Best Actor Oscar Winners

Adrien Brody becomes a 2-time Best Actor Oscar winner for his role in The Brutalist.

Want to know the best Best Actor Oscar Winners?  How about the worst Best Actor Oscar Winners?  Curious about Best Actor Oscar Winners box office grosses or which Best Actor Oscar Winners picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Best Actor Oscar Winners Movies got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which one got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place …. because we have all of that information.

Since 1927, there have been 97 Best Actor Oscar Winners. This page will rank all 97 movies from Best to Worst in five different sortable columns of information.  If you use the sort and search buttons the massive table becomes very interactive.

Table Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In The Table Below

The really cool thing about ther table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort by the winners
  • Sort by actual domestic box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort by critic reviews and audiences voting.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins
  • Sort Best Actor Oscar Winners by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.  The ceiling to earn points for box office is $200 million…once a movie passes that mark it stops earning points in that category.
 
Charlton Heston in 1959's Ben-Hur
Charlton Heston in 1959’s Ben-Hur

Some possibly interesting stats from the above table:

  1. These movies combined for 570 Oscar® nominations and 264 Oscar® wins.
  2. 63 of these movies earned more than $100 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. The combined average when looking at critic/audience rating was 71.59%

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

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79 thoughts on “Best Actor Oscar Winners”

  1. only 5 best actor oscar winner pages to go. yea Cogerson.
    great gathering of great pages of great performances.
    including the youngest recipient at time of award adrian brody who replaced richard dreyfuss, who replaced marlon brando( smiles to The Bob)

    Reply

    1. Hey bob cox…..with Adrien Brody and F. Murray Abraham being written…we are now down to 3 actors to go….all three are international stars…which means it will be a challenge getting those three completed.

      Reply

  2. 1 In view our recent discussions about the arbitrary nature of Oscar nominations and awards, particularly in relation to the negligence of Hanks, I thought you might be interested in extracts from an article in The New Yorker if you have not already seen it. It was written by Richard Brody on 23 Jun 15 but its title might have been lifted straight from a Hirschhorn critique because it is called “Free Yourself from the Cult of Marlon Brando.”!

    2 There is of course nothing new in ole Mumbles being the focus of attention in a discussion about acting but I invite you to carefully consider the comments about The Duke and Grant.

    3 I have always argued that Wayne was under-rated as an actor and whilst I am not sure of your views on that aspect we both do agree that Grant was a top-notch actor whose treatment by the Academy bordered on criminal.

    4 I hold the view that my praise for your good decisions is somewhat diluted if I don’t criticize your bad ones in my estimation, though I always try to do that tongue in cheek – nobody in their senses could really believe that I want to set on poor Joel that homicidal madman Edward Lionheart played by Vincent Price!

    5 Accordingly I reiterate that notwithstanding the fact that Mr Moore is one of your Top 3 idols it is my opinion that you sold him short by excluding him from your Top 25 Actors 1950-2010, although I have no quarrels with most of your other selections.

    6 I will send the New Yorker extracts in a separate post and when you have read it you might like to consider whether a possible lesson from the extracts is that commendably broad as your Top 25 criteria are they should maybe have taken account of force of screen PERSONALITY alongside such criterion as formal acting awards.

    7 I am of course biased in favour of The Duke and Mr M but whilst I honestly don’t think that Mr Moore had quite the same magnet personality as either of those two great legends as The Duke himself has expressed it “I sure wouldn’t like to live on the difference,” because in my opinion Demi’s ex had at his peak one of the strongest and most likeable screen personas in modern cinema [and I’m sorry that Death Wish has not done too well at the box office so far, about $26 million domestically and $4.5 overseas]

    8 Anyway let me know your views on the extracts and hopefully we’ll find something to DISAGREE about!

    Reply

    1. bob, great share. loved the new Yorker article. you are spot on. I prefer to think of brando as great in many ways. he got me with his performance in don juan demarco, one of his last and most spontaneously himself.

