I'm not talking about making an action film here and there that aspires to no more than a couple of hours of entertainment. I'm talking about garbage. There are excuses - fewer acting opportunities, films being altered by committee or losing their way, sheer bad luck - but many of the films seem simply like bad ideas from the start.

Occasionally an actor will need the money, having blown or lost their savings, forced to cough up in a divorce settlement or, having spent a lot of time in low-paying theatrical roles, wanting to build up a nest egg. And some older stars have to take what they can get if they want to keep working. Still, it's not good for a legacy to have too many bad movies in it.

Here are some from the hall of shame.

Gerard Butler: Some people rate him, and he was certainly effective in 300 and doing voiceover in How To Train Your Dragon. But smug, offputting performances in movies like The Ugly Truth and The Bounty Hunter show he's not suited to rom-coms, and surely there was a better choice for The Phantom of the Opera? Law Abiding Citizen was another misfire.

Marlon Brando: After a string of successes in the 1950s - The Wild One, A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront - Brando increasingly became self-indulgent and cash-grabbing, with an occasional quality film such as The Godfather but too many mediocre to terrible movies like The Night of the Following Day and Free Money.

Laurence Olivier: The great stage actor had an uneven career in film - while there were many excellent performances in films such as Richard III, Henry V and The Entertainer, Olivier, particularly in his later years, admitted he made a lot of his later films just for the money, and his often hammy performances seemed an admission they were beneath him. See, for example, The Jazz Singer, Inchon and The Betsy.

Liz'n'Dick: Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, together and apart, married or not, made some excellent movies and some bad ones. There were films like The Medusa Touch and Exorcist II: The Heretic for him and for Taylor efforts like Butterfield 8 (which she hated and won an Oscar for only because, as she admitted, she had almost died of pneumonia) and The Blue Bird.

Robert De Niro: He was of the premier dramatic actors of his time from the 1970s through to the 1990s. De Niro was in movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather Part II, his Oscar-winning turn in Raging Bull and Goodfellas. In more recent years he has tended to slum it in a series of mediocre to terrible comedies. The better ones are Meet the Parents (playing off his long-established dangerous persona) and The Intern but some are just bad like The Family, Bad Grandpa and The Big Wedding. There are occasional hopeful glimmers - Silver Linings Playbook, The Irishman - but they're not enough. Bobby, come back!

Nicolas Cage: Francis Ford Coppola's nephew showed he had more than enough talent to make it on his own. He could do comedy - wacky, like Raising Arizona, or romantic, like Moonstruck - drama, like his Oscar-winning role in Leaving Las Vegas, and unusual fare (the enjoyably weird Adaptation). But latterly the ham has come to the fore in universally panned films like The Wicker Man. Left Behind showed a depressed Cage realising the depths to which he had sunk. Let's hope for a comeback.

Peter Sellers: A superb comedy actor, Sellers made classics like Dr Strangelove, Being There and The Mouse That Roared. But he also made some really bad movies, especially later in his career, like The Bobo and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (his last).

Michael Caine: Here's an example of an actor who seemed to wake up to himself. After an auspicious early career - Alfie, Sleuth - he seemed from the late 1970s to spend a decade or so where if the money was right, he would do it. This led to too many duds like Bullseye! alongside better efforts such as Hannah and Her Sisters. And then he seemed to have enough money and went back to more consistently good movies.

While there's life, there's hope.