Best Performance in a Movie by a Former Resident

Actor Paul Rudd, who was reared in Overland Park, is perhaps best known for playing the stepbrother to Alicia Silverstone's Cher in the charming Jane Austen update Clueless. Since then, Rudd, a former class president at Shawnee Mission West High School, has seemed to struggle to find his place in Hollywood. He's appeared in such varied projects as Gen-X Cops 2, a film targeted at audiences in Hong Kong, and The Shape of Things, writer-director's Neil LaBute latest exercise in misogyny. But the silly Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy returned Rudd to a mainstream hit, and he excelled in the part of an investigative reporter named Brian Fantana. The "stylish" member of a fictitious '70s TV news team, Rudd's character reveals in the course of the film that he's named his testicles and his penis. Rudd also gets big laughs in a scene in which Fantana describes a powerful cologne gleaned from the "bits of real panthers."