That reminds me of James Cagney. He played Lon Chaney non-jr. in Man of a Thousand Faces– one of the best biopics ever, liberties or not-- and was just brilliant. This is a huge contrast to his gangster roles, as well as his turn as George M. Cohan.
Cary Grant? I mention him because if you gave me a dozen names of actors whose movies I could watch at any given time, I would pick him out of the dozen without even thinking about it.
It’s hard to beat Paul Newman. One of his early roles was The Rack, where he played a Korean War POW who caved under duress. Incidentally, it also starred Lee Marvin. The acting was early 50’s style, maybe a little stagey for contemporary tastes. But he was wonderful as a guy who “sold himself short” and had to admit that he could have held out a little longer.
In addition to being quite possibly the most beautiful human ever (note: I am a straight dude), the guy could act.
Re: James Stewart…
Spoiler for an 80-year-old whodunit:
He was the killer in After the Thin Man
Kirk Douglas. See the underrated 1951 Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole and the underrated 1962 Western Lonely Are the Brave.
Burt Lancaster also freaking brilliant…please see 1964 WWII movie The Train, where he holds his own against the formidable Paul Scofield, who gets to play an art-loving Nazi, a much richer role than Lancaster’s.
Lancaster always got credit for being great, though…Douglas didn’t.
I love love love that movie!
Jimmy Stewart is my choice. Very wide range. Comedies like Philadelphia Story with Hepburn. Harvey is a great sentimental fantasy. Then his Westerns showed his toughness.
I really like Flight of the Phoenix. He’s a model maker that transforms a wrecked passenger plane into a functioning smaller one.
He was pretty much a stinker in Hud.
He was the pilot, but I believe the little German guy was the model maker. Stewart had to start the engine so they could fly in a cleverly suspenseful scene.
You’re right about those roles, about as far out as he went I think.
What about William Holden? He did play much the same character often, but used it in a wide array of roles.
I got that movie mixed up. Thank you for the correction.
Nobody has mentioned Joan Crawford, who played as wide an assortment of roles as anyone else. If she had never done another movie, she’d deserve to be on this list for Rain.
No way I could pick one. Some favorites:
Cagney in One, Two, Three
Bogey in To Have and Have Not, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Casablanca
Welles in The Third Man or The Stranger
Edward G. in The Stranger or Scarlet Street
Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve
Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Bette Davis in All About Eve or The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
Lee J. Cobb and Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men
Peter O’Toole in Becket, The Lion in Winter, or Lawrence of Arabia
And some other worthies:
Ingrid Bergman in Suspicion or Gaslight
Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
Charles Laughton in Advise and Consent or Witness for the Prosecution or Mutiny on the Bounty
Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution or Judgment at Nuremberg
Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter
Tracy and Hepburn in Desk Set
The in-joke being that Stewart was a real-life WW2 bomber pilot.
I thought about it for a second and glad to see Jimmy Stewart mentioned. Great minds and all. I was thinking how well he did on the realism scale on the old time radio show called The Six Shooter, of course radio is a totally different deal than film, but it’s difficult to pull off convincingly, to make it sound believable. Maybe it’s tougher in some ways than film, I dunno, Theater of the mind and all. A lot of shows of the era they sound really wooden and just like they are reading from the script for the first time.
In that case, the answer is still Charlie Chaplin. He made several sound films, the best among them probably Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight (in which he will break your heart).
Anthony Hopkins.
Bogart was truly evil and brilliant in In a Lonely Place.
Cary Grant was a very “watchable” actor, but he played minor variations of himself in every movie. His mannerisms, voice tics, etc., were the same regardless of what character he was playing.
That was true once he was established, but in some of his early work, like Only Angels Have Wings, he wasn’t Cary Grant yet, and he displays remarkable talent. He is also very scary in Suspicion.
He also gets a mentsch award for telling the producer of The Music Man, who wanted Grant in the lead, because he wanted a big name, and not the unknown Robert Preston from the Broadway version, that he (the producer) was nuts if he used anyone other than Preston.