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Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando's naturalistic, deeply internalized acting style, developed through his training in method acting under Stella Adler, fundamentally changed American film and stage performance in the 1950s, moving away from the more theatrical, presentational acting that had dominated Hollywood previously. His 1954 performance in On the Waterfront, including the famous "I coulda been a contender" monologue, and his 1972 comeback role as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, are both widely cited among the greatest individual film performances in American cinema history, bookending a career with two distinct peaks decades apart. Brando's decision to send Native American actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather to decline his 1973 Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather, in protest of Hollywood's treatment of Native Americans, remains one of the most politically significant moments in Academy Awards history and reflected Brando's broader willingness to use his fame for activist causes. His influence on subsequent generations of actors — Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and countless others have directly cited Brando's naturalistic technique as foundational to their own approach — makes him one of the most consequential figures in the development of modern American film acting, regardless of his own personal reputation for being a difficult, unpredictable collaborator later in his career.
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Robert De Niro
Robert De Niro won two Academy Awards, for The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull, and his transformation for the latter role — gaining nearly 60 pounds to portray boxer Jake LaMotta's post-retirement decline — became one of the most famous examples of extreme physical commitment to a role in film history. His frequent collaboration with director Martin Scorsese, spanning nine films across five decades from Mean Streets and Taxi Driver through The Irishman, is one of the most celebrated and enduring director-actor partnerships in American cinema, producing several films now considered among the greatest ever made. De Niro co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival in 2002, alongside producer Jane Rosenthal, partly as an effort to help revitalize Lower Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood following the September 11 attacks, extending his influence on the film industry into festival programming and neighborhood cultural revitalization. His combination of intense, immersive preparation for dramatic roles and, in later decades, a surprising pivot toward broad comedic performances in films like Meet the Parents, has given De Niro a range across serious and comedic work that's kept him a consistently bankable and critically discussed actor across a career now spanning more than five decades.
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