Throughout August 2019 we polled members and contributors to find what they considered to be the greatest performances in film ever.

1 Marlon Brando – The Godfather

Brando’s great comeback sees him playing Vito Corleone, the patriarch of a fictional New York crime family. After months of debate between directer Francis Ford Coppola and Paramount over Brando’s casting, the studio president Stanley Jaffe required him to perform a screen test. Coppola did not want to offend Brando and stated that he needed to test equipment in order to set up the screen test at Brando’s California residence. For make-up, Brando stuck cotton balls in his cheeks, put shoe polish in his hair to darken it, and rolled his collar. Coppola placed Brando’s audition tape in the middle of the videos of the audition tapes as the Paramount executives watched them. The executives were impressed with Brando’s efforts and allowed Coppola to cast Brando for the role if Brando accepted a lower salary and put up a bond to ensure he would not cause any delays in production. Brando received a net participation deal which earned him $1.6 million. His mesmerising performance revitalised a career that had gone into decline during the 1960s and brought him a best actor Oscar.

2 Robert De Niro – Raging Bull

Bringing him his second Oscar, De Niro stars as Jake LaMotta, an Italian American middleweight boxer whose self-destructive and obsessive rage, sexual jealousy, and animalistic appetite destroyed his relationship with his wife and family. The film had initially come about because De Niro read the autobiography upon which the film is based, became fascinated by LaMotta and showed the book to Martin Scorsese. As well as making uncredited contributions to the screenplay, De Niro remarkably gained approximately 60 pounds (27 kg) to portray LaMotta in his later post-boxing years. The trans-formative performance remains one of cinema’s most explosive.

3 Daniel Day-Lewis – There Will Be Blood

“Once his (Day-Lewis) Plainview takes wing, the relentless focus of the performance makes the character unique.” Glenn Kenny, Premiere

Day-Lewis delivers a towering performance as a silver miner-turned-oilman on a ruthless quest for wealth during Southern California’s oil boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The performance earned him an Oscar, BAFTA, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild, NYFCC and IFTA Best Actor awards for the role.

4 Ralph Fiennes – Schindler’s List

Fiennes was cast as Nazi war criminal Amon Göth (an SS second lieutenant) after Spielberg viewed his performances in A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Spielberg said of Fiennes’ audition that “I saw sexual evil. It is all about subtlety: there were moments of kindness that would move across his eyes and then instantly run cold.” Fiennes put on 28 pounds (13 kg) to play the role. He watched historic newsreels and talked to Holocaust survivors who knew Göth. In portraying him, Fiennes said “I got close to his pain. Inside him is a fractured, miserable human being. I feel split about him, sorry for him. He’s like some dirty, battered doll I was given and that I came to feel peculiarly attached to.” Fiennes looked so much like Göth in costume that when Mila Pfefferberg (a survivor of the events) met him, she trembled with fear.

5 Robert De Niro – Taxi Driver

De Niro’s celebrated role sees him as a lonely Vietnam veteran, Travis Bickle, who while working as a taxi driver, descends into insanity as he plots to assassinate both a presidential candidate and the pimp of an underage prostitute. While preparing for his role as Bickle, De Niro was filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 in Italy. According to co-star Boyle, he would “finish shooting on a Friday in Rome … get on a plane … [and] fly to New York”. De Niro obtained a taxi driver’s license, and when on break would pick up a taxi and drive around New York for a couple of weeks, before returning to Rome to resume filming 1900. De Niro apparently lost 35 pounds and listened repeatedly to a taped reading of the diaries of Arthur Bremer (who attempted to assassinate presidential candidate George Wallace). When he had time off from shooting 1900, De Niro visited an army base in Northern Italy and tape-recorded soldiers from the Midwestern United States, whose accents he thought might be appropriate for Travis’s character.

