I think this is what the OP is going for…
**Judi Dench **as Queen Elizabeth in “Shakespeare in Love.” Doesn’t she only have a single 10 minute scene, or similar, and it won her the Oscar.
I think that was what Snickers was going for in post 24 too!
Just as memorable is Frank Vincent as Billy Batts: “Now go home and get your fuckin’ shinebox!”.
Love that scene.
Good one. He’s only in one scene, Shaw’s Henry is indeed memorable, and while the character never appears again, his personality dominates the rest of the movie.
Bill Murry in Little Shop of Horrors.
How about Sam Elliot as The Stranger in The Big Lebowski?
Not like he could steal anything in that movie away from the rest of the cast, but his appearance was fairly iconic … "sometimes there’s a man … "
While Judi Dench isn’t in the movie for long she has at least two or three scenes, two of them extremely significant, and the last scene would make no sense at all without the first.
Jack Nicholson in the original.
Ben Affleck - Boiler Room
“Want vacation time? Go teach third grade public school”
Another capitalistic scene stealer.
Donald Sutherland had a great single scene in JFK, where he explains all the weirdness surrounding the military not getting clearance to do what they were supposed to do for a Presidential visit in Dallas that day.
I nominate this one for disqualifacation because it basically a rip-off of the Baldwin scene in Glengarry.
This is hard – while some scenes are absolutely great the whole movie is also at the same level so I cant say that scenes im about to offer really did steal the movie. Anyways…
U-Turn – Billy Bob Thornton (Darrell) as a mechanic talking to Sean Penn (Bobby)
Darrell: Ya think bad, then bad’s what ya get.
Bobby: That’s a pretty decent philosophy you got there.
Darrell: Yeah, well, no charge.
The Dead Man – Billy Bob Thornton (Big George) in a scene with Iggy Pop dressed as a lady
Big George: I don’t give a shit who saw what, and who did what, or who did who.
Wasn’t that character essentially trying to emulate Alec Baldwin in Glengarry, though?
More…
Crispin Glover also has a single scene at the beginning of The Dead Man where for first 5 minutes none says a word. And then Crispin has this monologue that is so surreal. Crispin again in Wild at Heart as Lula’s cousin putting cockroaches in his underwear. This movie is totally weird but Crispin takes to another level.
Will Ferrell in Austin Powers. You got to see that!
Mark Walberg in The Departed. Patented scene stealer!
David Bowie in The Prestige. Who else could play the coolest inventor of all times but the coolest musician of all times?
For me, this scene is so memorable that it turns out to be one of the few scenes I can quote verbatim, from memory. And it’s because I feel exactly the same way. It’s Quentin Tarantino’s speech about coffee in Pulp Fiction. The rest of the movie I could take or leave, but I will watch it just for this scene when it happens to be on.
I also answer “Wow, your coffee is really good…” with this:
Yeah, I stop that at the n-word. Just too offensive to quote for fun. I generally change the end of that sentence to something else – relevant to whatever is going on conversationally at the moment.
Martin Balsam played the detective
H.I. McDonough’s cell mate and boss from “Raising Arizona”:
"…and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand. "
“You ate what?”
“We ate sand.”
“You ate SAND?”
“That’s right!”
“How many Polacks it take to screw up a lightbulb?”
"I don’t know, Glen. One? "
“Nope, it takes three…Wait a minute, I told it wrong. Here, I’m startin’ over: How come it takes three Polacks to screw up a lightbulb?”
"I don’t know, Glen. "
“'Cause they’re so darn stupid!”
Glen: “I’m crapping you negative.”
I believe Randall “Tex” Cobb from that movie deserves mention in this thread! Awesome performance.
I only had one real laugh watching the execrable comedy Loaded Weapon 1, starring Emilio Estevez and Samuel L. Jackson. And the laugh came from the absolutely perfect delivery of a fairly pedestrian line by Charlie Sheen, in a cameo as a carhop.
Sheen: (looks at the bill Jackson just gave him) “Got anything smaller?”
Jackson: (waves him away) “Keep the change.”
Sheen: (starts to turn away, pauses, then turns back) “Got anything larger?”
Jackson glares at him, Sheen gives a little shrug & eyebrow move that wordlessly expresses, “Can’t blame a guy for trying!” and leaves the movie forever. Sadly.
OK, maybe it just seemed hilarious when compared to the rest of the movie.
I love it. Anybody else remember SLJ as “Senor Love Daddy” in Do The Right Thing?