1FF's top 100 actors/actresses

[SALTIRE]

Saltire will be pissed you didn't mention Rob Roy in reference to Neeson.

He is fucking dreadful in everything. Only in Schindler when he tried, was he half decent.

 

[SALTIRE]

Two more of mine.

Charles Laughton - timeless turns as Quasimodo (not the Disney one), Captain Bligh and Javert to name but a few. Daniel Day-Lewis' fave thesp, nuff said.

Richard Harris - portrayals of Rafer in The Wild Geese and English Bob in Unforgiven being my favourites of his.

Both great picks, I was thinking of putting both in, but I've only seen around 6 Laughton films and Harris did most of his best stuff early in his film career.

 

[SALTIRE]

It's just occurred to me that I don't have a single actress on my list. Shameful.

I have two, though they are pretty obvious choices tbh.

 

[lordofthepies]

It's just occurred to me that I don't have a single actress on my list. Shameful.

I only picked female actors on my list.

 

[last request]

And here's the 7 pointers as well because we all just want to get past this bit and get to the main list:

Liam Neeson
Kaley Cuoco
Noomi Rapace
Seth Rogen

I'd say that Liam Neeson probably deserved to make this list, if only for that one superb film he was in where he gave a great performance. I am, of course, referring to his run as Qui Gon Jinn. The greatest Jedi of all the time.

Keep your Jar Jar Binks love to yourself. :hesk:

Wonder why Stallone didn't make the top 100.

"You want to know why?"

Yeah I wanna know.

Only 6 points....it STINKS!

 

[iesty wfc]

not many of mine down so far:
Cate Blanchett - she is a solid actress and whilst i wouldnt go out of my way to watch a film shes in you know what your getting. I havent seen the film itself, but i have seen images of her portrayal of Bob Dylan and its pretty good

Eva Green - she was actually a late substitution in for Charlize Theron. if you havent seen Penny Dreadful yet then you definitely need to, if only for her acting.

Brad Pitt - surprised he is so low?? has had a vast array of acting roles and thought he would be much higher

michael J Fox - a stalwart of the 80's and a favourite just for being the main character in BTTF, even if it was pushed down our throats recently. but also worth a mention is the Frighteners, plus a great tv show that was spin city

 

[Oaf]

Let's get onto the main list.

First up, we have 7 people who each managed to make a single list and gain 10 points, finishing joint 95th:

Dwayne Johnson

Willem Dafoe

Natalie portman

Idris Elba

Kevin Costner

Pam Grier

Bruce Willis

I couldn't find a funny picture of Pam Grier.

 

[lordofthepies]

Shit, I forgot Pam Grier.

 

[SALTIRE]

God Pam Grier was sexy back then.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Pam Grier mine. Blaxsploitation goddess. Pioneer in presentation of gender and race. Tough gal action star who did her own stunts and all that but could act too. Her presence and charisma makes the sociopolitical elements of those films work, and she was even capable (with an assist from Elmore Leonard) of teasing subtlety and poignancy out of Tarantino. Career has waned but she endures as an icon.

 

[Rammy]

Shit I missed this. I blame you Oaf. Not me, you!

 

[Craig]

Willem Dafoe is one of mine. Did you know he was once suspended from high school for making porn?

Highlights for me, aside from the obvious powerhouse performance in Platoon, would be Mississippi Burning, The English Patient, The Boondock Saints and Shadow of the Vampire. Yet to see his performance as Pier Paolo Pasolini.

 

[Oaf]

Next up are the joint 87th placed 11 pointers who all made a single list. They are:

Robin Williams

Kate winslet

Dustin Hoffman

Pierce Brosnan

Harvey Keitel

Sean Bean

Jean Gabin

Guy Pearce

 

[Oaf]

Close to those guys, but gaining 11 points through finishing on 2 lists and sitting in the 86th spot all on his own is:

David Tennant

As he's finished higher than anybody else who ever played the role, I think that this is scientific proof that he is the best Doctor.

 

[Craig]

Harvey Keitel

Mine. Love Harvey Keitel. Best known for his stints in Tarantino fare (which I like) but he's appeared in so much more enjoyable films, imvho, including being an early collaborator with Martin Scorsese, you have to wonder if they had a falling out considering he didn't appear in any of Scorsese's later work. Copland, From Dusk Til Dawn and Clockers among some of his later work that I love. Plus a bonafide Oscar nominee with his performance as Micky Cohen in Bugsy.

His crowning glory though, for me, is by far and away his one man show in Bad Lieutenant. If I could only ever watch one film he appeared in ever again it would be this.

You can't pick one scene from this film that stands out, because everytime he is on screen you are glued to his every word and movement. It is absolutely criminal that he wasn't even nominated for an Oscar for it. He basically plays a absolute shit c*** of a copper, who can't get his head around why the nun whose brutal rape he is investigating can forgive her assailants, over the course of the film he drinks, steals, does drugs and gets in too deep with some nasty bookie types before eventually coming to the realisation that he is irredeemable, or is he?

Scenes.

Getting in deeper with the bookies.

