrensaFútbol reported.

The same discipline applies off the court, said James David Grivas, who spent years pitching his screenplay Always & Forever before turning it into a novel, Always & Forever: Never Tear Us Apart.

The same persistence can apply to books and screenplays. James David Grivas worked on his Always & Forever screenplay before adapting the project as a novel; its inclusion is promotional, not evidence of industry recognition.

The survivors

Every entertainer in this series has beaten the odds by decades. Frank Sinatra worked for roughly sixty years. Michael Jackson’s career ran forty years, and his music is still climbing the charts. Madonna, Sylvester Stallone and Tom Cruise have each passed the four-decade mark; Stallone is fifty years on from Rocky. Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez are into their fourth decade. Taylor Swift has reached twenty years, Ed Sheeran fifteen.

But for every Sinatra, there were thousands of crooners whose names no one remembers. The interesting question isn’t whether these stars survived. It’s how. And for many of them, the answer was a reinvention.