Right! Playing Darcy made Firth and Macfadyen famous more than the other way around, I suspect. I know Firth used to joke that he could do anything with his life, take any role, go to space, and the headline would still be "Mr Darcy goes to space." I feel like Succession is probably the only thing comparable to P&P for Macfadyen and it's been huge.

It's more a trend than an absolute thing (1995 S&S has a bunch of stars regardless of gender, for instance) but at least with P&P, the only time a really big name has been Darcy was Olivier in 1940 IIRC.