The 25 Best Actors of All Time, Ranked
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Selecting an assortment of the best actors of all time is foolish, perhaps more so than trying to be objective while tackling any other “all-time” related ranking. Still, it was worth a shot. What you get below includes actors and actresses, with some attempt to highlight a few stars who've operated outside Hollywood for most of their careers, but the attempt probably wasn’t strong enough.
Uh… sorry. As for selecting actors/actresses, it came down to how legendary they are, and so that did favor actors who were either active for a long while a long time ago, or who are active now and have been for decades. Quality of performances, consistency, and quantity of roles (big bodies of work help) were all looked at in determining the best actors of all time. Hopefully, you don’t hate it all too much.
25 Joe Pesci
You only have to look at the gangster movies Joe Pesci has been in to realize how great he is, since he’s a big reason why the likes of Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman work so well. Beyond those, though, he is admittedly well known for Home Alone and its first sequel, and he is great there, playing another criminal, sure, but it’s tonally a very different kind of thing to the other movies he’s specialized in being in.
Even with his gangster films, though, he’s a different sort of gangster in The Irishman compared to his earlier roles, still being intimidating and having a certain presence, but just in a different way. Other highlights of his filmography include JFK, Raging Bull, and My Cousin Vinny. It’s a filmography that might be a bit more about quality than quantity, admittedly, but still, what quality you’ve got here.
24 Samuel L. Jackson
Of all the actors who've become part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe machine, in the sense of having multiple appearances and all, Samuel L. Jackson might well be the best, but part of that comes down to his role as Nick Fury being just one part of a massive filmography. Even without the MCU, he’d still be one of the most recognizable actors of all time, showing up in so many films.
Early on, he had small roles, like in Goodfellas and Jurassic Park, but then came Pulp Fiction, and that was deservedly a breakout kind of role for Jackson. He’s since been great in a bunch of other Quentin Tarantino movies, had a memorable role in the Star Wars prequels, shone in Unbreakable, and was also in the best of the Die Hard sequels. He’s also one of those rare actors who, it honestly seems like, pretty much nobody dislikes.
23 Cate Blanchett
Cate Blanchett has been in a lot, including blockbusters, as a role in The Lord of the Rings shows, but it’s a handful of slightly smaller films that best showcase her acting abilities. There are two Oscars for two of them, including for The Aviator, where Blanchett won for playing an actress who herself is famous for winning four Oscars in real life… but more on her in a little while.
The other win was for Blue Jasmine, where she’s great, and it’s almost a little surprising that Blanchett didn’t also win for 2022’s Tár. It’s hard to fault many Cate Blanchett performances, because she’s either in good movies, or she’s in movies that aren’t very good, but nonetheless still see her giving good performances, which is all you can really ask from a relatively prolific actor, in all honesty.
22 Tom Cruise
Straight up, Tom Cruise is one of the greatest actors still working today who’s yet to win an Academy Award. Time will tell if Digger ends up being the one to do it, but in any event, there are arguments to be made that Cruise’s performances in legendary films like Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, and sure, even Tropic Thunder were good enough to be Oscar-worthy.
Look, Cruise seems a bit eccentric, and maybe even frightening outside his movie roles, but like, those roles are so good. He’s always so committed.
That’s some real range demonstrated by just those films, yet that’s without getting to Tom Cruise and his contributions to the action genre, which is where he really seems to shine. He fully committed to eight Mission: Impossible movies all up, being great in all of them and honestly, most were pretty great. There’s of course Top Gun, and its even better sequel… look, Cruise seems a bit eccentric, and maybe even frightening outside his movie roles, but like, those roles are so good. He’s always so committed. He’s almost always so great.
21 Ellen Burstyn
Ellen Burstyn isn't a household name in the traditional sense, but she should be. She is well known, you'd hope, to anyone who’s into movies, since she’s been in a bunch of iconic ones, and it might be the fact that most of them aren’t blockbusters that plays a role in making her a bit underrated, in the overall scheme of things. Like, Interstellar is probably the most popular movie she’s been in, and she’s not in it for long, but she does make an impact regardless.