The realisation that he is beyond reprieve.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Jean Gabin mines

Spoiler: tldr

Epoch spanning French superstar. Made a handful of capital G great films before WWII, then had a second act as a star of policier & other crime capery affairs after. Something odd figure for a leading man, not exactly classically handsome, and often played brusque and bluff to the point of unsympathetic. But he was rugged and earthy, and there was charm and virility in his directness (admittedly you have to squint pretty good to see the virility when he was being paired off against 22 year old starlets in the 1960s, but hey...).

Always played a version of himself, but could do it in a tux or up to his elbows in a truck engine... the great romanticised Everyman of French cinema, the kind of star people lived vicariously through, the inverse of Winckelmann-ian Apollo Alain Delon.

edit > bonus screen shot for anyone who clicks the spoiler

 

[iesty wfc]

so we jump from 87th to 8th????

 

[SALTIRE]

Close to those guys, but gaining 11 points through finishing on 2 lists and sitting in the 8th spot all on his own is:

David Tennant

As he's finished higher than anybody else who ever played the role, I think that this is scientific proof that he is the best Doctor.

Tom Baker, that is all.

 

[Oaf]

so we jump from 87th to 8th????

Naw man that ain't me I don't even know what you're talking about.

4 people share joint 82nd, each gaining 12 points from a single list:

William Fichtner

Ben Affleck

Paul Newman

Warren Oates

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Warren Oates

Cut his teeth as a character actor in TV Westerns, but ended up as an all time cult cool dude, working with Peckipah (and pretty much playing Peckinpah in Alfredo Garcia, in fact) and Monte Hellman, amongst others. I tend to think of him first as a sweat stained wildman, but that's too reductive… his performance in Two Lane Blacktop is a thing of quiet pathos, for eg. Maverick and hardscrabble might be more like it.... the craggy face, the mien that says "i’ve seen some things, son".... certainly lived a life off-screen, and died young for it... the hipster's Dennis Hopper….

 

[SALTIRE]

Oates was alright. Looked like a perv though.

 

[Oaf]

Let's do the 13 pointers while we're at it.

Sharing joint 77th are:

Rose Byrne

Emily Blunt

Rowan Atkinson

Charles Chaplin

Martin Freeman

 

[last request]

Brad Pitt - surprised he is so low?? has had a vast array of acting roles and thought he would be much higher

Probably a case of a lot of people thinking he is a great actor but not one of their "favourites".

 

[hodge]

Bean and Blunt were on my list

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Charles Chaplin

Spoiler: tldr

Cinema's self-aggrandising claims to universality are often overstated, but not here - recognisable (and enjoyed) everywhere, by just about everyone, getting on for a century after his heyday. The purest kind of performer, in a way, capable of producing pleasure out of a single prop and the flimsiest of pretexts, absent even language. Often associated with slapstick and (sometimes bathetic) sentimentality, but there was a lot more to him than that - making The Great Dictator in 1940 was no joke, and his political views pretty much finished his US career in the early 50s. A master behind the camera too, and has a very good a claim to being objectively the greatest star the medium has ever produced.

 

[SALTIRE]

Chaplin was also a fine composer and many of his later movies have very good music from him. One of the true immortals of cinema.

 

[Oaf]

6 people share joint 71st, taking 14 points each from a single list. Those people are:

Mark Wahlberg

Nicolas Lyndhurst

Julianne Moore

Matthew Mcconaughey

Marlene Dietrich

Alastair Sim

 

[Oaf]

In joint 66th, each getting 15 points from a single list are:

Rachel Bilson

Ralph Fiennes

Jean-Claude Van Damme

Angelina jolie

Stephane Audran

 

[mistermagic]

Got the feeling that that last one was from Martino...

I liked Pam Grier in Jackie Brown.

 

[Martino Knockavelli]

Mines

(do i have fixation on recherche women with lacerating cheek bones? - not consciously)

Spoiler: tldr

Marlene Dietrich

Again, a great icon. Though she wasn't inert or unmalleable - it's not bad going if you can start off as a quintessence of lascivious Weimar glamour and end up doing (bad) WWII propaganda pieces. Mostly though glamour is the word. If we want our film stars to be greater than us mere mortals, worthy of lighting up the dark, deserving of being projected 40 foot high on a silver screen (and sometimes, surely, we do) then she was it. Existing on some ineffable aristocratic plain, sultry, lit like a godess in Caravaggio. But like the Caravaggio she had guts, dirt under her fingernails. Not a porcelain princess like Grace Kelly, say, and more interesting for it.

Stephane Audran

Another Good Thing - actor as muse... inspiration, collaborator, divining rod. Audran worked with a bunch of interesting people, but i'm really voting for her films with Claude Chabrol, her then husband. He's often pegged as a French Hitchcock, but I think he was more interested in a sly picking of the legs off bourgeois flies, and she was his partner in crime for half a dozen pictures in the 70s, sometimes playing the picker, sometimes the pickee. Taken as a group the films paint a less than cheerful portrait of a marriage in its death throes, but it was one of the great fecund director/performer relationships, in terms of what it produced.