The Big Picture
- Luise Rainer’s performance in ‘The Great Ziegfeld’ is an extraordinary and memorable portrayal, even though she only appears in 20% of the film.
- Peter Finch delivers an iconic line delivery and a masterful performance in ‘Network,’ despite having limited screentime.
- Anthony Hopkins’ chilling performance as Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ is one of the most iconic in horror cinema, even though he only appears in 21% of the film.
It’s quite a monumental event in an actor’s career when they manage to earn the praise of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) with an Oscar. A Best Leading Actor or Best Leading Actress statuette can give a thespian’s trajectory a turn for the better, and if their performance is particularly memorable, it’s bound to remain in audiences’ minds as an all-timer.
More often than not, a lead performance has a large amount of screen time to go along with it. Sometimes, though, a few performances have won a Best Leading Acting statuette though they’re featured in only a surprisingly limited portion of the movie. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it brings up interesting conversations regarding the Academy’s rules or even what exactly constitutes a leading performance.
10 Luise Rainer — ‘The Great Ziegfeld’ (1936)
35m 43s of Screentime
The Great Ziegfeld was the very first biopic film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. Outside of that, audiences don’t really remember much of it, and think it’s one of the worst recipients of the award ever. It follows the ups and downs of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., one of the most important producers of extravagant revues in Broadway’s history. At nearly three hours long, it’s an ambitious film that covers a lot of ground.
While William Powell (who plays Ziegfeld) is the main lead in the film, he didn’t even get a Best Actor nomination in 1937. On the other hand, the iconic Luise Rainer earned a Best Actress statuette for her portrayal of Ziegfeld’s first wife, Anna Held. Her performance might have read differently to audiences at the time, but nowadays, it’s pretty clear to anyone watching that she should have campaigned for Supporting, as evidenced by her showing up in just a little under 20% of the picture. In any case, hers is an extraordinary performance that makes an otherwise pretty forgettable film a little more tolerable, so it’s hard to be upset.
9 Peter Finch — ‘Network’ (1976)
33m 20s of Screentime
One of the most renowned dark comedies of all time, whose examination of themes like how the mass media manipulates the public’s perception of reality have aged concerningly well, Network is an exceptional film by the great Sidney Lumet. In it, a television network exploits a deranged former anchor’s revelations about the news media for its own profit, though his message soon proves difficult to control.
With an exceptional screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky and a legendary cast featuring the likes of Faye Dunaway (who won the Best Actress award for her performance) and Beatrice Straight (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for hers), Network is a timeless masterpiece. Peter Finch became the first of only two actors who have posthumously won an Academy Award, and it was well deserved. He makes the best of very limited screentime, offering one of the most iconic line deliveries in the history of cinema.
Network
- Runtime
- 121 minutes
- Main Genre
- Drama
8 Geoffrey Rush — ‘Shine’ (1996)
31m 27s of Screentime
One of the most powerful music biopics made in modern times, as well as perhaps one of the most underrated, Shine is an Australian psychological drama starring Geoffrey Rush as the pianist David Helfgott. The movie sees the pressures of his newfound fame and the echoes of his complicated childhood bring his schizophrenia to the surface, which made him spend years in and out of mental institutions.
With insightful commentary on mental illness, as well as a life-affirming celebration of the joys of life and the fight against hardships to achieve it, Shine excels as an incredible display of Rush’s talents. The actor learned piano for the role so that he wouldn’t need a hand double, and that’s only one of the signs of his dedication. Even in spite of only appearing on-screen for 30% of the movie, he became the first actor to win the Best Leading Actor award at the Oscars, the SAG Awards, the BAFTAs, the Critics’ Choice Awards, and the Golden Globes for the same role.
7 Lee Marvin — ‘Cat Ballou’ (1965)
31m 6s of Screentime
Lee Marvin is perhaps one of the most underrated actors in the history of Old Hollywood, the unsung hero of many legendary classics. One of his best works, the one that brought him his only Oscar nomination (and win), came in Cat Ballou. In this forgotten Western, a young schoolteacher named Cat Ballou turns into an outlaw to avenge her murdered father.
Lee Marvin plays the washed-up gunslinger who helps Jane Fonda‘s Cat Ballou get revenge on those who wronged her, in an exquisitely comedic and layered performance that the actor is evidently having a blast with. Whether he’s a co-lead or in a supporting role is frankly up for debate, but what’s for sure is that the actor finally won an Oscar for what many would call his single most memorable performance.
6 Frances McDormand — ‘Fargo’ (1996)
26m 29s of Screentime
The Coen brothers have directed some of modern cinema’s most influential gems, and Fargo might just be their best work. With just the right mixture of police procedural thrills, character drama, and pitch-black comedy, it tells the story of a Minnesota car salesman whose inept crime falls apart due to the persistent police work of the quite pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson.
