After years of making movies, sometimes an actor's last turns out to be their best. This may come after a performer has spent a lifetime playing roles in a variety of genres, or during their prime when circumstances beyond their control cut their career short. It's a sign of distinction that an actor's last movie is their greatest achievement when so many actors, even the best of their generation, can fade into obscurity starring in B and C-grade movies that don't offer them the sort of challenge, recognition, or prestige of their earlier years.
Heath Ledger died at just 28 after doing incredible work as The Joker in The Dark Knight, even earning a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, but his unfortunate passing greatly affected his final film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in a part that was overshadowed by how spectacular his penultimate film was. For these actors, their final films truly were the culmination of all of their skills, talents, and charisma. Fortunately, their work lives on and immortalizes them as the dedicated craftspeople that they were.
11 Chadwick Boseman - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020)
Chadwick Boseman has become a mainstay in pop culture thanks to Black Panther, but "it’s no stretch to say his last performance may be his finest" in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (via RogerEbert.com). Boseman won a Critics' Choice Award and an NAACP Image Award for his portrayal of Levee Green, the Georgia Jazz Band's cocky trumpeter, who tries to get his own record deal apart from Ma Rainey's band only to realize the hypocrisy of recording with white producers in 1927. His struggle to carve a place in the musical landscape after his mother was sexually violated and his father was lynched, is a tragic tour de force.
10 Brandon Lee - The Crow (1994)
Brandon Lee's life was cut short on the set of his final movie, a gothic superhero film called The Crow, due to an accident involving a prop gun. Lee brought a sense of melancholy to the part of Eric Draven, a musician resurrected to enact vengeance on the men who killed him and his fiancé, while also managing to convey strength and whimsy. As the son of famous martial artist and actor Bruce Lee, he could certainly do all the stunts, as he had in previous martial arts movies, but he also brought a thoughtfulness to the superhero genre with themes about love and loss that have rarely been seen.
9 James Dean - Giant (1956)
James Dean may have only made three films in his young life, but they made him an icon that has remained recognized for his considerable talent (as well as his Golden Age Hollywood looks) for decades. In Giant, Dean plays Jett Rink, an impoverished farmhand who inherits a small Texas ranch that happens to have a huge oil reserve buried beneath it, allowing him to go up against the likes of Rock Hudson for Elizabeth Taylor's affections. In a Texas-sized epic Western, Dean manages to steal the show out from under huge Hollywood heavyweights with his Method Acting approach that earned him a posthumous nomination for Best Actor.
8 Peter Finch - Network (1976)
In a scathing satire about the media, Peter Finch plays Howard Beale, a veteran news anchor about to be fired in Network. Upset about being put out to pasture, he threatens to shoot himself on live television before descending into a maniacal rant about how debased modern American culture has become, the dramatic fallout from which ironically creates instant ratings boost for his network. Finch won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his powerful portrayal, and his "Mad as Hell" speech has been referenced by The Young Turks, Better Call Saul, Boston Legal, and has been sampled in one way or another in dozens of songs.
7 James Gandolfini - The Drop (2014)
James Gandolfini joined Tom Hardy in his final movie The Drop, where he plays Marv, the cousin of Hardy's Bob, and owner of a Chechen bar where money is dropped off and collected for various drug deals. Where Hardy imbues his part with laconic melancholy but ultimately acceptance of his lot in life, Gandolfini shines as the nervous and desperate Marv, who is such a far cry from his mob boss titan Tony Soprano as to be almost unrecognizable. It's a part that reminds fans how much range the late actor had while mostly confined to television, and what he could have done with even more film roles.
6 Marilyn Monroe - The Misfits (1961)
For most of her life, Marilyn Monroe wasn't considered a great dramatic actress because the parts she tended to be offered capitalized on her figure and her face rather than her acting ability. In her final movie The Misfits in 1961, she was finally able to sink her teeth into a role that really challenged her and brought out her capacity for authenticity as a divorced ex-stripper looking for love and finding it in the company of three unlikely men. She received a Golden Globe Award for her earnest portrayal of a woman more compelling and sympathetic than any character she'd ever been allowed to play.
5 Oliver Reed - Gladiator (2000)
Oliver Reed had a long and storied career before he portrayed the robust Proximo in Gladiator, but even dying at 61 during filming robbed fans of a comeback later in his career. He had mostly been known for playing villains and scoundrels in horror movies and dramas, but Gladiator gave him the chance to use every trick of the trade to deliver a surprisingly empathetic portrait of a man who had been where Maximus was, and did what no gladiator could - survive the arena and earn his freedom. He delivered lines like, "We mortals are but shadows and dust," with all the grandeur of the greatest Shakespearean troubadours.
4 Daniel Day-Lewis - Phantom Thread (2017)
Daniel Day-Lewis has been described as the greatest actor of his generation, and when he chose to retire in 2017 with his final film Phantom Thread it was a great loss for cinema. Day-Lewis is known for extreme method acting in many superb films and won plenty of Academy Awards for totally immersing himself in a role, but his masterful portrayal of fastidious dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock showcased his towering talent through every subtle gesture, eye movement, and inflection. Watching Day-Lewis strike a fine balance conveying Woodcock's toxicity, narcissism, and also vulnerability, as well as sew his own dresses, is to see a master at his finest work.
3 John Wayne - The Shootist (1976)
By the time John Wayne made The Shootist he had already starred in 80 Westerns, but his final movie was the sort that he wouldn't have made when he was a younger icon. As an aging gunslinger dying of cancer, Wayne's J.B. Books has lived long enough to warrant attention from those looking to profit off of his notoriety, so he devises a way to go out in a blaze of glory rather than rot in obscurity. This is The Duke at his most ferocious and yet his gentlest, his most mythological and his most humane, and "you will be surprised by the dimensions he provides for J.B. Books" (via RogerEbert.com).
2 Spencer Tracy - Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? (1967)
Jonah Hill and Lauren London remade Guess Who's Coming To Dinner in 2023, but You People didn't capture the complexity of latent racism in the way that Spencer Tracy's final movie did. Tracy plays Matt Drayton, a father preparing to host a dinner party for his daughter, her Black fiancé, and his parents, and was already ill by the time he made the film. Tracy gives total commitment to a layered performance representative of the conservative part of the American population struggling with interracial marriage during the Civil Rights era, who ultimately sees the error of his ways, and garnered a nomination for Best Actor from it.
1 John Cazale - The Deer Hunter (1978)
In John Cazele's final film The Deer Hunter he could have been overshadowed by Robert DeNiro and Christopher Walken, but he manages to stand out even amidst their strong performances. Unlike the main cast, Cazale plays Stanley, one of the few friends who don't get drafted during the Vietnam War and remains in his little steel town without engaging in horrific combat. Cazale imbues Stanley with all the inhumanity of someone who hasn't seen the brutalities of war and speaks cavalierly about the violence he knows nothing about, made all the more powerful but the fact that he filmed his scenes with terminal cancer.