Didn’t read any other responses yet, these are the first that sprang to mind.
- Hans Gruber - Die Hard
- Archibald (Cunningham?) - Rob Roy
- Hannibal Lecter - Silence of the Lambs
- Khan - Star Trek 3
- Creepy Nazi with glasses - Raiders of the Lost Ark
Charles Napier in the Blues Brothers
(starting at about the :30 second mark:
My other choices have already been mentioned. I nominate Leonard from Memento. It’s a strange movie where a good argument can be made for the protagonist also being the villain.
Answering “five actors whose presence as ‘the bad guy’ makes the movie worth watching” instead. With one noted exception, they also play other kinds of roles; they’ve even been known to play different bad guys.
Alan Rickman, Tommy Lee Jones, Jack Nicholson, Lee van Cleef (did he ever play a good guy?), Sergi López. Honorable mentions to Jean Reno, José Coronado and Luis Tosar.
Nurse Ratched
Good question. IMDB credits him with roles in 171 movies/TV shows. He must have worn a white hat in there somewhere.
ETA: I spoke too soon. See Lee Van Cleef - Wikipedia
Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter. I know Voldemort was the big baddie, but at least he was knowingly evil and after power. Dolores was evil in the pursuit of goodness/justice.
He was a good guy in the title role of the ninja themed TV show The Master.
He’s more machine than man, now. Twisted and evil. But James Earl Jones packs more menace into his voice than half the actors in this thread could convey with their entire body.
That being said: Tim Roth as Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy.
MST3K had a blast with that one. It also features Demi Moore’s first appearance, or at least a very early one.
That was Charles Boyer.
Also, Peter Lorre in M. Or do foreign films not count? He was pretty creepy in Mad Love as well: the original mad scientist.
Gustav von Seyffertitz as Mr. Grimes in Sparrows was pretty much irredeemably evil, and very scary.
Donald Crisp as Battling Burrows puts evil right on screen in 1919, by doing something horrifying right in front of the camera for the first time, and shocking the crap out of audiences in Broken Blossoms. He traps his teenaged daughter in a closet, and we see the trapped Lillian Gish, terrified and hysterical, in a very famous scene; then she decides to come out and face him, and he beats her to death; she dies right in front of the camera. It’s probably on youtube, although I’ve never looked, because I have a file of the whole movie.
They’d have to be on my list.
I second Orson Welles in The Third Man, but I think Peter Cushing’s character in the original Star Wars “holding Vader’s leash,” is actually more evil, although not as scary.
Does the villain have to be human? If not, I nominate Bruce, the shark in Jaws.
Y’all have named many of my easy-to-hate types so I’ll just put up a few names to add to whatever poll comes from this thread:
Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) from Tombstone
Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) from Schindler’s List
Malak Al Rahim (Gene Simmons) from Wanted: Dead or Alive (1987)
This third one may need a bit of support for his villainy potential. If you allow for the “most cathartic demise” to establish how bad the dude was it will be hard to beat this scene!
It might be worth a spinoff thread to find the most fulfilling death scene ever.
No particular order…
[ul]
[li]Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men[/li][li]Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest[/li][li]Hannibal Lecter, Silence of the Lambs[/li][li]The Joker, Dark Knight[/li][li]Archibald Cunningham, Rob Roy[/li][/ul]
This far down, and no one has mentioned Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West?!? :eek: :dubious: 
I was going to say Dr. Simon Bar Sinister but the cartoon version was far more villainous than the movie version.
Kate from East of Eden – evil for the sake of evil
Cruella de Ville from 101 Dalmations – so she could have a puppy skin coat
Kurtz from Apocalypse Now – to use evil methods to win an evil war that was not worth winning
Hyman Roth from Godfather II – it amused him to set his old partner’s sons against each other
I thought Hyman Roth wanted revenge for the execution of Moe Green?
Alan Arkin as Harry Roat in “Wait Until Dark.”
Oh, yeah; forgot about him. That’s a good one.
Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) in The Long Goodbye
Noah Cross (John Huston) in Chinatown
Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) in Sexy Beast
Eddie Dane (J. E. Freeman) in Miller’s Crossing
Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) in Schindler’s List