 100 Greatest Movie Performances of All Time Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |
 100 Greatest Movie Performances of All Time |
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Character Name | Played By | Film Title | The Performance |
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Sam Spade | Humphrey Bogart | The Maltese Falcon (1941) | A wise-cracking, tough-acting, seedy detective. |
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Elisabet Vogler | Liv Ullmann | Persona (1966) | A stage star who suddenly stops speaking. |
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Phil Connors | Bill Murray | Groundhog Day (1993) | A sarcastic, misanthropic weatherman reliving the same day in the same small town many times. |
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Randle Patrick McMurphy | Jack Nicholson | One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) | A mischievous, low-level, misfit asylum inmate who fakes his mental illness. |
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Chuck Noland | Tom Hanks | Cast Away (2000) | A desperate island castaway forced to communicate with a volleyball. |
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Tracy Flick | Reese Witherspoon | Election (1999) | An anal-retentive go-getter determined to win a student council election with the slogan "Pick Flick". |
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Tramp | Charlie Chaplin | City Lights (1931) | An iconic, desperately poor and compassionate Tramp infatuated with a poor, blind flower girl, and friends with a suicidal, alcoholic millionaire. |
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Jim Stark |
James Dean | Rebel Without a Cause (1955) | An anguished teenager pained by his parents ("You're tearing me apart"). |
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Travis Bickle | Robert De Niro | Taxi Driver (1975) | An intensely violent loner intent on cleaning up New York's streets. |
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Jules Winnfield | Samuel L. Jackson | Pulp Fiction (1994) | A modern-day, chattering hitman/gangster who engages in Biblical gunplay. |
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Suzanne Stone | Nicole Kidman | To Die For (1995) | A sexy, and sometimes cool, aspiring anchorwoman. |
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Richard III | Laurence Olivier | Richard III (1955) | A sinister and murderous king. |
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Maria Tura | Carole Lombard | To Be or Not to Be (1942) | A beguiling, ravishing wife of a Warsaw acting couple that resists the Nazis. |
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Harry Caul | Gene Hackman | The Conversation (1974) | A quiet, repressed, and intensely private expert wiretapper with a guilty conscience. |
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Evelyn Cross Mulwray | Faye Dunaway | Chinatown (1974) | A damaged, world-weary, and innocent femme fatale. |
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Truman Capote | Philip Seymour Hoffman | Capote (2005) | A vain and self-loathing gadfly writer who ends up in catatonic despair. |
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Johnny Gray | Buster Keaton | The General (1927) | A stunt-performing train engineer who must save his two loves, his sweetheart and his locomotive. |
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Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels | Dustin Hoffman | Tootsie (1982) | A frustrated cross-dressing New York actor transformed into a wispy-voiced steel magnolia. |
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Holly Golightly | Audrey Hepburn | Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) | A regal, ditzy, coy and beguiling New York City call girl. |
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Ray Charles | Jamie Foxx | Ray (2004) | An R&B legend and unique voice in pop music. |
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John "Scottie" Ferguson | James Stewart | Vertigo (1958) | An obsessed, mourning fetishist only interested in dressing up a woman in the likeness of his dead, platinum-tressed lover. |
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Chance the Gardener | Peter Sellers | Being There (1979) | An, innocent, illiterate fool-sage gardener with pure and simple (and misinterpreted) observations about caring for plants. |
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Hildy Johnson | Rosalind Russell | His Girl Friday (1940) | A retiring, whip-smart journalist wishing to get married, with razor-sharp, sparkling wit. |
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Paul | Marlon Brando | Last Tango in Paris (1972) | A grieving, toxic-raging widower involved with an anonymous lover. |
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Joan of Arc | Maria Falconetti | The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) | A wide-eyed, saintly martyr who suffers trial and execution. |
