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The Top 100 Performances by a Male Actor
- Robert De Niro – Raging Bull
- Daniel Day-Lewis – There Will Be Blood
- Marlon Brando – On the Waterfront
- Robert De Niro – Taxi Driver
- Al Pacino – The Godfather Part II
- Joaquin Phoenix – The Master
- John Wayne – The Searchers
- Toshirô Mifune – Seven Samurai
- Jean-Paul Belmondo – Breathless
- Tony Leung – In the Mood for Love
- Marlon Brando – The Godfather
- James Stewart – Vertigo
- Marcello Mastroianni – 8 ½
- Peter O’Toole – Lawrence of Arabia
- Al Pacino – The Godfather
- Denzel Washington – Malcolm X
- Takashi Shimura – Ikiru
- Emil Jannings – The Last Laugh
- Dustin Hoffman – The Graduate
- Klaus Kinski – Aguirre, the Wrath of God
- David Thewlis – Naked
- Henry Fonda – The Grapes of Wrath
- James Stewart – It’s a Wonderful Life
- Joe Pesci – Goodfellas
- Gunnar Björnstrand – Winter Light
- Clark Gable – Gone with the Wind
- Emil Jannings – The Blue Angel
- Lamberto Maggiorani – Bicycle Thieves
- Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight
- Malcolm McDowell – A Clockwork Orange
- Anatoliy Solonitsyn – Andrei Rublev
- Humphrey Bogart – Casablanca
- Charlie Chaplin – The Gold Rush
- Marlon Brando – A Streetcar Named Desire
- Marcello Mastroianni – La Dolce Vita
- Marlon Brando – The Last Tango in Paris
- Rutger Hauer – Blade Runner
- Tom Cruise – Magnolia
- Anthony Hopkins – The Silence of the Lambs
- Tony Leung – 2046
- Kirk Douglas – Paths of Glory
- Dennis Hopper – Blue Velvet
- Bill Murray – Lost in Translation
- Jean-Louis Trintignant – The Conformist
- Al Pacino – Dog Day Afternoon
- Jack Nicholson – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Christian Bale – American Psycho
- Burt Lancaster – The Leopard
- Paul Newman – Cool Hand Luke
- James Cagney – White Heat
- Peter Lorre – M
- Peter Sellers – Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
- Robert Mitchum – Night of the Hunter
- Humphrey Bogart – The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
- Michael Fassbender – Shame
- Oscar Isaac – Inside Llewyn Davis
- Carlo Battisti – Umberto D
- Philip Seymour Hoffman – The Master
- Ray Liotta – Goodfellas
- Jean-Pierre Léaud – The 400 Blows
- Charlie Chaplin – City Lights
- Max von Sydow – The Seventh Seal
- Clive Owen – Children of Men
- Robert De Niro – The Godfather Part II
- Orson Welles – Touch of Evil
- Chhabi Biswas – The Music Room
- Adam Sandler – Punch-Drunk Love
- John Travolta – Pulp Fiction
- Martin Sheen – Apocalypse Now
- Samuel L. Jackson – Pulp Fiction
- Michael Keaton – Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
- Henry Fonda – Once Upon a Time in the West
- Ralph Fiennes – The Grand Budapest Hotel
- Casey Affleck – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
- Jesse Eisenberg – The Social Network
- Gene Hackman – The French Connection
- Toshirô Mifune – Rashomon
- Daniel Day-Lewis – Gangs of New York
- Michael Gambon – The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
- Takashi Shimura – Seven Samurai
- Tatsuya Nakadai – The Human Condition
- Robert Shaw – Jaws
- Anthony Perkins – Psycho
- Jonathan Pryce – Brazil
- Jean-Paul Belmondo – Pierrot le Fou
- Toshirô Mifune – Yojimbo
- William Holden – Network
- Jeremy Irons – Dead Ringers
- Erland Josephson – The Sacrifice
- Morgan Freeman – The Shawshank Redemption
- Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds
- Dirk Bogarde – The Servant
- Eli Wallach – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
- Gary Oldman – Sid and Nancy
- John Cazale – The Godfather Part II
- Heath Ledger – Brokeback Mountain
- Dustin Hoffman – Midnight Cowboy
- Chishû Ryû – There Was a Father
- Pete Postlethwaite – Distant Voices, Still Lives
- Tony Leung – Chungking Express
Drake2023-09-15T00:36:23-04:00
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I love that Dirk Bogarde in The Servant is on this list, finished it earlier and his performance in it is so diabolical yet so interesting–his performance is currently in my personal favorite performances of all time.
