The 5 Most Intense Acting Performances Ever
With the hundreds and perhaps millions of acting performances in films it would seem very difficult to narrow down the list of the 5 most intense acting performances ever. That’s exactly what the website call Study Finds has done.
What a job that must have been to put this list together, after all there are so many to choose from. You can go all the way back to the golden age of Hollywood and see some pretty intense acting performances from great actors like Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and James Cagney. Those were all great actors who were larger than life and would make the most of any scripts, but the modern actors that you will see on this list are all much more intense. That stems from the scripts that called for a heightened sense of reality as opposed to the scripts of that time that were much more gentle.
Today’s actors relish the opportunity to turn up the intensity volume to grip the audience in a way that would have been considered way over the top in the past.
Because I have always been a fan of the late Roger Ebert, I have chosen to use his reviews to describe the performances based on his reviews at the time of the movie’s release.
Here are the 5 Most Intense Acting Performances Ever
5. Charlize Theron as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in “Monster”, 2003
Here’s a review of her performance by the late Roger Ebert:
What Charlize Theron achieves in Patty Jenkins’ “Monster” isn’t a performance but an embodiment. With courage, art and charity, she empathizes with Aileen Wuornos, a damaged woman who committed seven murders. She does not excuse the murders. She simply asks that we witness the woman’s final desperate attempt to be a better person than her fate intended.
4. Robert De Niro as Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull”, 1980
Here’s what Roger Ebert said about DeNiro in Raging Bull:
It’s not De Niro doing Brando, as is often mistakenly said, but De Niro doing LaMotta doing Brando doing Terry Malloy. De Niro could do a “better” Brando imitation, but what would be the point?
3. Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in “The Shining”, 1980
Here’s Roger Ebert on the character Jack Nicolson played:
We meet Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a man who plans to live for the winter in solitude and isolation with his wife and son. He will be the caretaker of the snowbound Overlook Hotel. His employer warns that a former caretaker murdered his wife and two daughters, and committed suicide, but Jack reassures him: “You can rest assured, Mr. Ullman, that’s not gonna happen with me.
2. Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood”, 2007
Here’s what Roger Ebert said about his performance, noting that Day-Lewis was in fact channeling another great American actor:
The performance by Day-Lewis may well win an Oscar nomination, and if he wins he should do the right thing in his acceptance speech and thank the late John Huston. His voice in the role seems like a frank imitation of Huston, right down to the cadences, the pauses, the seeming to confide.
1. Heath Ledger as The Joker in “The Dark Knight”, 2008
Roger Ebert knew that Heath Ledger was going to win an Oscar for his performance, and he was correct;
The key performance in the movie is by the late Heath Ledger, as the Joker. Will he become the first posthumous Oscar winner since Peter Finch? His Joker draws power from the actual inspiration of the character in the silent classic “The Man Who Laughs” (1928). His clown’s makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child. In one diabolical scheme near the end of the film, he invites two ferry-loads of passengers to blow up the other before they are blown up themselves
