17 weirdly underrated performances by great actors
Great actors need great roles: they are the stuff from which icons are forged.
Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle. Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview. James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. Cinema is full of stars who have come to embody their best characters in the popular imagination.
But what about all the stellar performances that manage to fall through the cracks?
This piece is about those roles that, for one reason or another, failed to get the recognition they deserved.
Often, it’s a case of the work simply being overshadowed by some other, showier part in a more popular project – Samuel L Jackson’s nuanced turn in Hard Eight, for instance, was never likely to usurp his famous Pulp Fiction persona.
From Matt Damon to Robin Williams, here are 17 top actors who’ve delivered brilliant work that more people need to see…
Michael Caine in Youth
Much of Caine’s lateractor play it fairly safe – after all, this is a man who claimed to have mentally retired after 1983’s . But his starring role in Paolo Sorrentino’s funny, endlessly surprising , playing an elderly music composer, is up there with his very best work.
