Who's the Best Actor in Hollywood?

Sean Penn

by Martha Frankel

The first time I saw Sean Penn, he was biting his toenails. How could I not fall in love with him? As Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Penn brought being stoned to a new level of vacuousness, and although that performance has been imitated hundreds of times, no one has played a doped-up goofball to such perfection since. So what did Penn up and do? He almost always went for the roles that didn't point up his good looks, the ones that let him play to all the dark sides and hidden nuances. Think of him as Daulton Lee in The Falcon and the Snowman, an amoral, deceitful, drug-taking schemer whose nerves seem to jump from his body. The critic Pauline Kael once said that watching Penn play Lee, "you feel as if the artist has disappeared and you were left watching a twerp playing a twerp"--which is the best thing an actor could aspire to. Remember his scene at the end of At Close Range, when he's got to face his father (Christopher Walken) and admit that the man would just as soon kill him as help him out? Remember Penn as the nervy, tic-filled lawyer in Carina's Way, or the cop returning to his crime-infested neighborhood in State of Grace? Each time, he pushes through what you think he'll do, and comes out as a character you believe. As Matthew Poncelet in Dead Man Walking, Penn is at his very best. The haircut, the angle of his head, the strange and halting speech only make him seem more repellent, and his redemption all the more beautiful. Sure Penn's had his misses (Shanghai Surprise, anyone?), but he's often better than the material he's in, and if truth be told, I'd rather watch Sean Penn bite his toenails than see Tom Cruise or any of Penn's peers licking someone's breasts.

Daniel Day-Lewis

by Stephen Farber

The great English actors have always delighted us with their protean range. Sir Alec Guinness and even Sir Laurence Olivier were often unrecognizable from one film to the next; they were more chameleonlike character actors than iconic movie stars. Daniel Day-Lewis carries on this glorious tradition, with the added pleasure of high-voltage sex appeal. His first two major films, A Room with a View and My Beautiful Laundrette, demonstrated that we were in the presence of an astonishingly versatile actor; he was equally convincing as the upper-class twit in the first movie and as the gay working-class punk in the second. The Unbearable Lightness of Being unleashed his sexual magnetism. He didn't flaunt it, like some young American hunks, and that made his charisma all the more insinuating.

Although Day-Lewis hasn't acted in a great many movies since then, he's shown that he can play just about anything. He made a thrilling action hero in The Last of the Mohicans, and then he transformed him-self into the weak, vacillating urban lawyer in The Age of Innocence. Day-Lewis never begs us to love him. In My Left Foot he caught the petulant anger as well as the fortitude of the handicapped Christy Brown, and he played up the reckless immaturity of the falsely accused Irishman in In the Name of the Father. Other actors would have highlighted the nobility of those two characters, and the films would have been no more than TV-style message movies. With Day-Lewis, they became more tangled and profoundly involving human dramas.

Beyond all that, his intelligence always shines through; he has a rare ability to illuminate the intricacies of thinking. He should be ideally cast in The Crucible, because he's one of the few actors who can make us experience the internal struggles of Arthur Miller's reluctant hero, John Proctor. Daniel Day-Lewis has it all: intensity, fearlessness, along with old-fashioned glamour. How can you beat that combination?

Denzel Washington

by Virginia Campbell

A journalist friend of mine once told me this anecdote about a legendary Hollywood star he'd inter-viewed. The star was looking over script pages for an upcoming scene, and the journalist noticed that next to certain lines the star had written "N.A.R." "What does 'N.A.R.' mean?" he asked. The star replied. "No Acting Required."

That was a very wise movie star, to under-stand that a lot of what makes a star a star on the big screen is that ineffable quality which radiates and moves the viewer when no acting is taking place. It happens that the movie star in question was also an excellent actor--a rather unusual circumstance. Which brings us to Denzel Washington. How odd that Washington should be named People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" just as he is on screen in Courage Under Fire, giving a performance that involves no eroticism at all. For heaven's sake, he's a psychologically tortured, alcoholic ex-tank commander browbeating other tortured vets into telling him the truth about their lived nightmare. But that's part of the weirdness of Denzel Washington's situation, that he has in him the movie star and the great actor. The ineffable quality stare radiate is erotic in great part, and lots of stars lean on that. Great actors are many, many other things, and seek to seduce only on special terms.