6 Maria Falconetti – The Passion Of Joan Of Arc

7 Rutger Hauer – Blade Runner

8 Heath Ledger – The Dark Knight

9 Samuel L. Jackson – Pulp Fiction

10 Klaus Kinski – Aguirre, the Wrath of God

11 Peter Lorre – M

12 Orson Welles – Citizen Kane

13 Robert De Niro – The Godfather Part II

14 Jean-Louis Trintignant – The Conformist

15 Peter O’Toole – Lawrence of Arabia

16 Al Pacino – The Godfather

17 Malcolm McDowell – A Clockwork Orange

18 Monica Vitti – L’Avventura

19 Anatoly Solonitsyn – Andrei Rublev

20 Gloria Swanson – Sunset Boulevard

21 Jack Nicholson – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

22 Robert De Niro – Once Upon A Time In America

23 Dennis Hopper – Blue Velvet

24 Al Pacino – The Godfather Part II

Pacino delivers another strong performance as Michael Corleone, who is now the new Don of the Corleone crime family, protecting the family business in the aftermath of an attempt on his life.

25 James Stewart – Vertigo

26 Anthony Perkins – Psycho

27 Charles Chaplin – The Gold Rush

28 Marlon Brando – Apocalypse Now

29 Jean-Pierre Leaud – The 400 Blows

30 Christopher Walken – The Deer Hunter

31 Gena Rowlands – A Woman Under the Influence

32 Morgan Freeman – The Shawshank Redemption

33 Jack Nicholson – The Shining

34 Marcello Mastroianni – 8½

35 Bibi Andersson – Persona

36 Marlon Brando – On the Waterfront

37 Jean-Pierre Leaud – the mother and the whore

38 Anthony Hopkins – The Silence of the Lambs

39 Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds

40 Brad Pitt – Fight Club

41 Kirk Douglas – Paths of Glory

42 Emily Watson – Breaking the Waves

43 Toshiro Mifune – Seven Samurai

44 Jack Nicholson – Chinatown

45 Casey Affleck – the assassination of the jesse james by the coward robert ford

46 Mickey Rourke – The Wrestler

47 Marilyn Monroe – Some Like It Hot

48 Daniel Day-Lewis – Gangs of New York

49 Joe Pesci – Goodfellas

50 Diane Keaton – Annie Hall









51 Ray Liotta – Goodfellas

52 Robert Mitchum – The Night of the Hunter

53 Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca

54 Liv Ullmann – Persona

55 Bruno Ganz – Downfall

56 Russell Crowe – Gladiator

57 Tony Leung – In the Mood for Love

58 Robert Duvall – Apocalypse Now

59 Peter Sellers – Dr. Strangelove

60 Liam Neeson – Schindler’s List

61 Al Pacino – Scarface

62 Vivien Leigh – Gone With the Wind

63 Viggo Mortenson – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

64 Paul Scofield – A Man for All Seasons

65 Robert De Niro – The Deer Hunter

66 Bette Davis – All About Eve

67 James Stewart – Rear Window

68 Brad Pitt – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

69 Paul Newman – Cool Hand Luke

70 Orson Welles – Chimes at Midnight

71 Clint Eastwood – The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

72 Bruce Lee – Enter the Dragon

73 Tim Robbins – The Shawshank Redemption

74 Al Pacino – Dog Day Afternoon

75 Kevin Spacey – American Beauty

76 Charlie Chaplin – The Great Dictator

77 John Wayne – The Searchers

78 Clark Gable – Gone With The Wind

79 Marlon Brando – Last Tango in Paris

80 James Dean – Rebel Without a Cause

81 Edward Norton – American History X

82 Harrison Ford – Raiders of the Lost Ark

83 George C. Scott – Patton

84 Tatsuya Nakadai – Ran

85 Alec Guinness – The Bridge on the River Kwai

86 Sigourney Weaver – Aliens

87 Charlie Chaplin – City Lights

88 Kevin Spacey – The Usual Suspects

89 Ewan McGregor – Trainspotting

90 Forest Whitaker – The Last King of Scotland

91 Henry Fonda – Once Upon a Time In the West

92 Guy Pearce – Memento

93 Gabriel Byrne – Miller’s Crossing

94 Ben Kingsley – Sexy Beast

95 Denzel Washington – Malcolm X

96 Michael Fassbender – Shame

97 Sam Shepherd – the right stuff

98 Gene Hackman – The Conversation

99 Dustin Hoffman – Midnight Cowboy

100 James Caan – The Godfather









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