An attractive All-American looking leading man of the 1980s with a flair for playing perplexed characters overtaken by unusual circumstances, Jeff Daniels first registered with the public with his performances as a mostly self-involved semi-intellectual who cheats on his cancer-stricken wife in "Terms of Endearment" (1983). Two years later, he solidified his status as the smug actor in the film-within-the-film who steps off the screen to woo Mia Farrow in Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of Cairo" (1985). But Daniels' defining role, and one of his finest performances to date, came as the
