If there’s anything that audiences and awards voters alike love, it’s seeing a faded star revitalise their career with one breathtaking performance. But finding the right role to reannounce yourself to the world is a real art.

Will Demi Moore win the best actress prize at this year’s Oscars? She’s certainly in with a strong chance. Her fearless performance in Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body-horror film, The Substance, has already earned her a Golden Globe. And aside from the quality of her acting, one key factor could tip the balance in her favour: Hollywood loves it when a former superstar makes a comeback – as do we all.

“Hardcore fans of particular actors feel vindicated when they come back into fashion,” says Anna Smith, a film critic and the host of the Girls on Film Podcast, “and more casual fans may still have a certain nostalgic affection for the people they watched on screen when they were younger – all the more so if they starred in mainstream films. And I suspect that deep down, seeing a famous person’s fortunes change for the better gives people hope that it could happen to them, especially in their mature years.”

Moore’s current change in fortunes has all the elements that go into an ideal Hollywood comeback. To a lesser extent, the same could be said of Pamela Anderson’s revelatory work in The Last Showgirl, which was released in the US last week, and has garnered its star Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations. And Ke Huy Quan’s comeback is another textbook case: after abandoning acting for 20 years, the one-time child star won a best supporting actor Oscar for Everything Everywhere All at Once in 2023, and now has his first-ever starring vehicle, Love Hurts, in cinemas in February. As different as they might seem, all three actors are following a pattern that was established decades ago.

“The perfect Hollywood comeback is a carefully orchestrated symphony of narrative parallels and zeitgeist timing,” says Mark Borkowski, a PR expert and the author of The Fame Formula: How Hollywood’s Fixers, Fakers and Star Makers Created the Celebrity Industry. “A sidelined star – like Demi Moore – must step into a role that mirrors their offscreen arc. Add a dash of auteur credibility and just enough edge to provoke chatter, and you’ve got the formula for an A-list resurrection.”

As Borkowski says, the first essential ingredient is an inspiring behind-the-scenes redemption story. This Friday marks another major Hollywood “comeback”, with the release of Cameron Diaz’s first film in over 10 years, Netflix’s Back in Action, after announcing her retirement in 2018. However when she left the business, she was still riding high as an A-lister, so her return doesn’t make for a particularly emotional one,  particularly when the comeback film in question is a big-budget action comedy which sounds like something she could do in her sleep. It’s mildly intriguing, but nothing more.

By contrast, Moore’s comeback feels like a timeless fable. She hadn’t starred in a mainstream hit since the 1990s, and, in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, she talked about how her confidence had been knocked by a producer labelling her a “popcorn actress”. She was, she said, “at kind of a low point”. But The Substance proved to herself and everyone else that she had more to give. That’s the kind of beating-the-odds, overcoming-the-obstacles arc that Hollywood can get behind.

Most actors’ comebacks have a similar theme: the overdue vindication of someone who was treated unfairly by the industry. Quan was in The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as a boy in the 1980s, but he became disillusioned with acting because there were so few substantial roles for Asian Americans, so when he had the opportunity to shine in Everything Everywhere All at Once, the real-life plot was more satisfying than any fictional one. Viewers and voters could bask in the warm glow of justice being done.