If you go back a little further, you do of course come across The Exorcist, which would have to be her second-most famous movie. She gets a lot more to do in that incredibly grim horror film, and is incredible, and the same can be said about her prominent role in Requiem for a Dream, which is also horrific, but without being a horror movie. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and The Last Picture Show are also obvious highlights, and there are plenty of other less obvious highlights if you want to dig into Burstyn’s filmography.
20 Leslie Nielsen
Before he was in the movies for which he’s best known, Leslie Nielsen was probably most famous for being part of the Forbidden Planet cast, and sure, that’s a fun sci-fi movie, and he’s pretty good in it. But a little over a couple of decades later, Nielsen would have a highly memorable supporting role in Airplane!, being absolutely hilarious in a uniquely deadpan way, and it was a big old second wind for his acting career.
He is one of the best comedic actors of all time, without a doubt. Nielsen is so effortlessly funny in the right role, and you just need to compare what he did in his Naked Gun movies versus what Liam Neeson did in his reboot or legacy sequel or whatever you want to call it. Neeson was funny, but Nielsen was hysterical. If the Academy Awards were cooler, they would’ve given him an Oscar for either Airplane! or the first The Naked Gun.
19 Tatsuya Nakadai
There is one other Japanese actor who’ll be mentioned a little later who’s probably more well-known and high-profile overall, but Tatsuya Nakadai is still very much worth shouting out. He was one of the most chameleonic actors of all time, really disappearing into just about every role he took on, and some of those individual roles demanded a whole lot out of him, too.
The character arc he goes through across the epic-length The Human Condition does need to be witnessed to be believed, and he’s also incredible in the likes of Harakiri, Ran, Kagemusha, High and Low, Hachiko, and The Sword of Doom. There was nothing he couldn’t do, and no role that ever seemed too big or too small for him to take on and excel at.
18 Philip Seymour Hoffman
It’s hard to think about Phillip Seymour Hoffman nowadays without also thinking about what a loss his passing was, since he died suddenly in 2014, and did leave behind an incredibly vast filmography, considering how long he was active for, but thinking about what could've been beyond that is obviously sad. A similar thing can be said about James Gandolfini, who died fairly young less than a year earlier, but he’s mostly legendary for his work on TV (hard to look past The Sopranos), so he’s not here.
But Hoffman did the majority of his acting work on the big screen, and he really did do a bit of everything while he was active, shining in small roles, being great as part of ensemble casts, and even knocking it out of the park in leading roles, when they came his way (see Capote, obviously, and also Before the Devil Knows You're Dead). Though it would've been great if he’d been active for decades upon decades, he was great enough in his time that he didn’t need decades upon decades to establish himself as one of the absolute best film actors of his generation.
17 Audrey Hepburn
Oh, nice, speaking of Capote, which was about Truman Capote, obviously, he was an author who (also obviously) wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That novella is probably the second most well-known work by the author, while the story behind his most famous, In Cold Blood, is covered in that aforementioned Phillip Seymour Hoffman movie.
But yeah, Breakfast at Tiffany’s didn’t necessarily get the most accurate of adaptations, but the film of the same name, starring Audrey Hepburn, is iconic in its own right. She was arguably even stronger, in terms of showing off her range, in Roman Holiday, which is an absolute masterpiece. She’s also probably the best part of a flawed War and Peace adaptation, she’s great in Wait Until Dark, Charade is another highlight, and then she and Sean Connery did great work together as the title characters in the underrated Robin and Marian. Hmm… Connery probably deserves to be here. Sorry. Would it be any consolation to know that he was on the shortlist, before things got cut down to a top 25?
16 James Mason
Potentially one of the more underrated actors here, James Mason gets a deserved placement largely thanks to his turn in A Star Is Born, specifically the 1954 one. That one’s also a bit underrated overall, of the four(!) A Star Is Born movies, but he’s great there, and then, like, he’s pretty great in pretty much everything he shows up in, including North by Northwest and the very difficult lead role he had to play in Lolita.
Working with Alfred Hitchcock in the former and Stanley Kubrick in the latter helped for sure, but then he also manages to do a lot with roles in not quite as impressive films (overall) like Julius Caesar, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and The Boys from Brazil. If you're watching an older film and you see his name in the opening credits, you can be pretty sure you'll see at least one great performance in the movie to come.
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