Another Greatest Movie Star Listing (1 Viewer)

[Robert Crawford]

There are too many missing Movie Stars from this listing for me to take it very seriously.

 

[Kyle_D]

Tom Cruise at #3, ahead of Bogey, Henry Fonda, the Duke.....

Bogart and Hepburn not in the top 10?

Personally I like Cary Grant at #1, but other than that I can't say I'm a fan of this list.

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

The presence of Cruise, Pitt, Smith, and Crowe pretty much invalidates it from the start.

 

[george kaplan]

Well it's definitely not perfect, but it only really includes a handful that are definitely not top 50 (the bottom 4 + Will Smith), and only has a few who are ranked out of kilter. It's a lot closer to being a list I can live with than most of the ones that get posted around here.

Considering that "movie star" is a different thing from actor, I think it does a fairly decent job as a starting off point.

 

[Adam_S]

Good thing there's no older=better bias at HTF.

:rolleyes

It's quite stunning to see Tom Cruise ranked so high, but he is a very powerful movie star currently and quite an icon for nigh on 25 years now (Risky Business was what, 1980, 81?) Garbo comparitively had a 15 year career and little more than a dozen films to her name, few of which hold up. Cruise MIGHT crack my top ten, but not before Jimmy Stewart (my pick for number one or two with Cary Grant), Katherine Hepburn, Lemmon, Hanks, Audrey Hepburn, Duke, Gable, Fonda, Bogart then Ford and Cruise (the last three are kind of interchangeable in my mind in any of those three spots, 10-12)

Julia Roberts likewise, while she's no Katherine Hepburn (who is shockingly low)

Monroe, I think, is ranked too high compared to the peers she's ranked with... However it depends on how you rank the star status. Certainly Monroe had one of the biggest and most impactful presences off the screen as well as on it, but Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Grace Kelly, Claudette Colbert were all better actresses--but none quite had the off-screen pop-culture zeitgeist/penetration that Monroe achieved...

Brad Pitt is right where he should be, the man can open films internationally on a level that only Tom Cruise also does currently (Troy, and expect most all of his other films with Warners to open day and date globally as well). Russell Crowe is probably the first one I'd drop, though the man is a fantastic actor and Gladiator was an incredible performance (so sue me, I liked him in it before it became popular to dismiss the performance as garbage). Since the list is so man heavy I'd add Ginger Rogers, who is shockingly absent.

I've never felt Nicole Kidman to be the star that Cruise is, and I think their positions relative to one another is telling, I'd probably also leave her off my list and replace her spot with Claudette Colbert or Jean Harlow (love the thirties )

I fell Johnny Depp is there because he's arisen to a headliner/opener after being the best character actor in Hollywood throughout the nineties.

I would definitely keep Will Smith because he's insanely successful, much more so than Russell Crowe and he's much more consistently good than Brad Pitt. Plus he's one of the strongest openers and names you can possibly get right now. He's as big as Denzel, if not bigger at this point, both deserve a spot on the list.

I really don't have too many issues with this list, it's a relatively decent balance of old and new, I would order it completely differently, but so would everyone else.

Adam

 

[Robert Crawford]

No intented swipe at today's generation of actors, but besides Cruise, I don't see how those actors can make such a list by excluding Charlie Chaplin, Laurence Olivier, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.





Crawdaddy

 

[Adam_S]

I didn't realize Chaplin was missing, I guess I just assumed that he couldn't possibly not be on there (Keaton never seems to quite get the recognition he equally deserves, let's not even go near Langdon, Arbuckle et al) when I first looked at the list. Olivier's never really been effective for me, but I've not seen his big iconic shakespeare war productions. Lancaster and Douglas I don't miss as much, different strokes, but Chaplin is a major oversight.

 

[Cees Alons]

Major oversights - too many people missing indeed - and very odd relative positions of most that are present (to state it nicely). This list cannot possibly be taken even remotely seriously, IMO.


Cees

 

[Steve Christou]

Unbelievable. I like Will Smith and Russell Crowe but how the hell did they suddenly get in a list of 50 greatest movie stars of all time, booting out true movie greats such as those Robert listed above?
Nicole Kidman? [falls off chair]

 

[Jan H]

Bogart, Brando and Hepburn are ranked too low, Monroe, too high. But my by biggest beef is:


Gary Cooper is #42?

