These performances are my choices for the best performances, by actors and actresses, from every era of the last 100 years in film history. It’s the hardest thing to evaluate acting in movies. There is so much more that goes into the making of a film than a stage play, that it all can distract an audience from the astonishing acting performance, happening right before their eyes. Sometimes, all of the other elements in the film, from the direction to the sound design can help accentuate a performance better than any other median. This can also be used to distract an audience from a terrible performance.
Take Tom Hanks’s performance in Cast Away as a performance that transcends the setting and filmmaking techniques. Not only does Tom Hanks alone, keep the film alive, but his character of Chuck Nolan brings us all the more closer to understanding the psyche of loneliness. Everyone might scoff at the presence of Chuck’s volleyball friend, Wilson. But, it is his relationship with that sports toy that becomes the most powerful bond in the film. It becomes all the more clear, when Nolan loses Wilson to the sea and we see a thinned-out, weak and desperate Tom Hanks, curled up, shivering and grieving.
What did it take to get to this point? How much suffering does a man have to endure to go through such intense pain for the loss of a personally that he has created himself? The film jumps from Nolan, just after he crash lands on this island to 4 years later. We don’t see Chuck Nolan’s evolution or in this case, his de-evolution. But, that doesn’t matter. Tom Hanks is so good in this film, as this character, that he answers all of our questions with his performance. He was nominated by the Academy for good reason.
Just as Tom transformed his body to show Nolan’s de-evolution, losing a lot of weight to help the illusion that he’s been on that island for 4 years, there are plenty of other, more impressive transformations in the history of acting on film. For one, Dustin Hoffman’s transformation into an autistic, card-shark of a man in Rain Man is one of the best – if not the best in recent film history. By the time the characters of Raymond and Daniel Babbit, drive off to Vegas to make some big money, fast, you’ll be hard-pressed to recognize the same man that would later play Captain Hook in Hook. The man who was the 21-year-old, self-conscious graduate in The Graduate. Dustin Hoffman literally ceased to exist before our eyes, replaced by this friendly, yet dangerously incompetent autistic man. Tom Hanks would later continue that transition in Forrest Gump, breathing real life into a character so different from himself, that he’s one of the most recognizable fictional people in history.
Emoting is another big role in creating a great performance. This is a vital element in the acting process that fewer and fewer actors in Hollywood seem to understand these days. When they deliver a line, there has to be an emotion behind it. They can’t just walk in front of the camera and read the line from a script or teleprompter and expect that to fly with audiences. Two perfect examples of great emotionally charged performances, are the top acting performances on my list.
The first is Vivien Leigh’s powerful take on the role of Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlet O’Hara. She is the wealthy daughter of an Irish plantation owner around the time of the Civil War. She is sassy, self-confident, self-made, spoiled, stubborn and vulnerable woman. In 4 hours, an audience will get to know and understand Scarlett so well, they will feel like she’s part of the family. And, Vivien Leigh is in 95% of the entire film, working her butt off to turn out the best performance in film history as far as I’m concerned. When she raises a fist to the sky and proclaims, “As God as my witness, I will never go hungry again,” I would defy anyone to not feel a twinge of something down their spine. That is what emoting and the delivery of a line is all about. That one line-reading would transcend acting on stage just as much as it has on-screen.
The next acting performance on my list comes from the man most critics have deemed, the “most important actor” in film, Marlon Brando. I don’t particularly agree with that statement. I think that’s a very risky thing to say, considering all of the film actors that have came and went over the years. But, I can’t deny how extraordinary Brando’s performance is as the head of the Corleone crime family, Vito Corleone in The Godfather. The man went so far as to put cotten in his cheeks to suggest that his character is physically disabled in the jaw for some reason.. And yet, this does not distract audiences from feeling the power in each line-reading. Brando delivers every line with such emotion and passion, it’s hard not to see this man who once played an ex-boxer in On The Waterfront and a card-playing loser in A Streetcar Named Desire, transform into this protective, tyrannical, old-school father of such great actors as Al Pacino, James Caan, and Robert Duvall.