Hello Drake, love the site. How close was Citizen Kane’s lead performance to making this list? I see you have Welles up there once, but I’d certainly have his Kane somewhere in my 100
@Haider- thank you for the comment and high praise for the site- appreciate it. I don’t have a quick list of performances that just miss the 100 list- but my starting point was taking all of the best performers of the year and using that as my starting list
@Drake – Could Guru Dutt in Pyaasa make it here? It’s in my opinion, one of the most heart rendering performances ever.
P.S. I won’t be using my nickname Alex anymore I think. It’s a bit too confusing. I’ll stick to my actual name for the time being.
@Parmeet- I do have a page for Pyassa- it came up just after my 1957 page update. Any performance that deserves to be one of the year’s best (which this does)- is on the short list for this top 100.
What makes, say, De Niro in Raging Bull greater than Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront?
For the record, I agree with that listing, but only based off intuition. How would you verbalize that difference? (or what makes those 3 better than the other 97 on the list)
@K- There are pages for all top 100 actors (including these three) with a section on their best performance if you’d like to see it verbalized
Even though my intuition agrees with yours, its just harder for me to explain it intellectually (as I could with films), even off the pages.
Like for example, you say for Raging Bull: “tour-de-force transcendent performance – a transformation – and a landmark film and moment for acting, method acting, and dedication to a role (weight gain/body shapeshifting included along with everything else).”
I totally agree with everything here – but I would have a hard time proving to someone that these words couldn’t apply to, say, Christian Bale in Vice. Obviously Christian Bale in Vice couldn’t tie De Niro’s shoes in Raging Bull – but what would I point to concretely to show that difference?
@K – The quality of the film is vital as almost every performance on this list is MP or MS. Daniel Day Lewis has the # 78 spot with his amazing performance in Gangs of New York which I believe is HR on this site. I have same grade when I did my Scorsese Study
I am also a fan of Christian Bale’s performance in Vice and have mentioned it in posts on this site. I think Bale’s performance is in a category of amazing performances in weak or weaker films. Forest Whitaker gives an immaculate performance in The Last King of Scotland (2006). Denzel gives a breathtaking performance in Training Day (2001). Doubt (2008) is one of the best acted films I have ever seen. The acting is so good that Meryl Streep who is excellent merely gives the 4th best performance with Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis are all superior in my opinion. And for Viola Davis she does this in just 10 minutes of screen time when she goes mono e mono with Streep. Yet the film is limited cinematically, which is not that surprising given that it was adapted from a stage play
I think the first question you need to ask yourself is whether or not you believe a performance can be evaluated in a vacuum, that is without context. If you want to rank performances I think you need to have an idea of how much the quality of the film matters to you
Admittingly I have trouble ranking performances as I believe it to be more difficult, especially when the actors or actresses you are comparing have different roles within their respective films
@James Trapp – it’s as it’s said “a great performance in a bad/average film is an average performance”
@M*A*S*H-I do not think so. But certainly if a film relies too heavily on a great performance that is a weakness compared to a great performance in a great film. But saying “a great performance in a bad/average film is an average performance” is just wrong.
@K – Some questions to consider
What is the purpose of the role in relation to the film? To what degree does this actor succeed in achieving this?
How physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging is the role?
How emotionally taxing is your viewing experience?
While films can be analyzed through an academic prism, they are an artform concerned with playing to human emotions. If the Takashi Shimura performance in Ikiru (1952) does not move someone they should really be checked for a pulse. Unsurprisingly, many of the performances on this list, come from emotionally shattering films
A similar question to the one directly above is in regards to how much of an impression does the performance make from other elements such as intrigue or fascination. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance in The Master (2012) is one such character. While Joaquin Phoenix gives the more raw emotional performance, PSH’s Lancaster Dodd is endlessly fascinating to me
Don’t knock intuition. Evaluating performances can incorporate both verbal analysis and intuition
I absolutely am not knocking intuition, nor do I think evaluating acting is necessarily more subjective than movies. I think we just lack the research and the technical vocabulary to analyze actors – unlike movies where we can speak of mise-en-scene, lighting, staging, blocking, camera movement, etc. – there is no equivalent terminology for acting. Eventually even those terms are just heuristics to guide the thinking process, but they can certainly make it much easier.
