Actually, any one of them has a case, depending on the metric you use.

In terms of raw numbers, Daniel has had the biggest career besides Alec (he's also second in birth order), having appeared in over 120 film and TV projects over the years. Stephen, the youngest brother, has 103 titles on his resume, while William has just 78.

However, numbers aren't everything. You could say that William's career, on the whole, has been a little more respectable. He's won the most awards -- 20, compared to 16 for Daniel and just three for Stephen. But even the awards metric is tricky, since one of Daniel's awards was a Stinkers Bad Movie Award for Worst Supporting Actor in 1998's "Vampires."

There's more support on the respect front from the cable movie network AMC, which ran an article on its website about the Baldwin brothers that said, "If Alec is the Cadillac of the Baldwins, then William is the Honda: respectable, reliable and underrated."

If we stick with the car analogy, then perhaps Stephen is the flashy sports car. He has all the looks of the ridiculously handsome Baldwins, but has put them to use in some pretty substance-free projects like 1998's stoner comedy "Half Baked." However, three years earlier he had a central role in the modern classic "The Usual Suspects," so, like many sports cars, maybe his biggest weakness is reliability.

The film-geek friendly Internet Movie Database has tried to turn this sort of debate into a science with what it calls the "STARmeter" -- a ranking it gives to actors based on how frequently they're searched on the IMDb.com site. By this value, the fame order is Alec (with a STARmeter ranking of 1,346), William (3,659), Stephen (3,968) and Daniel (9,960).

But even the STARmeter has its weaknesses, most notably timeliness. It's a reflection of public interest in the actor at this moment, not across time.

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