GREATEST LIVING ACTOR, SCENE IV

Man #1 enters blog, stage left. He looks around.

MAN #1

"I declare that I have forgotten to mention the estimable Gene Hackman."

Or Harvey Keitel. Or Williem Dafoe. A tremendous danger for an excellent, successful actor is the risk of self-parody - one reason that Brando, Hoffman, Nicholson and Pacino are not meriting our unambigious support. De Niro's range is considerable, but for me Duvall and Keitel edge him out for showing a humanity stripped - apparantly- of artifice. We've also left out Anthony Hopkins - perhaps this is Merchant-Ivory diabetic shock. Dr. X's comment on playing people - where you watch a full, living character-consciousness unfolding without anticipating the lines-made me think again of Duvall and Gene Hackman, and they're been doing this for forty years with a minimum of self-parody.

[I thought of Hackman too, but decided against mentioning him. My problem with Hackman is this: when he's in a bad movie, you say "hey Gene Hackman's in this bad movie." But with Michael Caine (at least in my experience) you say "hey, this movie's not so bad, Michael Caine is in it."

Does anyone else remember when William Hurt was going to be the best actor of his generation? Every movie I saw him in, he slammed-dunked the role. He won an (deserved) Oscar for Kiss of the Spider Woman and nominations for Broadcast News and Children of a Lesser God. And then...nothing. I haven't seen much lately except this thing on cable, and I wasn't impressed. On the bright side, he's still working and Lost in Space was probably the bottom. - Dr.X ]