      Reply

  3. 1 In view our recent discussions about the arbitrary nature of Oscar nominations and awards, particularly in relation to the negligence of Hanks, I thought you might be interested in extracts from an article in The New Yorker if you have not already seen it. It was written by Richard Brody 23 Jun 15 but its title might have been lifted straight from a Hirschhorn critique because it is called “Free Yourself from the Cult of Marlon Brando.”!

    2 There is of course nothing new in ole Mumbles being the focus of attention in a discussion about acting but I invite you to carefully consider the comments about The Duke and Grant. I have always argued that Wayne was under-rated as an actor and whilst I am not sure of your views on that aspect we both do agree that Grant was a top-notch actor whose treatment by the Academy bordered on criminal.

    3 I hold the view that my praise for your good decisions is somewhat diluted if I don’t criticize your bad ones in my estimation, though I always try to do that tongue in cheek – nobody in their senses could really believe that I want to set on poor Joel that homicidal madman Edward Lionheart played by Vincent Price!

    4 Accordingly I reiterate that notwithstanding the fact that Mr Moore is one of your Top 3 idols you sold him short by excluding him from your Top 25 Actors 1950-2010, although I have no quarrels with most of your other selections.

    5 I will send the New Yorker extracts in a separate post and when you have read it you might like to consider whether a possible lesson from the extracts is that commendably broad as your Top 25 criteria are they should maybe have taken account of force of screen PERSONALITY alongside such criterion as formal acting awards.

    6 I am of course biased in favour of The Duke and Mr M but whilst I honestly don’t think that Mr Moore had quite the same magnet personalities as those two great legends as The Duke himself has expressed it “I sure wouldn’t like to live on the difference,” because in my opinion Demi’s ex had at his peak one of the strongest and most likeable screen personalities in modern cinema [and I’m sorry that Death Wish has not done too well at the box office so far, about $26 million domestically and $4.5 overseas]

    7 Anyway let me know your views on the extracts and hopefully we’ll find something to DISAGREE about!

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….is the one that you have sent a few times?

      1. Death Wish is chugging along…should end up around $50 million in worldwide gross……on a $30 million budget….it should become profitable when it reaches home entertainment.
      2. The audience voting has remained decent….I think some of the reviews were decided before the person saw the movie…..though I am not thinking it is even close to being a good movie…..at this point I will take a average movie…lol.
      3. I liked the extracts…..good to know Joel is not alone. Joel might have rated Brando’s overall career low…but he did put Brando on the cover on his book…..TWICE.
      4. In today’s post I did a Top 10 Movie list….and Brando did very well in that one….finishing in the top 5.
      5. Other favorites…Cary Grant 30th, John Wayne 35, Michael Caine 46th, Charlton Heston 64th, Myrna Loy 84th and Bruce Willis 166th.
      6. Good comment…sorry it did not go through….trying to figure out why some of your comments are being pulled.

      Reply

      1. HI BRUCE

        1 Yes thanks, that is the one that I have been trying to send all day and I see that it’s now gone through three times. Perhaps you could do me a favour and delete two of the submissions when you have time though the triplication should keep my fan club happy!.

        2 Possibly the post was initially pulled for copyright considerations as I mentioned extracts from The New Yorker in it

        3 I will now try to send you the extracts themselves and would be very interested on your comments on the opinions in the extracts. Meanwhile I enjoyed the comments in your latest post and also found your UMR Top 20 intriguing though I notice that as Steve says you have just three dames on it so you’ll need to watch out that those “feminists” in W o C’s work aren’t after your skull again!