There is no method for discussing, in a systematic manner, an actors body language, voice, eyes, etc.
As for those qualities you listed (“physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging”, etc.) – there is one performance that was left of the list which triumphs by every metric: Shery Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I genuinely cannot comprehend how she is not universally listed next to Marlon Brando or De Niro in that performance. Her screaming, her sobbing, the sheer range of emotional expression: from pure joy to total despair, free, bitter angry, feigned anger, protectiveness, sadness, innocence, eroticism, childishness, and on and on, often multiple in a single scene.
Any one of these emotions, in just a single scene, would make her memorable (look at her terrified expression at the dinner table) – but all of them, combined, perfectly, with full physical, emotional, and intellectual commitment, with not a single weak scene; and bringing together all those contradictions without compromising any of them, but still making Laura a cohesive character – how anyone could see her in that movie without instantly ranking her among the best in history is incomprehensible to me.
For the record, I haven’t seen Joan of Arc, and my ranking of the best performances in history would go:
1. Robert De Niro in Raging Bull
2. Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
3. Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
(I could be persuaded any of these deserves the top spot)
Do you remember the handful of performances that hurt leaving off the most?
@Matthew – good question – John Wayne in Red River? Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski? Maybe Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer? What do you think?
I actually have not seen Red River but 100% agreed on the other two. Really glad to see you already putting Murphy’s performance that high, I was ready to call it an all time great performance the moment the credits rolled
So for me, Leo in The Revenant is the biggest one left off. I was about to say Von Sydow for The Seventh Seal but I just caught that it actually was on the list. Other big ones that are left off would be De Niro in Heat and probably something for Pitt (Jesse James and/or Fight Club). Maybe Nicholson for Chinatown. He’s firing off with his trademark Nicholsonisms but also has some really good understated moments like he showed he can do in The Passenger. I really wanted to say Duvall for Apocalypse Now but thought the performance was too small, but then I googled it and it seems that Duvall is only on screen for 2 less minutes than Hopkins was for Silence of the Lambs. I actually have not seen Kane in 5-6 years (really need to remedy that, that was before I would even say I was a cinephile) but I recall being super impressed with Orson there. Charles Foster is obviously one of the richest characters in film history, and Orson plays him at all of these different points and stages of his life. It’s a really versatile and epic performance. But I haven’t seen the film in so long so I’m not gonna die by this, Orson can be a spotty actor but when he’s locked in I think he’s one of the best of his era
I’ll also acknowledge that I have not seen Atleast a quarter of the performances on this list. So I’m just listing the best performances that are not on here to me, I’m not saying that you are wrong for leaving them off
@Drake. Any thoughts on Claude Laydu’s performance in Diary of a Country Priest which I’ve seen sometimes mentioned as one of the greatest in the history of film (and was also a first performance) and could draw comparisons to Falconetti’s performance as Jeanne D’Arc.
Drake (and everyone else), fun question, what’s the best performance in a non-archivable film?
Samuel L. Jackson in Lakeview Terrace
Depends on whether ‘non-archivable’ means films which are not in the archive on the site or films which are not deemed worthy to be in the archives? If the former, would propose Kristen Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long, Tim Robbins in Jacob’s Ladder, any of the leads in La Piscine or Serge Reggiani in Casque d’Or. If the latter, are you saying best performances in bad/unworthy films?
Peter Coyote tops it for Bitter Moon. Absolutely incredible performance. It has it all.
The latter.
Drake, do you rank these by how brilliant the actor was during their screen time (even if it was brief)?
I wonder where Dave from 2001 would rank. He does nothing wrong for his entire screen time and he is the main actor in the greatest film of all time. I think his acting was great there.
Also, if you were to make a combined top 100, would Falconneti or De Niro win? I think that’s a very hard comparison.
@Azman- Thanks for the comment. Hard to say screen time isn’t a factor- but there are plenty of examples here and on the best performance of the year categories in roles that last mere minutes on screen. Haven’t made a combined top 100- not sure- would have to give it some thought.