We had the thread about actors who always played the same character but what about “stars” who have played three clearly different characters. (None of this John Wayne - he was a cowboy, Marine and firefighter- everybody knows they were all basically the same character).
I mean someone like Dustin Hoffman with Tootsie as the anal, cross-dressing actor, Midnight Cowboy as the scuzball Ratso Rizo and The Graduate the total innocent or
Marlon Brando with The Wild Ones as the motorcycle gang leader, Julius Caesar as Marc Antony and Scoundrels as the dapper conman.
I guess we should have some ground rules. To qualify the actors have to be stars not just bit players and the movie had to be good, and they should have been good in it (Sort of eliminates Istar, doesn’t it?).
Vlad Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Lee Harvey Oswald in JFK
Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy
Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element
…and the list goes on. The guy’s a freakin’ chameleon.
In addition to L.A. Confidential and Memento, Guy Pearce was also in Ravenous.
As much as I hate to say good things about Tom Hanks, he has pretty good range. Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, Cast Away, Philadelphia, Saving Private Ryan. And I think he’s playing a bad guy in some upcoming mob movie…
Kevin Spacey: Usual Suspects, American Beauty, Swimming with Sharks
Glenn Close: Fatal Attraction, Jagged Edge, Air Force One, 101 Dalmations, Reversal of Fortune
John Cusack: Grosse Point Blank, High Fidelity, Being John Malkovich
You forgot his role as a pile of flesh in Apocalypse Now.
Speaking of which:
Robert Duvall:
To name a few:
Gingerbread Man, The (1998) Dixon Doss
Apostle, The (1997) Euliss “Sonny” Dewey - The Apostle E.F.
Lonesome Dove" (1989) Augustus McCrae
Apocalypse Now (1979) Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore
Godfather, The (1972)Tom Hagen
MASH (1970) Major Frank Burns, M.D.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Arthur “Boo” Radley
Uptight prig in A Room With A View.
Severely handicapped genius in My Left Foot.
Naive, innocent prisoner in In The Name of the Father.
Sex God in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
8 different characters in “Kind Hearts and Coronets.”
“The Man in the White Suit” as an mild absent-minded scientist
“The Ladykillers” as a comic criminal mastermind.
“Bridge over the River Kwai”
“The Lavender Hill Mob”
And, of course, that obscure cameo in “Star Wars”
As much as I cringe at the thought of publicly praising Leonardo DiCaprio, his performance in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? was actually quite impressive, and radically different from Titainc, The Man in the Iron Mask and Romeo and Juliet, in which he essentially played “the character created for Leonardo DiCaprio so 15-year-old girls will pay to see this piece of crap 20 times in a row.”