Washington has played many different kinds of characters--some definitively black, some not--in worthy and unworthy films. The Academy got it right awarding him for the out-raged slave he played in director Edward Zwick's Glory. Zwick's Courage Under Fire is a bookend of sorts to Glory (and another opportunity for the Academy to recognize Washington). Here Washington plays a career military man trained not to let emotion cloud his thought. In a terrific choice, Washington acts mostly with his voice--he has a great voice, which is a profound asset to both a star and an actor, though you'd hardly know it these days. He speaks in a deliberately low voice much of the time, signalling both his character's trauma and his nearness to an edge that if crossed would result in maximum decibels. That low voice achieves dramatic depth in the movie's climactic scene, as Washing-ton tells the parents of a fellow commander that he accidentally killed their son. The extended close-up in this same scene could make a stand-alone argument for Washington's brilliance. It is the truest picture of grief I've ever seen in the movies.

But a word about Washington's eyes. And about Malcolm X. Movie stars tend to let their eyes anchor their beauty. Washington's eyes are free agents. As the many Malcolms of Malcolm X, Washington has the gestures, the vocal tones, even the weight of his character ever in transition as the real man was, and it's a remarkable piece of technical acting. Still, the eyes tell everything. They withhold brilliantly. They behold brilliantly. They fear and inspire fear. They hate and love. Best of all, they calculate and will. In one scene. Malcolm stares down two cops who want to keep him from the fellow Muslim that police have beaten; his eyes move carefully from one cop to the other, preying on the predators; they give in. It is Malcolm and Denzel in a nutshell: force of charisma put to a purpose.

Johnny Depp

by Edward Margulies

Ok, I know what you're going to say Johnny Depp, the best actor in Hollywood- are you kidding? And even if you're not, didn't you see Nick of Time? I'm not, and I did. First, about Nick of Time. I suspect Depp made it to get his career wranglers--his manager, his agent--off his back. I can imagine they hounded him after Keanu Reeves's price soared post-_Speed_: "Can't you do an action picture, can't you have a tent-pole hit, can it hurt you to make some serious money?" So maybe Depp, that sly devil, picked a John Badham picture on purpose: "See? You wanted me to make a straightforward action picture. I did. It bombed. End of story."

Which is just as well, for this puts Depp back where he belongs-- giving unpredictable, looks-easy-but-isn't performances in unpredictable small films. Depp's quintet of best portrayals to date make it clear that no one plays a beautiful loser more beautifully than he does. Using his hushed voice and haunted eyes to draw one in, Depp gently shows the shaky vulnerability that hides within movie masculinity--whether as a prince who's disguised as a frog (Edward Scissorhands), a sibling who mimes Buster Keaton to escape his troubles (Benny & Joon), a sibling who woos Juliette Lewis to escape his troubles (What's Eating Gilbert Grape), a clueless, cross-dressing optimist (Ed Wood), or a schizophrenic cheerfully trapped in his own fantasy world (Don Juan DeMarco). Damaged goods, all. Has any other leading man illuminated such tortured souls so kindly--as kindly as if he were actually revealing himself?

Depp's work in Don Juan DeMarco is the argument on which I rest my case. In this film, his command of the screen as he subtly parodies the heyday of "Latin lovers" like Gilbert Roland and Fernando Lamas (while deftly unfolding the eroticism within the cliché) would be unmistakably obvious if Depp weren't so constitutionally averse to being obvious. When he suddenly switches gears to unveil the unhappy man who prefers living in an altered state, Depp holds the screen without any theatrical artifice at all. If that's the kind of thing that makes him so underrated, so be it. It also makes him great.

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