John Ttavolts
Travolta
That’s how Idina Menzel pronounces it.
George C. Scott WAS general patton in PATTON
Maybe this belongs in a different thread, but I was having a similar conversation with my husband just recently. We were listing actors whose talent is sometimes underappreciated because they are so physically attractive. Newman was my number one choice. He is the charter member of the 9/9 Club–looks and talent both 9 (or better) out of 10.
I’ve heard a number of times that Brad Pitt is an Oscar-caliber character actor trapped in the body of a handsome leading man: he could just coast by on his looks, but he doesn’t, but people kind of automatically assume that he does.
I would tend to agree with this. I’ve seen him in a bunch of interesting roles, though he seems to be best as an oddball/crazy character, like in 12 Monkeys or Burn After Reading.
Uh, Robert Duvall.
Christian Bale
Daniel Day-Lewis
Yeah, you’re never quite sure if Jeffrey Goines is over-the-top enough to be camp or whether Pitt is ‘playing it straight.’ The character must’ve been a helluva lot of fun to play. (Of course, Terry Gilliam’s worlds tend toward the surrealistic anyway.)
I thought he did an excellent job in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button too.
Apparently he was Hitchcock’s favourite, but never won an Oscar. 
IMO The Last Detail and Five Easy Pieces are Nicholson’s best films, period.
(lol and I’m guessing “versital” is a whoosh spelling?)
Meaning - you considered that a stinker? I guess I wouldn’t say it was one of the “greats” like I know some people have, but I wouldn’t exactly call it a stinker either.
I’d put Johnny Depp in that category. Everything he plays has this underlying self-conscious hipsterism about him, except for maybe in “Ed Wood”, which I found him cloying anyway.
And yeah Nicholson for the most part.
I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman was great in that there were more than just two roles to name. The variety of roles he played in Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, Doubt, Capote, (actually I’ve yet to see The Master - should !?), and Owning Mahoney made for an impressive dossier.
Which should have been done long before now considering I still don’t know if it’s “classic” or more “modern” actors we should be looking at.
If you haven’t seen Nobody’s Fool, which I mentioned in the OP, give it a look. Hoffman played an idiot cop in one of his very first screen roles, and he was hilarious.
ok - thanks.
So James Dean, Audrey Hepburn and Sidney Poitier get no love here?
No Bill Kirkenbauer (as Tony Roletti)?
sheesh.
I always thought James Dean was vastly overrated. He does angst well, which makes me think he was just playing himself.
Audrey Hepburn was great, but she was another one who had trouble getting past the ‘pretty face’ syndrome. Poitier was excellent in pretty much everything he did. Mr. Tibbs is da man. 
James Dean’s garishly over-romanticized legacy has not done him favours for “his craft”, to be sure, and one could speculate (somewhat in vain) how he’d have fared in comedy, horror, or other genres had he lived past 24, but the contributions he did make do not, in my estimation, warrant a “vastly overrated” dismissal. (Well, the word “vastly”, in particular, I’d say is a bit strong.) Not that I’m any huge gigantic bonkers fan of the guy or anything, but I thought what he and Brando, Clift, Bancroft, Stieger, Geraldine Page, Ben Gazzara et al. brought to the table was definitely a needed tonic for its time, and Dean (and Brando) spearheaded that. No idea what the guy was like off-camera so I can’t comment on the 24/7 brooding thing. In the 80’s, especially, fucking air-brushed paintings, everywhere, and seven out of ten of them would be either fucking Dean or fucking Marilyn - that really picked my ass after a while. (alluding more to the “pop” legacy)
There were a number of films where I thought Audrey resoundingly transcended any “pretty face” yolk, like her measured performance in “Nun’s Story”, or exploring (taboo for '61) lesbian themes in “The Children’s Hour”, or pushed to the limit in “Wait Until Dark” (which still has some of the scariest movie scenes I’ve seen). She isn’t in that next tier with Elizabeth Taylor or Maggie Smith, but close.
Sidney Poitier and Richard Widmark appeared together in a movied called *“The Long Ships.” Widmark plays it up for fun, pretty much realizing that this is just a cartoon on film. Poitier, however, plays it as if he’s doing Shakespeare.
*In general, people remember only two things about this movie:
The execution of people by forcing them to ‘ride the steel mare.’ and The ‘Mother of Voices’, a GIANT bell made of gold.
Bleh don’t even get me started on method. You don’t need to live as a homeless person for 6 weeks to play one effectively. (You might be able to guess that I’m not a huge Brando fan either.) A lot of stuffing for the shirt.
Not saying Audrey wasn’t a great actress; quite the opposite. But she was stereotyped by Hollywood quite a bit, even after multiple successes. And her career very much paralleled Elizabeth Taylor’s…both started pretty young, and stretched themselves with daring choices later in their careers. I always loved Wait Until Dark, a psychological thriller at least on the level of Hitchcock.
Scott is my choice as well. His portrayal of a widowed music professor in The Changeling is very moving.
His performance in The Hospital was also quite powerful.
Also as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and as Rainbird in Firestarter (and probably the movie’s only redeeming feature).
For me it’s a tossup between Newman, Stewart and Fonda. All of them were killing it right up until they quit making films, with nary a bomb among them. More recently, Hoffman and Benedict Cumberbatch are to be reckoned with, along with Gary Oldman, Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren.
I liked Nicholson in his earlier work, but his last few outings have been just. . .bad.
No love for Lassie or Rin Tin Tin?