Sometimes one has a great performance, yet does not really capture a real life character all that accurately. George C. Scott’s “Patton” comes to mind. Now the film was great, his acting was superb, but the real life Patton actually did not sound like that at all. I mean he was indeed foul mouthed, but his recorded speeches were hardly the gung-ho monologues of the film. However, when you mention George Patton, almost everyone thinks only of George C. Scott’s performance.
Worst - Kevin Costner as Robin Hood
I love anything to do with the whole Robin Hood story, but once was enough for that one!
Best - I’d go with Ghandi as portrayed by Ben Kingsley.
Best
Ed Harris as Jackson Pollack
Willem Dafoe as Jesus (in The Last Temptation of Christ) , Max Shreck (in Shadow of the Vampire), and as T.S. Eliot (I forget the name of the movie but it might have been called “Tom and…whatever his wife’s name was”)
Fred Ward as Henry Miller in Henry and June
I second Johnny Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson.
Mark Harmon in that tv-movie as Ted Bundy.
Definitely Ben Kingsley as Ghandi.
Worst
Although I liked the movie, Sam Rockwell as Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
Mel Gibson as William Wallace. He could have at least tried to do it in a Scottish accent…
Noah Taylor as a young Hitler in Max. He just played him oozing with natural evil. The movie is good, though; I recommend it.
I dunno, greenphan. If he did a poor Scottish accent, he’d be horrible. I’d rather him not make the attempt.
Ditto for Noah Tylor and Anthony Hopkins’ Hitlers. They even got the growl right. Scary. :eek:
Anthony Michael Hall’s Bill Gates in Pirates of Sillicon Valley was good, too. (Of course, it’s the only depiction of Gates on film so far…but it was still good.)
Gary Busey as President Truman.
Tom Berenger as Theodore Roosevelt.
Sô Yamamura as Admiral Yamamoto.
Best:
Anthony Hopkins as Nixon
Stephen Frye as Wilde
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X
and one that’s not a “ditto”:
Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane in Autofocus, a depressing but excellent film. (William Dafoe was also excellent, but I can’t judge how true to the RL character.)
Here are a couple of oddball nominations:
Best: Noah Wiley as Steve Jobs.
Worst: Shakespeare’s Richard III, a characterization which is in almost all respects 180 degrees away from the historical character. The single most effective piece of propaganda ever perpetrated. (It’s still a great play, though!)
The body is D’Onofrio, but the voice is that of Maurice LaMarche. He’s done Welles a couple of times, more memorably on The Critic and by proxy in Pinky & The Brain during a take off of the notorious Birds Eye commercial outtakes.
Ian McKellen as James Whale in ‘Gods and Monsters’
Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde in ‘Wilde’
Both utterly brilliant.
Didn’t think much of John Malkovich in ‘Shadow of the Vampire’, but then they weren’t really going for historical accuracy, were they? 
And I can forgive that movie anything for Willem Dafoe’s performance.
Best: Alec Guinness playing King Charles I in Cromwell. The man is a painting come to life, down to the last detail.
Worst: Almost all the Confererate Generals in Gettysburg especially the actor that played Longstreet’s beard.
Good
Alec Guiness as Hitler
John Malkovich as John Malkovich
Michael Rooker as Henry Lee Lucas
Stuck on Nazi characters for some reason, but two excellent portrayals of real people are Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List (apparently his physical resemblance in uniform frightened people) and Brian Cox as Hermann Goring in the TNT Nuremberg. Also, I thought Alec Baldwin did a surprisingly good job as Justice Jackson in the same movie.
Also, I appreciate Cherry Jones as Hallie Flanagan (a real-life 30s all-round theater person who taught briefly at my alma mater) in Cradle Will Rock, Jonathan Pryce as Lytton Strachey in Carrington, and, for a hop into the past, Jimmy Stewart in The Glenn Miller Story.
Of course if your patron and monarch is a descendant of the man who put an end to Good King Richard’s line, it isn’t very healthy to portray Crookbacked Dick as a decent fellow(if he’s the good guy, what does that make the one who took him out?)
If someone is playing a historical figure that lived before TV or recorded audio, how do we know how to judge them? How do we know what a good Lincoln performance would be?
It would seem a good acting job would be viewed as an accurate portrayal.
As an example, I thought Anthony Hopkins was EXCELLENT as John Quincy Adams.
But I don’t know if it was an accurate JQA.
I think it harder to portray someone that we have record of (or that is still living); especially those that are very famous.
That is why I think Will Smith’s Ali was particularly good. Grading on the curve! (of course Voight’s Cossell was pretty good).
I can’t believe I forgot that one in the OP. I’ve read every biography in English of Göring and he absolutely nailed him: the ego, the charm, the pomposity and ridiculousness and the brilliant- a very complicated character. My favorite moment in the miniseries is his expression when he’s being visited by his wife and daughter and he’s going on and on about how great will be his place and that of the Nazis in history and she politely interrupts “Do you think they would mind if we took some of this food home with us?” Once the richest man in Europe, he has just realized that he cannot even feed his family. (One slight criticism of the movie, though: in the scene he and his wife are sitting together at the same table when in reality they were always separated by a screen.)
Someone mentioned Johnny Depp as Ed Wood - I thought Martin Landau did a great job as Bela Lugosi.
Amen to Ben Kingsley’s Ghandi and Val Kilmer’s Jim Morrison. Incredible. I hated the movie The Doors, but he had the character nailed.
[QUOTE=Cargogal]
Someone mentioned Johnny Depp as Ed Wood - I thought Martin Landau did a great job as Bela Lugosi.
[QUOTE]
Indeed, I can’t think of/read about Karloff without hearing “Karloff is a COCKSUCKER!” Landau hits such great notes in that performance, managing to capture the old boy’s pride and dignity and, yet, his desperation.
Worst:
Pia Zadora as Anne Frank…
runs away giggling…
(I know, it is an Urban Legend) 