Top Movie Legends by Genre: The Greatest Actors of All Time

Top Movie Legends by Genre: The Greatest Actors of All Time

Most "greatest actor of all time" lists ignore genre completely, which is how Meryl Streep and Charlize Theron end up ranked on the same vague scale of "talent," as if their jobs were remotely similar. They aren't. What defines a performance in a slasher movie has almost nothing to do with what defines one in a romantic comedy, and pretending otherwise flattens what's interesting about acting. So here's the breakdown by genre: six categories, three picks apiece, actors who didn't just show up in their genre, they defined it. Click through for full profiles.

Action

Action lives or dies on whether the audience believes the danger is real, and these three get there differently. Arnold Schwarzenegger built a career on scale: in the original Terminator he's the villain, not the hero, playing a killing machine with almost no interior life, setting the template for movie robots for a decade. Predator is pure muscle; Total Recall has him unsure his own memories are real, and he sells the paranoia. Tom Cruise does his own stunts, real fighter jets in Top Gun, climbing buildings and aircraft across Mission: Impossible, into his sixties. Edge of Tomorrow is the odd one out, a time loop war movie built on watching him die and come back sharper. Charlize Theron makes the strongest physical case: her one-armed Imperator Furiosa dominates Mad Max: Fury Road without raising her voice, and she trained hard enough for Atomic Blonde that the fight exhaustion on screen wasn't acting. More in our action library.

Comedy

Comedy is the genre awards shows have never known how to reward. Robin Williams worked best off the leash: his best material in Good Morning, Vietnam came from improvising past the script, and Mrs. Doubtfire channeled that same restless energy into something warmer and more physical. Melissa McCarthy got the Oscar nomination her co-stars didn't for Bridesmaids, stealing scenes with less screen time than the leads, then proved it in Spy, carrying an action plot on top of the comedy. Jim Carrey should annoy you a little: the rubber-faced physicality that made Ace Ventura a hit turned genuinely unsettling and sad in The Truman Show, and the Academy never nominated him. More in our comedy section.

Drama

Drama rewards precision, and these three built reputations on how exact they can be. Meryl Streep is the most Oscar-nominated actor in history for a reason: in Sophie's Choice she plays a Holocaust survivor haunted by an unbearable decision, in an accent built from scratch, and in The Iron Lady she ages Margaret Thatcher across decades without tipping into impression. Daniel Day-Lewis has three Best Actor Oscars, still a record for a man: the ruthless prospector of There Will Be Blood and the quietly deliberate title role in Lincoln, two turns sharing almost nothing except total commitment. Viola Davis won her Oscar for Fences opposite Denzel Washington, a rawness hard to watch and impossible to look away from, though she's said she regrets making The Help, arguing it never told the story from the right point of view. More in our drama picks.

Horror

Horror acting spans nearly a century, and these three cover three different generations of scary. Jamie Lee Curtis turned Laurie Strode in Halloween into the blueprint for the modern final girl, fitting for the daughter of Janet Leigh, who'd already given horror its most famous scream in Psycho; The Fog is a lesser film with the same instinct for dread. Toni Collette spans horror's prestige turn: restrained, Oscar-nominated unease as a mother who doesn't yet know what's wrong in The Sixth Sense, and a full, screaming collapse as a mother who does in Hereditary, one of horror's most upsetting performances this century. Bela Lugosi goes back nearly fifty years further: his 1931 Dracula set the template everyone since has riffed on, slow and seductive, the vampire as foreign aristocrat rather than monster, and it typecast him for the rest of his career. More in our horror collection.

Sci-Fi / Fantasy

These roles ask actors to sell entire invented worlds, and the best make the invention disappear. Carrie Fisher turned Princess Leia into something sharper than the title suggested, running her own rescue in Star Wars and setting the tone for every space-opera heroine after her. Ian McKellen played the wise mentor twice over, Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto in X-Men, never letting either feel like a rerun of the other. Sigourney Weaver proved a woman could anchor a franchise built on fear and violence, starting with Ripley in Alien; by Avatar, she'd traded the rifle for a scientist studying an alien world and stuck around the sequels as a different character. More in our fantasy section.

Romance

Romance depends on chemistry you can't fake. Audrey Hepburn won her Oscar for her first major American role in Roman Holiday, and by Breakfast at Tiffany's she'd built an image so glamorous it obscures how sad and rootless Holly Golightly actually is. Ryan Gosling turned real off-screen chemistry with his The Notebook co-star into tabloid fodder for years, then spent months learning piano for La La Land, earning an Oscar nomination and, frankly, the better performance. Julia Roberts became a star off that smile in Pretty Woman, then subverted the genre in My Best Friend's Wedding by not getting the guy at the end, a braver ending than most rom-coms manage. Our romance shelf has the rest.

Honorable Mentions

Some actors are too restless to file under one genre. Leonardo DiCaprio has been the romantic lead of a generation, the fever-dream architect of a heist thriller, and the survivalist whose performance finally won him Best Actor after years of coming close. Denzel Washington has two wildly different Oscars, a supporting win for Glory and a lead win for playing a corrupt, magnetic cop in Training Day, moving between crime dramas, war films, and Shakespeare like it's nothing. Cate Blanchett has won for embodying a real person as a supporting player and carrying an original one as a lead, as comfortable playing an elf queen in a blockbuster as anchoring an austere art film.

Who Did We Miss?

The toughest cut here isn't close: Jack Nicholson. He could have anchored the horror list off The Shining, the comedy list off As Good as It Gets, or the drama list off One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and that's exactly the problem. A list built around actors who own a genre has no room for someone who refuses to stay in one. That's the tradeoff, and we think it's right. If your favorite got left out, the full actor directory has everyone else, and our genres page is a good place to keep making the case.