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Stone Cold Steve Austin
Steve Austin's "Stone Cold" persona — a beer-drinking, boss-defying antihero built around his real-life frustration with how he'd been previously booked at WCW — became the single most popular act of the WWF's Attitude Era, driving the promotion's ratings past WCW's for the first time in years during the mid-to-late 1990s. His feud with WWF chairman Vince McMahon, in which Austin's on-screen character repeatedly rebelled against and physically attacked his boss, became one of the most successful storylines in wrestling history, giving Austin a rebellious, working-class appeal that resonated with audiences in a way few wrestling characters before him had achieved. Austin won the WWF Championship six times, and his WrestleMania XIV victory over Shawn Michaels in 1998, capped by a beer celebration with Mike Tyson at ringside, is remembered as the moment the Attitude Era's new direction was fully cemented as the promotion's dominant creative approach going forward. A series of neck injuries forced Austin into early retirement from full-time wrestling in the early 2000s, but his catchphrases — "Austin 3:16" and his signature beer-toast celebration — remain some of the most recognized moments in wrestling history, and he's still widely credited as the performer most responsible for the WWF's 1990s ratings turnaround.
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The Rock
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson became one of the WWF's biggest stars during the late-1990s "Attitude Era," a period defined by edgier, more adult-oriented storylines, winning multiple world championships while building a catchphrase-driven, charismatic promo style — "Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?" — that made him one of the most quotable performers the genre has ever produced. His rivalry with Stone Cold Steve Austin, headlining WrestleMania X-Seven in 2001 in front of more than 67,000 fans at Houston's Astrodome, is still widely regarded as one of the greatest matches and best-attended events in WrestleMania history, capping the most commercially successful period the promotion had experienced up to that point. The Rock transitioned to a full-time Hollywood film career in the mid-2000s, eventually becoming one of the highest-paid actors in the world — a crossover from pro wrestling to mainstream movie stardom more successful and sustained than any performer before him had achieved, reshaping expectations for what a wrestling career could lead to afterward. He returned for occasional high-profile matches even after becoming a movie star, including a WrestleMania main event against John Cena in 2013, and his combination of in-ring success during wrestling's most-watched era and his subsequent global film fame make him one of the most recognizable performers to ever come out of the business.
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