More great actors and performances, represented in this article include the awesome performance of Robert DeNiro as the abusive and self-hating real life character, Jake LaMotta. Another truly mesmerizing transformation that will make audiences hard-pressed not to associate DeNiro with that character for the rest of their movie-viewing experience. Meryl Streep deservedly won Best Actress as Sophie in the holocaust-based film, Sophie’s Choice, delivering a performance of purity and power that could easily rival Vivien Leigh’s in Gone With The Wind. Streep hasn’t been nominated by the Academy over 10 times for no reason.
Two very unusual performances that I personally feel deserve such a high spot on my list, are Anthony Hopkins’s chilling and utterly convincing performance as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter in Silence of The Lambs and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, delivering the greatest on-screen heroine since Leigh. Unlike Vivien, Sigourney’s Ellen Ripley must face off against the ultimate nightmare, save a little girl and keep an arrogantly stupidified group of marines together. She emotes and transforms herself so well, it’s easy to forget that Sigourney is a big anti-gun advocate, during a film that features Ellen Ripley, shooting the hell out of a bunch of ugly, scary and disgusting monsters. Choosing Anthony Hopkins’s performance as the sinister Hannibal Lecter probably doesn’t even need an explanation. A very classy actor, who once played alongside old greats like Katharine Hepburn in costume dramas, transforms himself entirely into the monster-esque psychiatric genius that could strike fear into Satan himself. He plays it cool, one minute and truly scary, the next. This makes Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter, the greatest on-screen villain, for a lot of people and a lot of reasons.
And, look for Bette Davis, Al Pacino, Orson Welles, Spencer Tracy, Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery, listed for the best performances throughout their careers.
On a side note, I’m not sure how to evaluate the acting in many foreign language films. There’s only a handful I’ve chosen. One is Max Sydow for his subtle, yet gripping performance in The Seventh Seal.
1. Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind
2. Marlon Brando as Vito Andolini / Corleone in The Godfather
3. Dustin Hoffman as Raymond Babbit in The Rain Man
4. Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull
5. Meryl Streep as Sophie in Sophie’s Choice
6. Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs
7. Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in Aliens
8. Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird
9. Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather: Part 2
10. Bette Davis as Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?
11. Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane
12. Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge in The Christmas Carol (1951)
13. Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in Forrest Gump
14. Spencer Tracy as Manuel Fidello in Captains Courageous
15. Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd.
16. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho
17. Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in Hamlet (1948)
18. Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
19. Renee Falconetti as Jeanne d’Arc in The Passion of Joan of Arc
20. Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story
21. James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces
22. Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz
23. Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire
24. Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca
25. Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in Gone With The Wind
26. Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic
27. Charles Chaplin as The Tramp in City Lights
28. Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve
29. Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver
30. Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs
31. Mia Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby
32. Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
33. George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton in Patton
34. Charleton Heston as Judah Ben-Hur in Ben-Hur
35. Paul Newman as Eddie Felson in The Hustler
36. Clint Eastwood as The Man With No Name or “Blondie” in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
37. Harriett Anderson as Agnes in Cries & Whispers
38. Max von Sydow as Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal
39. James Stewart as John Ferguson in Vertigo
40. Geoffrey Rush as David Helfgott in Shine
41. Mel Gibson as William Wallace in Braveheart
42. Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia
43. Cary Grant as T. R. Devlin in Notorious
44. Morgan Freeman as “Red” in The Shawshank Redemption
45. Katharine Hepburn as Ethel Thayer in On Golden Pond
46. Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes in Chinatown
47. Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown in My Left Foot
48. Boris Karloff as The Monster in Bride of Frankenstein
49. Heath Ledger as The Joker in The Dark Knight
50. Charles Laughton as William Bligh in Mutiny on The Bounty
51. John Wayne as Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man
52. Brigette Helm as The Creative Man / The Machine Man / Death / The Seven Deadly Sins / Maria in Metropolis
53. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator in The Terminator
54. Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in Ray
55. Ingrid Bergman as Anna Koreff in Anastasia
56. Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady
57. Robert Mitchum as Max Cady in Cape Fear
58. Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest
59. Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson in Titanic
60. Gene Hackman as Little Bill Daggett in Unforgiven
61. Patty Duke as Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker
62. Clint Eastwood as Will Munny in Unforgiven
63. Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich in Erin Brockovich
64. Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady
65. Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)
