Adoring celebrities can be risky. Society tends to elevate Hollywood figures to a status of reverence, eagerly consuming their art and tracking their personal stories. In return, these stars often amass fortunes beyond imagination. Yet, as the saying goes, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The narrative of a celebrity’s decline is all too familiar. Take Chris Farley, for instance, who dedicated his final year to a Fatty Arbuckle biopic—a comedian whose career was marred by grave sexual assault allegations.

Looking back with rose-tinted glasses can be equally misleading. We often recall our early years as idyllic, free from the burdens of adult life like mortgages. However, this view is skewed, as inequality and power struggles have always been present, merely manifesting in different forms over time. The challenges we face today are echoes of past issues that were just as prevalent.

When nostalgia meets once-adored celebrities, it can lead to disappointment. Many 1980s Hollywood icons have seen their reputations tarnished, often by their own actions. While some transgressions are minor, such as falling short of rigid Hollywood beauty norms, others involve profound personal transformation that alienated fans. There are also those whose true negative traits have only recently come to light.

Chevy Chase’s rise to fame began with “Saturday Night Live” in 1975, where he quickly became a standout as the “Weekend Update” anchor. By the 1980s, he had left the sketch show and transitioned into a successful film career. Chase became a household name through hits like “Caddyshack,” “Fletch,” “¡Three Amigos!,” and the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” series, captivating audiences with his distinctively sardonic humor.

When “Saturday Night Live” launched in 1975, the show made an instant star of “Weekend Update” host Chevy Chase. By the time the 1980s rolled around, Chase had left the sketch show and had become a full-fledged movie star, the first of many breakouts to prove that “SNL” could lead to more. Hits like “Caddyshack,” “Fletch,” “¡Three Amigos!,” and the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” series cemented Chase as a familiar face all throughout that decade, his sardonic brand of everyman comedy delighting audiences.

Decades later, when Chase played Pierce Hawthorne on the cult-favorite sitcom “Community,” his reputation soured significantly. There were rumors of drunken phone calls, racist rants, castmate feuds, and more. Ultimately, all the behind-the-scenes drama had Chase written off “Community,” and in the years since, he has struggled to rebuild his legacy. There are plenty of stories now, too, about how disliked he was on the “SNL” set. He even once physically fought with Bill Murray. “In the heat of anger,” John Landis later recalled (via People), “Murray pointed at Chevy and yelled, ‘MEDIUM TALENT!’”

In 2026, CNN aired a documentary called “I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.” In the film, Chase defended himself from the long line of accusations, inadvertently proving everyone right in the process that he’s hard to be around. “I’m not gonna let anybody figure me out,” he told director Marina Zenovich (via People). “You’re not bright enough.” Yikes.

Each week on “The Cosby Show,” Bill Cosby dispensed pearls of wisdom. His sitcom’s massive success offered a vision of an America that no longer cared about the color of someone’s skin the way it once had; in fact, Cosby was so popular and beloved that he was called “America’s Dad.” He coasted for a long time on that good will.

In 2014, it all came crashing down. Comedian Hannibal Buress joked about the open secret that Cosby was a predator, hitting out against his hectoring on-screen persona. “‘I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom!’” Buress said (via The Guardian), mimicking the actor. “Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches.” The routine went mega-viral, and in its wake, dozens of women came forward to accuse Cosby of drugging and assaulting them. It appeared that “America’s Dad” had spent decades taking advantage of his fame.

He was ultimately sentenced to 10 years in prison, convicted of having assaulted a minor. In 2021, however, he was released for procedural reasons, having only served a small fraction of his sentence. Model and alleged Cosby victim Jewel Allison told New York Daily News, “We may be looking at America’s greatest serial rapist that ever got away with this for the longest amount of time. He got away with it because he was hiding behind the image of Cliff Huxtable.”

For a certain type of film fan, “the ’80s” immediately conjures images crafted by David Cronenberg. From the exploding head in “Scanners” to the goopy, gross remake of “The Fly,” few directors better captured that decade’s uneasy slide into the future.

Enter: “Videodrome,” his 1983 masterpiece all about the horror of analog media. The movie made an ’80s icon out of James Woods, who plays Max; he gets caught up in a vast conspiracy meant to alter humanity’s very biology, using television waves to change what it means to be a person. “Long live the new flesh!” the characters in the film cry, and Woods rode that fame for decades. In the 1980s, he was also in “Once Upon a Time in America,” “Cat’s Eye,” “Salvador,” and more, scooping up a collection of accolades for his work.

These days, Woods’ legacy isn’t what it used to be. He became an outspoken conservative, making headlines for posting racist tweets on X, endorsing Donald Trump in 2024, and even telling Jimmy Kimmel to “eat s***” (via TMZ) after ABC suspended his show. Woods produced the 2023 Best Picture winner “Oppenheimer,” but you wouldn’t know it from the film’s press tour. “It was gently suggested that I basically remain invisible,” he told Megyn Kelly (via Deadline), “which was painful.”

In the 1970s, a young Mel Gibson acted primarily in Australia, where he was raised. In 1979, he starred in a post-apocalyptic Ozploitation film that catapulted him to international fame. The “Mad Max” franchise, featuring Gibson as a warrior wandering a desert wasteland, became a staple of the 1980s. To close out the latter half of the decade, Gibson starred with Danny Glover in the “Lethal Weapon” franchise, proving himself as one of the pre-eminent action stars of his age. (Click here if you need the entire “Lethal Weapon” timeline explained.)

The 1990s brought Gibson critical acclaim, including films like “Braveheart,” which he directed. By the 2000s, however, Gibson managed to tarnish his legacy when he was arrested for driving under the influence, caught on police cameras belittling the arresting officer. He made misogynistic and antisemitic remarks, to put it mildly, and after significant backlash, Gibson apologized in a statement to The New York Times. “I want to apologize specifically to everyone in the Jewish community for the vitriolic and harmful words that I said to a law enforcement officer the night I was arrested on a D.U.I. charge,” he wrote.

Charlie Sheen’s tragic true life story goes all the way back to the very beginning; though he is, as we’d say now, a “nepo baby,” it couldn’t have been easy to grow up in such an acclaimed acting family. Martin Sheen was an acclaimed actor in films like “Badlands,” so when Charlie and his brother Emilio Estevez hit the scene, they had a lot to live up to. While they were both part of the Brat Pack, Charlie quickly developed an edgier on-screen persona than his brother, leading films like “The Boys Next Door,” “Platoon,” and “Wall Street.” He was a heartthrob, a Hollywood scion, and a talented actor, and he built quite the legacy for himself.

In 2010, after being arrested for assaulting his then-wife Brooke Mueller, the actor entered rehab. In 2011, Sheen’s longtime battle with addiction really caught up to him. That year, Sheen was roundly mocked in the public for a series of bizarre interviews where he claimed to be “winning,” and he was ultimately let go from “Two and a Half Men,” his long-running, successful sitcom. He would later go public with his HIV diagnosis.

In 2025, Sheen reconsidered his legacy in a Netflix documentary called “aka Charlie Sheen.” He claimed that all of those hard-partying days are behind him, insisting on an episode of the “Howie Mandel Does Stuff” podcast, “There’s no part of me that wants that life anymore.”

Like his Brat Pack co-star Charlie Sheen, Rob Lowe became one of the pre-eminent heartthrobs of the ’80s. His roles in films like “The Outsiders,” “St. Elmo’s Fire,” and “Class” made him one of the decade’s most promising new stars, those boyish good looks seeming to rocket him to the top of the A-list.

As the decade drew to a close, however, Lowe found himself embroiled in one of the biggest star scandals of the decade. He was 24 the night he slept with two fans from a club, and he later said he was unaware that one of them was only 16. Though the age of consent in Atlanta made that hookup technically legal, it wasn’t legal for Lowe to film the encounter. He did, though, and after the girls took it home with them, the tape was ultimately one of the first celebrity sex tapes widely circulated among the public.

He was sued by the family of the younger girl, and the incident upended his rising-star status. His family stuck by him, though. A year after the scandal swamped his son, Lowe’s father Chuck told People, “We weren’t embarrassed by [the incident]. I’m worldly enough to know, or at least suspect, what goes on in people’s homes.” Lowe worked only intermittently throughout the 1990s, ultimately giving his legacy a boost when he starred on “Parks & Recreation.”

These days, it’s common for celebrities to get plastic surgery; there are plenty of actors who look way different than they used to, but fans have learned to roll with it, to follow their favorites anywhere, through any face. Back in the 1980s, however, Jennifer Grey’s legacy became a cautionary tale for any rising stars considering going under the knife. She starred in hits like “Red Dawn” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” before cementing her stardom opposite Patrick Swayze in “Dirty Dancing.” She played Frances “Baby” Houseman, the character who leads Swayze to utter the iconic line, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

Then Grey got a nose job, shocking Hollywood. In her aptly-titled memoir “Out of the Corner,” Grey looked back on the outsized reaction to her smaller nose, which led everyone from fans to Hollywood executives to say she was unrecognizable, and therefore un-castable. What was the use of building up marquee-name status if no one would notice her on a movie poster? When she handed airport security her driver’s license shortly after the nose job, Grey wrote (via The New York Times) that the employee straight-up didn’t believe it was her. “‘I’ve seen ‘Dirty Dancing’ a dozen times. I know Jennifer Grey,” the woman said. “And you are not her.” Grey recalled, “Overnight I lose my identity and my career.”

The 1980s saw a ton of sitcoms break through, leading to a whole new generation of child stars hitting the big time. One such star was Kirk Cameron, brother of “Full House” star Candace Cameron Bure. Cameron starred on television from a very young age, and in 1985 he began playing Mike Seaver on “Growing Pains.” The sitcom was a smash and would last until the next decade. While he acted on the show, Cameron also led films like “Like Father Like Son” and “Listen To Me,” even crossing over with his sister’s show by appearing on “Full House.”

The fame of plenty of child stars fizzle out after they leave their sitcoms. Cameron didn’t get sucked into the hard-partying lifestyle that tarnishes many legacies, however; he went the opposite direction, becoming increasingly outspoken about his religion and his conservative politics. That would be fine, as far as it goes, but Cameron found himself a pariah in Hollywood because it went very far.

By 2012, he was regularly making headlines for things like an appearance on “Piers Morgan Tonight” (via ABC News), during which he insulted queer people. “[Homosexuality is] ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization,” he said, drawing widespread condemnation. In 2020, Cameron held a “protest” in the form of a maskless Christmas caroling event next to a COVID-19 testing center.

Mickey Rourke was one of ’80s Hollywood’s handsomest leading men. He put his movie-star good looks to use in a number of films that decade; in the steamy “9½ Weeks,” for example, he was so thrillingly good-looking that Kim Basinger’s character missed the fact that he was controlling and abusive. He was also in “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” “Diner,” “Rumble Fish,” “Body Heat,” and many more.

Shocking fans as the decade drew to a close, Rourke left Hollywood to pursue a boxing career instead. Those movie-star good looks got absolutely pummeled in the ring, and Rourke found himself turning to plastic surgery to try to repair some of what had originally made him famous. “I had my nose broken twice. I had five operations on my nose and one on a smashed cheekbone,” he told The Daily Mail.

The effect, unfortunately, was unsettling, and Rourke found his on-screen persona shifting significantly as he attempted to mount a comeback. Even when he was Oscar-nominated for “The Wrestler” — a movie that played on his real-life persona — Rourke told The Daily Mail that he’d probably ruined his chances of a genuine career resurgence. “I stupidly said acting wasn’t a job for a real man. I threatened producers, raged at directors, forgot my agent’s name,” he said. “I really burned my bridges. And a lot of people have long memories.”

For certain people in the 1980s, there was very little cooler than the talking car on “Knight Rider.” David Hasselhoff played a superhero of sorts, a guy who fights crime with the help of his AI-powered car named KITT. Okay, sure, it was incredibly cheesy, but it made Hasselhoff an icon of the ’80s even before he started running shirtless in slow-mo on “Baywatch.” Hasselhoff closed out the decade as a mega-famous musician… in Europe, anyway, where a massively-attended performance in Berlin came to represent the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

By the 2000s, however, with “Baywatch” off the air and his relevance fading, an embarrassing incident involving a hamburger tarnished The Hoff’s legacy. He’d struggled with alcoholism for several years, and his daughter wanted to show him what he looked like when he was drunk. She took video of Hasselhoff laying on a kitchen floor, drunkenly eating a hamburger while he insulted the teenager. When the video leaked, the resulting firestorm seemed sure to end his career entirely.

Thankfully, he decided to look at it in a positive light, and Hasselhoff was able to turn things around. “For me it was actually a good sign because it was a wake-up call,” he told “TODAY,” “and it brought everything to a head.”

If we’re talking about faltering legacies of the 1980s, there is no way around mentioning Tom Cruise. He hit Hollywood like a lightning bolt that decade, rising through the ranks from “Risky Business” to “Top Gun,” “Born on the Fourth of July,” “The Color of Money,” “Cocktail,” and more. He was popular, bankable, and a great actor, proving that heartthrobs could still be talented.

Over the next few decades, however, public opinion of Cruise was significantly soured by several romantic setbacks, all of which shone a spotlight on his involvement in Scientology. After divorcing his “Eyes Wide Shut” co-star Nicole Kidman, Cruise seemed to have obliterated his legacy by leaping up on Oprah Winfrey’s couch to announce that he was madly in love with “Dawson’s Creek” star Katie Holmes. Around the same time, “TODAY” host Matt Lauer pressed him on Scientology, and in response he railed against antidepressants. In 2012, Cruise told ABC News that he regretted it. “Telling people how to live their lives? I saw how that came across,” he said.

In the post-COVID years, Cruise has been able to turn his trajectory around. Films like “Top Gun: Maverick” made going to the theater seem like an event again, and Cruise got the credit. We put a pin in the Scientology thing, apparently!

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, may be the victim of sexual assault, or has experienced a hate crime, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN’s National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

• The VictimConnect Hotline by phone at 1-855-4-VICTIM or by chat for more information or assistance in locating services to help. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.