Jake Gyllenhaal: Happy birthday to the multifaceted actor who is 35

Gyllenhaal was the last American actor to come of age in an era when movie stars built careers from roles that didn't involve donning a rubber suit

Jake Gyllenhaal pictured in 2002, the year of his breakthrough performance in 'Donnie Darko' (Corbis)

Jake Gyllenhaal might just be the last great American actor. Hyperbolic? Perhaps. But there has been much hand-wringing in Hollywood of late over the dearth of young, US-born men with the star power to open a movie and the acting chops to carry it. Who and where, concerned producers might well ask, are the Brads, Leos and Matts of tomorrow?

Born to a film director father and a film producer mother, with an actress sister in Maggie Gyllenhaal, he was the last US actor then aged 25 or under to receive an Oscar nomination, for his performance in 2005's Brokeback Mountain.The youngest American nominated for Best Actor in the past five years was 40-year-old Bradley Cooper. Or maybe Gyllenhaal was just the last American actor to come of age in an era when movie stars built careers from roles that didn't involve donning a rubber suit.

Those big, expressive eyes, first seen daydreaming in Donnie Darko, have since conveyed melancholy and yearning in Brokeback; a twitchy intelligence in Prisoners; and the chilling intensity of a sociopath in Nightcrawler – for which, by rights, Gyllenhaal ought to have earned a second nod from the Academy. Meanwhile Hollywood's most promising male twentysomethings, Miles Teller and Michael B Jordan, followed their breakthrough roles – in Whiplash and Fruitvale Station respectively – with the superhero flop Fantastic Four, the less said about which the better.

The only time Gyllenhaal ever appeared in anything with franchise potential was 2010's $200m turkey Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a videogame adaptation whose failure was probably the best possible outcome for its star's career. In its wake, Gyllenhaal grew not into a comic-book hero, but a chameleon.