:rolleyes

 

[Steve Christou]

Fred Astaire's in there but no Gene Kelly? tsk tsk for shame. I suppose they had to make room for Brad Pitt. Well we can thank our lucky stars Jude "every film ever made" Law and Colin "fookin'" Farrell aren't in there, although I wouldn't be surprised if they just missed the 50.

 

[Edwin Pereyra]

Julia Roberts at #7? Oh, it's from Premiere magazine. That explains it.

~Edwin

 

[Haggai]

This list does have its problems, but as for Chaplin and other silent stars, Premiere just decided to stick with Hollywood sound-movie stars. Here's what they say about it:


I remember another Top 100 movie stars list from 8 or 9 years ago that did include the silent stars, and it was probably better than this one in the ordering at the top. Bogart was #1, and I think the others in the Top 6 or so were Katherine Hepburn, Wayne, Monroe, Chaplin, and Grant. I thought it was from Entertainment Weekly, but I'm utterly unable to find anything online about it.

 

[Robert Crawford]

You're correct about it being Entertainment Weekly! I have that issue in my hand and it was published in Fall of 1996. The top 50 numerically are the following:

• Bogart
• Katharine Hepburn
• Stewart
• Monroe
• Wayne
• Grant
• Brando
• Gable
• Chaplin
• Davis
• Taylor
• Bergman
• Newman
• Cagney
• Tracy
• Eastwood
• Nicholson
• Cooper
• Astaire
• Olivier
• Audrey Hepburn
• Dean
• Garland
• Connery
• Garbo
• Hanks
• Grace Kelly
• Hoffman
• Henry Fonda
• Redford
• Cruise
• Valentino
• Lemmon
• De Niro
• Keaton
• Kirk Douglas
• Streep
• Temple
• Lancaster
• Stanwyck
• Pacino
• Gene Kelly
• Dietrich
• Poitier
• Laurel and Hardy
• Harrison Ford
• Crawford
• Gibson
• Harlow
• Robin Williams

IMO, you can arguably make a case for all of them except Robin Williams. There are several actors in the next 50 that I consider greater movie stars like Flynn, McQueen, Peck and Holden to name a few.









Crawdaddy

 

[Ruz-El]

What no Bruce Campbell?

Chaplin would probably fall under the banner of "Total Genius" as opposed to simply Movie Star. Orson Welles and Ed Wood Jr. would fit that list as well.

 

[Cees Alons]

The relative positions of Cruise, DeNiro and Pacino weren't right then either. To name just a very few that weren't.

For Ed Wood Jr. that would need a strong "Genius at Work" association.


Cees

 

[Haggai]

Thanks for confirming that I didn't just dream the whole list up, Robert. I remember that the photo they used of Grace Kelly was the best one I've ever seen of her.

 

[Lew Crippen]

Well Adam, I’d opine that any star list ought to be very heavily weighted towards the older actors, as they worked during the height of the studio star system. With particular actors under contract, studios were much more concerned with promoting actors as stars. Not that studios and filmmakers do not try to get ‘stars’ in their films or that they don’t actively promote the names they do secure. But it is far different than the days of yore.

I would note that Chaplin made films (and some great ones) well after the silent era was over—and he was very most certainly a ‘star’ after 1927.

Listings like this always call ordering into question and who did not make (and who made) the list. Among other orderings already questioned, I’m somewhat surprised at how low Elizabeth Taylor is placed (below James Dean, iconic though he was (and is)) made only three films—one of them with Taylor (the ‘star’ of the movie).

 

[Ruz-El]

You know, thinking about this list. Alot of us are wondering why some of the greatest actors are not featured on the list, of higher on the list. I think there is a big difference between greatest actor and biggest movie star, and this list a strange mix of the 2. If your talking movie stars, you should probably have people Paulie Shore and Maculay Chaulkin on it. Not grat actors by any meens, but serious bank ot the box office which is the main thing to qualify as a "Movie Star".

And no, I'm not saying that great actors are not movie stars in their own right, I'm saying there are alot of crappy actors in showy roles that are more movie sars than great actors (Queen Latifa and Hilary Swank are 2 that come to mind.)

 

[Robert Crawford]

My criticism of this listing has nothing to do with who was the greatest actor. IMO, there were more impressive movie stars left off that list strictly in order to pump up some of today's current performers, never mind, that those omitted were still greater movie stars.






Crawdaddy