Frances McDormand plays Marge in a portrayal that’s simple but nuanced, perfect for scenes of suspense but also comedic, light, and the perfect counterbalance to the film’s darkest moments. She’s an absolute delight in the role of an absolute delight of a woman, and though she has to share lots of screen time with co-lead William H. Macy as well as supporters Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, she still manages to shine in what’s easily one of the best crime movies ever.
Fargo
- Director
- Joel Coen , Ethan Coen
- Runtime
- 98
- Main Genre
- Crime
5 Anthony Hopkins — ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
24m 52s of Screentime
Even showing up in only 21% of The Silence of the Lambs (the lowest percentage of any Best Leading Actor winner), Anthony Hopkins managed to deliver one of the most iconic performances of ’90s cinema, as well as one of the most memorable in all horror cinema. In this incredibly dark thriller, a young FBI cadet has to be helped by an incarcerated cannibal killer to catch another serial killer.
Jodie Foster delivers what might be the best performance of her career in what’s definitely the movie’s lead role. Nowadays, many would argue that Hopkins’s win for Best Actor was a case of category fraud. However, when talking about such a masterful performance in one of the most popular Best Picture winners of all time, a horrifying transformation into one of cinema’s best villains, it’s tough to fault the Academy for wanting to give Hopkins a bigger reward.
4 David Niven — ‘Separate Tables’ (1958)
23m 39s of Screentime
In Separate Tables, the great David Niven plays Major Angus Pollock, one of the several people staying at a seaside hotel in Bournemouth whose stories the movie follows. In such large ensemble films, it’s always complicated to define who’s the lead and who isn’t. Though many would argue that Niven’s is definitely a supporting role, leading his to be considered the weakest Best Actor win of the ’50s, he won the category with less than a quarter of the film’s screen time.
Wrong category or not, Niven is terrific in Separate Tables. Emotional and complex, his work adds a lot of depth to a drama that has unfairly been swept up into oblivion by the passage of time. While it would definitely have been welcome to get to see more of his performance, what glimpses audiences do get of it is more than enough to satisfy.
3 Nicole Kidman — ‘The Hours’ (2002)
23m 30s of Screentime
The Hours chronicles the story of how Virginia Woolf‘s novel Mrs. Dalloway affects three generations of women, all of whom have had to deal with existential dramas not too dissimilar from the ones in the book. Of the three leads, including Meryl Streep (in one of the few great performances of hers that the Oscars ignored) and Julianne Moore in a performance that gave her a Best Supporting Actress nod, Nicole Kidman‘s portrayal of Woolf is the one with the least amount of screentime. Even then, she managed to win Best Actress in 2003.
There’s certainly no arguing that Kidman was just as much of a lead as her two co-stars— and more than deserving of her Oscar win, too. Fake nose prosthetic aside, her performance is quiet and subtle, allowing for its sheer emotional power to come across as particularly genuine and effective. Every time she’s on-screen, she conveys an elegant existentialism that surely contributed to her win.
2 Louise Fletcher — ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975)
22m 37s of Screentime
Screen time is only one factor in deciding what constitutes a leading performance. Sometimes, a character is so pivotal to the narrative and the actor playing them has such a looming presence that it’s impossible to consider theirs anything but a lead performance, even in the face of limited time on screen. One of the performances that best prove this is Louise Fletcher‘s in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where she plays a tyrannical nurse struggling to keep the patients of a mental institution in check, when a new patient rallies them up to rebel against her tactics.
Fletcher’s Nurse Ratched is one of the most fearsome movie villains of all time, an embodiment of the sadistic manipulation of institutions with too much power on their hands. Fletcher absolutely dominates every single scene she shows up in, offering a portrayal of Ratched that makes her a mysterious and terrifying force of nature that’s as easy to hate as she is to fear.
1 Patricia Neal — ‘Hud’ (1963)
21m 51s of Screentime
In the contemporary Western, Hud, an honest and hard-working Texan rancher, has a conflict with his ruthless, selfish, reckless son Hud, a young man who tarnishes everything and everyone he comes into contact with, after falling into alcoholism following his accidental killing of his brother in a car crash. It’s a bleak and devastating film, and Paul Newman is beyond terrific as Hud.
Patricia Neal‘s performance as the family’s live-in housekeeper is exquisitely subtle yet powerful. She’s an intriguing woman who clearly desires Hud, but knows better than to give into her impulses. Though it would be extremely hard to make a compelling case for her role being anything more than a supporting one, the Academy decided to reward her with a Best Actress win. Even with only less than 20% of the movie’s screen time, she commands the whole film with one of the most surprisingly memorable performances that has won the award.
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