Daniel Day-Lewis

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• Top 6 Film Actors of All Time

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• Meryl Streep

  Meryl Streep holds the record for the most Academy Award nominations of any actor in history, with 21 nominations across a career spanning five decades, a total so far ahead of any other performer that it's rarely even discussed as a close statistical comparison. Her range across roles — from a Polish Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady to a comedic fashion editor in The Devil Wears Prada — reflects a versatility across drama, comedy, and biographical performance that few actors have sustained at a consistently high critical level across so many different registers. Streep is also known for her precise command of accents and dialects, often training extensively with dialect coaches to accurately portray characters from specific regions or countries, a level of technical preparation that's become closely associated with her reputation for meticulous, research-driven performance. Her continued box-office relevance and critical acclaim well into her seventies, in an industry that has historically offered far fewer substantial roles to older actresses, has made Streep a frequently cited example of an actor who's maintained both commercial viability and artistic ambition across an unusually long career.

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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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• Denzel Washington

  Denzel Washington has won two Academy Awards, for Glory in 1990 and Training Day in 2001, and his combined nominations and wins across a career spanning more than four decades have made him one of the most consistently recognized dramatic actors in American film. His performances often center on morally complex characters — corrupt cops, conflicted soldiers, principled lawyers — and Washington's ability to make deeply flawed or even villainous characters genuinely compelling, rather than simply sympathetic, has become a defining feature of his most acclaimed roles. Washington's long-running collaboration with director Spike Lee, including Malcolm X and Mo' Better Blues, produced some of the most significant depictions of Black American life and history in mainstream Hollywood film, and his 1992 performance as Malcolm X is widely regarded as one of the great biographical film performances. Beyond acting, Washington has directed several films himself, including Fences, adapted from the August Wilson play in which he also starred, and his sustained box-office draw across action, drama, and biographical films over four decades has made him one of the most bankable and critically respected leading men in American cinema.

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• Katharine Hepburn

  Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, the most of any performer in history, spread across five decades of her career from the 1930s through the 1980s, a level of sustained critical recognition unmatched by any other actor across such a long span of active work. Hepburn's independent, outspoken public persona — she frequently wore trousers at a time when that was considered scandalous for women, and openly discussed her preference for privacy over Hollywood's studio-driven publicity machine — made her a distinctive figure in an industry that typically demanded more conformity from its female stars. Her decades-long personal and professional partnership with actor Spencer Tracy, spanning nine films together despite Tracy's marriage to another woman throughout their relationship, produced some of Hollywood's most celebrated on-screen chemistry, including Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Tracy's final film before his death. Hepburn's willingness to walk away from major studio contracts when she felt her creative control was threatened, at real financial risk to her own career, reflected an independence from the studio system that was unusual for her era and has made her a frequently cited example of an actor who prioritized artistic control over commercial safety.

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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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More in Film & TV

• Hidden Figures

  "Hidden Figures" (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi, dramatizes the true story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three Black women mathematicians whose calculations at NASA were critical to the success of the early American space program, based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same name. The film brought significant mainstream public attention to the real contributions of Black women "computers" at NASA during the Space Race, a history that had received relatively little prior widespread recognition, and it prompted renewed public interest in and honors for the real Katherine Johnson, who was still alive at the time of the film's release. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe's central performances drew significant critical acclaim, and the film became a notable box office success, outperforming many contemporary awards-season dramas and demonstrating a substantial mainstream audience for historical stories centered on Black women. Hidden Figures's combination of its overdue mainstream spotlight on real, previously under-recognized NASA scientists and its strong central performances has made it one of the most culturally significant true-story films of its decade.

• 12 Years a Slave

  "12 Years a Slave" (2013), directed by Steve McQueen, dramatizes the true story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the antebellum South, based on Northup's own 1853 memoir of the same name. Chiwetel Ejiofor's lead performance and Lupita Nyong'o's supporting performance, in her film debut, both drew significant critical acclaim, with Nyong'o winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and the film itself won the Academy Award for Best Picture. McQueen's unflinching, sustained visual approach to depicting the brutality of slavery, including several extended, unbroken takes of violence that the camera refuses to look away from, was widely credited with giving American slavery a more direct and confrontational cinematic treatment than most previous major studio films had attempted. 12 Years a Slave's combination of its direct grounding in Solomon Northup's own historical memoir and Steve McQueen's unflinching directorial approach has made it one of the most acclaimed and historically significant true-story films ever produced.

• Catch Me If You Can

  "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, dramatizes the real early life of Frank Abagnale Jr., who successfully impersonated an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while forging millions of dollars in checks before being caught by an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks. The film was based on Abagnale's own memoir, and the real Abagnale, who later became a longtime security consultant working with the FBI, served as a consultant on the production, giving the filmmakers direct access to the actual details and methods behind his real-life cons. The film's stylish, buoyant tone and 1960s period production design, paired with John Williams's jazz-inflected score, gave the true story a lighter, more playful cinematic register than many other crime-based true stories, emphasizing the audacious cleverness of Abagnale's real schemes over their consequences. Catch Me If You Can's combination of its direct access to the real Frank Abagnale's own account and its stylish period filmmaking has made it one of the most purely entertaining true-story films ever produced.

• Erin Brockovich

  "Erin Brockovich" (2000), directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Julia Roberts, dramatizes the true story of the real Erin Brockovich, an unemployed single mother who, working as a legal clerk, helped build a massive lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Electric over water contamination in Hinkley, California. Roberts's performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her portrayal of the real Brockovich's brash, persistent determination in the face of both corporate stonewalling and professional condescension became one of the most acclaimed performances of her career. The real underlying case resulted in a $333 million settlement, at the time the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history, and the real Erin Brockovich served as a consultant on the film and appeared in a small cameo role. Erin Brockovich's combination of Julia Roberts's Oscar-winning lead performance and its grounding in one of the largest environmental settlements in American legal history has made it one of the most acclaimed true-story legal dramas ever produced.

• The Social Network

  "The Social Network" (2010), directed by David Fincher from Aaron Sorkin's screenplay, dramatizes the founding of Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University and the subsequent legal disputes with his co-founders and the Winklevoss twins over credit and ownership of the company. Sorkin's screenplay, built around competing depositions and conflicting accounts of the same events, embraced the genuine ambiguity of the real underlying legal disputes rather than presenting a single definitive version of what happened, a structural choice widely praised by critics as an unusually sophisticated approach to dramatizing contested recent history. Jesse Eisenberg's performance as a fictionalized version of Zuckerberg drew significant critical acclaim, and the film's release while the real Facebook was still a relatively young and rapidly growing company gave it an unusually immediate, real-time quality rare for a historical biopic. The Social Network's combination of its sophisticated multi-perspective legal-dispute structure and its unusually immediate proximity to still-unfolding real events has made it one of the most critically acclaimed true-story films of the 21st century.