        Reply

        2. FREE YOURSELF FROM THE CULT OF MARLON BRANDO
          [Extracts from 23 Jun 2015 article]

          A new piece in The Atlantic by Terrence Rafferty, “The Decline of the American Actor,” is immensely thoughtful and stimulating. Rafferty brings to light a crucial fault line in the history of filmmaking and film criticism: the cinema, since its invention, has been haunted by an inferiority complex in the face of the theatre. That complex was first exacerbated by talking pictures, and it shows up in contemporary times in the kind of acting that gains critical acclaim and wins Oscars—showy, theatrical, imitative acting

          American movie culture produces different kinds of actors, who are by and large vastly superior in movies but who suffer from a lack of cultural cachet—which is to say, they’re demeaned by critics, and even by many in the industry, for their lack of overt connection to traditional high culture.

          For instance, it took John Wayne—who was, along with Humphrey Bogart, the best American movie actor who ever lived—until 1969 to win his virtually honorary Oscar. Cary Grant, the other comparably great actor in the classic era, was British but utterly non-Shakespearean, and he never won one at all. Henry Fonda, nominated only twice, won once, at age seventy-six.

          The best American actors have been overlooked, by critics and peers alike, and Rafferty, in repeating that error today, replicates the misjudgments of years past. As he laments the decline of training—along with what he considers a concomitant decline in “American culture,” which, he says, “isn’t providing a high level of sustenance right now”—Rafferty invokes another spectre that haunts the current cinema, the cult of Marlon Brando.

          Imbued with serious theatrical training, Brando is cherished for his theatrical impersonations, as in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront,” and “The Godfather,” when, in fact, his greatness is in his person, and shines through most clearly and forcefully in roles that depend least on impersonation—“Guys and Dolls,” “Last Tango in Paris,” and the Maysles brothers’ documentary “Meet Marlon Brando.”

          Brando was great not because of his theatrical training but despite it. He was trapped in artifice through most of his career, when his mere presence was itself one of the most charismatic and original ever filmed. Brando himself was a living work of art, and most of his famed performances aren’t gilded lilies but gilded paintings. He was pushed to be overpainted, overvarnished, overdecorated, and only a few films of his get close to the true depths of his character—because the technical and theatrical side of his talent was, for the most part, the one that got praised and rewarded, the one for which he was hired.

          Reply

  4. 1 In view our recent discussions about the arbitrary nature of Oscar nominations and awards, particularly in relation to the negligence of Hanks, I thought you might be interested in extracts from an article in The New Yorker if you have not already seen it. It was written on by Richard Brody on 23 Jun 15 but its title might have been lifted straight from a Hirschhorn critique because it is called “Free Yourself from the Cult of Marlon Brando.”!

    2 There is of course nothing new in ole Mumbles being the focus of attention in a discussion about acting but I invite you to carefully consider the comments about The Duke and Grant.I have always argued that Wayne was under-rated as an actor and whilst I am not sure of your views on that aspect we both do agree that Grant was a top-notch actor whose treatment by the Academy bordered on criminal.

    3 I hold the view that my praise for your good decisions is somewhat diluted if I don’t criticize your bad ones in my estimation, though I always try to do that tongue in cheek – nobody in their senses could really believe that I want to set on poor Joel that homicidal madman Edward Lionheart played by Vincent Price!

    4 Accordingly I reiterate that notwithstanding the fact that Mr Moore is one of your Top 3 idols you sold him short in my opinion by excluding him from your Top 25 Actors 1950-2010, although I have no quarrels with most of your other selections.

    5 I will send the New Yorker extracts in a separate post and when you have read it you might like to consider whether a possible lesson from the extracts is that commendably broad as your Top 25 criteria are they should maybe have taken account of force of screen PERSONALITY alongside such criterion as formal acting awards.

    6 I am of course biased in favour of The Duke and Mr M but whilst I honestly don’t think that Mr Moore had quite the same magnet personalities as those two great legends as The Duke himself has expressed it “I sure wouldn’t like to live on the difference,” because in my opinion Demi’s ex had at his peak one of the strongest and most likeable screen personalities in modern cinema [and I’m sorry that Death Wish has not done too well at the box office so far, $26 million and fading in US and $4.5 million abroa]

    7 Anyway let me know your views on the extracts and hopefully we’ll find something to DISAGREE about!

    Reply

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