the bad guy in “Rob Roy”
most of my other ones have already been named.
Damn right. When I see him in other roles, even from the same era, I have to remind myself it’s the same guy. Still alive at 96.
I’ll add John Lithgow in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and The World According to Garp.
Jack Nicholson stole Easy Rider.
Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in Sexy Beast. Astonishing performance.
How about Gary Oldman in True Romance?
Or, Dennis Hopper AND Christopher Walken in . . . True Romance?
Oh yes, never has stillness, creeped me out so much. Just waiting for the next explosion meant I could never settle.
Sir Ben utterly nailed that part.
Tom Cruise as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder. There were a lot of memorable characters in that movie, but he blew them all away.
Disney’s Aladdin may as well have just been called Genie. Legend has it that Robin Wlliams wouldn’t stay on script, and they eventually just let him riff and then animated the character to fit. Whether you like Williams’s schitck or not, he arguably stole the whole film.
This is what I’ve been thinking; how can Alec Baldwin steal a scene of him doing a monolgue? Was it in fact Jack Lemmon’s scene, over at the coffee machine, going, “Uh, what?”
Even in a movie full of good characters excellently acting, his Begbie in Trainspotting steals it.
Hard to look past Ben Foster in “3:10 to Yuma” when thinking about scene stealers, he was brilliant in that movie, very chilling.
Its proper scene stealing too. How can Johnny Depp steal scenes in Pirates when many of the bloody scenes focus on him in the first place? How can Eli Wallach steal scenes when he is one of the title characters?
Foster on the other hand was simply a henchman, a background character who drew the eye through sheer menace.
Michael Keaton as “Bill Blazejowski” in Night Shift. I once read that it was supposed to be a minor character, but the part kept getting larger because of the way he stole the movie.
Playing a hammy actor suddenly called upon to lead a real rescue mission, Vincent Price in His Kind of Woman picks up and bodily carries off the whole second part of the film, stealing it away from Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell, and Raymond Burr.
Gary Oldman once more in “The Fifth Element.”
I guess there is some disagreement over what ‘scene-stealer’ means. Sometimes hard to separate from “actor who you can’t take your eyes off of when they’re onscreen no matter how big or small the part.”
Michael Badalucco as George Nelson (NOT BABYFACE!) in O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Amen. IMO he’s the only good thing about that movie. Thought so in '69, still think so.
My entry for this thread: David Carradine in “Long Riders”.
It has been opined (and I agree completely, though I can’t recall the source) that Maggie Smith has stolen virtually every scene in every movie she’s ever been in. The woman is astronomically talented.
She’s good in Murder By Death, but I think Peter Falk steals it.
Not to mention Jimmy Stewart, Ernie Kovaks, and Piewacket.