My Favorite Actor & Performance

In relation to David Tolentino's request for a new theme, today's post will be about my favorite actor and performance.

FAVORITE ACTOR: MORGAN FREEMAN
Notable Roles: Red in The Shawshank Redemption, Eddie Dupris in Million Dollar Baby, Hoke Culburn in Driving Miss Daisy.
Oscar Wins: One for Million Dollar Baby (Best Supporting Actor)
Best Performance: The Shawshank Redemption

This was a tough choice. Peter O'Toole, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Annette Bening, Angela Lansbury, Judi Dench and Patti LuPone were all in consideration. But in the end, I had to go with Morgan Freeman. Everything he says sounds like it's a commandment from God. His voice is so powerful, when he talks he demands your attention. But at the same time, he has a great amount of range. He can do comedy, his best comedic work being in Nurse Betty, or drama, as displayed in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby. Every movie he is in suddenly becomes great (unless we're talking about Batman Begins. Not even he could save that). I have yet to see him give an unsatisfactory performance, and I think he is the only actor that I can say that about, except for maybe Peter O'Toole.

His performance in The Shawshank Redemption is by far his best--and I'm not just saying that because it's my second favorite movie of all time. He deserved the Oscar nod he got for it, and he really should have won (of course, it did go to Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump. A worthy alternative).

New Direction

In light of our editor's request to find an interesting topic of conversation over the next few weeks, I'd like to offer an idea on the table by asking you two very simple questions : who is your favorite actor (or actress) of all-time, and who gave the best performance in your mind? It doesn't necessairily have to be an Academy Award winner, but every time you can post a message, you can write about an actor whose performance in a particular movie gave you chills, made you believe in love, terrified you to the bone or made you laugh so hard you couldn't hold the tears. If this performance won the actor an Oscar, you can talk about how it beat out the rest of the competition, otherwise you can mention why it lost or why it deserved to win. To start, I'll talk about one I found quite amazing in my youth :

1984 : Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator

When I was young, I was initiated very early to all types of films : I would watch Disney films as much as violent or horror films and learn to enjoy watching actors play their roles. In this particular case, Arnold's Terminator in the first film was the first movie character that truly terrified me, that would haunt me in my nightmares running after me with his big guns and always warning me : I'll be back! Seriously, how can you beat a giant monster that bullets can't kill? Pretty hard, especially for a kid. This film was a great initiative for science-fiction that brought James Cameron on the sunset strip, and Arnold is perfect for this character, because it doesn't require for him to speak much, especially since he was still learning to speak English well at the time. It also didn't need much acting on his part, which is great for him, and let's face it, he is physically intimidating and he knows how to ride his motorcycle.

So, that's one of the many performances that I found interesting in movie history, and I encourage you to write your favorites.