66. James Dean as Jim Stark in Rebel Without A Cause
67. Linda Blair as Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist
68. Anne Bancroft as Anne Sullivan in The Miracle Worker
69. John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit
70. Kirk Douglas as Col. Dax in The Paths of Glory
71. Henry Fonda as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath
72. Sean Connery as James Bond in From Russia With Love
73. Gene Hackman as Jimmy Doyle in The French Connection
74. Kathy Bates as Anne Wilkes in Misery
75. Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on The Bounty
76. Bruce Willis as John McClane in Die Hard
77. Diane Keaton as Annie Hall in Annie Hall
78. Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon
79. Elizabeth Taylor as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
80. Jack Lemmon as Jerry in Some Like It Hot
81. Russell Crowe as Maximus in Gladiator
82. Dustin Hoffman as Michael Dorsey / Dorothy Michaels in Tootsie
83. Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
84. Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins in Mary Poppins
85. Tom Hanks as Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia
86. Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham in American Beauty
87. Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley, Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake, and Dr. Strangelove in Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
88. Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan in Boy’s Town
89. Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront
90. James Stewart as George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life
91. Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction
92. Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in Rocky
93. Ellen Burstyn as Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream
94. Kirk Douglas as Spartacus in Spartacus
95. Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz
96. Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds
97. Denzel Washington as Trip in Glory
98. Robin Williams as Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting
99. Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos in Monster
100. Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood
More honorable mentions:
Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ in The Passion of the Christ
Cary Grant as Dr. David Huxley in Bringing Up Baby
Jack Nicholson as Melvin Udall in As Good As It Gets
Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Nicholas Cage as Ben Sanderson in Leaving Las Vegas
Tom Hanks as Josh Baskin in Big
Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men
Meg Ryan as Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally
Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire in Jerry Maguire
Johnny Depp as George Jung in Blow
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club
Julia Roberts as Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman
Michael Caine as Dr. Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules
Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean Loomis in Splendor in the Grass
Harrison Ford as Henry Jones Jr. / Indiana Jones in Raiders of The Lost Ark
Sean Connery as Jim Malone in The Untouchables
Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List
Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List
Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate
John Travolta as Vincent Vegga in Pulp Fiction
Robert Shaw as Quint in Jaws
Paul Newman as Luke in Cool Hand Luke
Robert Redford as The Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid
Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity
Edward G. Robinson as Johnny Rocco in Key Largo
James Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey
Tommy Lee Jones as Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive
Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose
Clark Gable as Peter Warren in It Happened One Night
Claudette Colbert as Ellie Andrews in It Happened One Night
Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now
Jamie Lee Curtis as Helen Tasker in True Lies
Kevin Costner as John Dunbar / Dances With Wolves in Dances With Wolves
Jodie Foster as Sara Tobias in The Accused
Sidney Poitier as Detective Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of The Night
Glenn Close as Alex Forrest in Fatal Attraction
Tom Hanks as Chuck Nolan in Cast Away
Zoe Saldana as Neytiri in Avatar
Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate
Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas
Harrison Ford as John Book in Witness
Susan Sarandon as Louise Sawyer in Thelma & Louise
Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands in Edward Ecissorhands
Mel Gibson as Max in The Road Warrior
Tony Curtis as John “The Joker” Jackson in The Defiant Ones
Janet Leigh as Marion Crane in Psycho
Christopher Walken as Nick in The Deer Hunter
Ed Harris as Virgil “Bud” Brigman in The Abyss
Geena Davis as Thelma Yvonne Dickinson in Thelma & Louise
Andy Serkis as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Russell Crowe as John Nash in A Beautiful Mind
Kevin Spacey as Verbil Kint in The Usual Suspects
Katharine Hepburn as Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby
Hilary Swank as Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby
Robin Williams as Daniel Hillard / Mrs. Euphegenia Doubtfire in Mrs. Doubtfire
Dustin Hoffman as Ted Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer
Meryl Streep as Joanna Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer
Woody Allen as Alvy Singer in Annie Hall
Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men
Mel Gibson as Lt. Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon
Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive
Jim Carrey as Andy Kaufman in Man On The Moon
Sidney Poitier as Homer Smith in Lilies of the Field
Eddie Murphy as Professor Sherman Klump, Buddy Love, Mama Klump, Papa Klump, Ernie Klump, Grandma Klump and Lance Perkins in The Nutty Professor
Edward Furlong as John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Arnold Schwarzenegger as Harry Tasker in True Lies
Gene Wilder as Dr. Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein