The greatest posthumous movie performances of all time
From Rebel Without A Cause to The Crow and The Dark Knight, these are the acting epitaphs that made us miss the dearly departed even more
Film Features Maria Tura
From left: Rudolph Valentino, The Son Of The Sheik (Hulton Archive/Getty Images); Bruce Lee, Enter The Dragon (Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images); Natalie Wood, Brainstorm (IMDb); Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.) Graphic: The A.V. Club
Making a movie takes years. Over the course of getting a story from the script to the screen, there are rewrites, reshoots, and countless edits—and, sometimes, real life can have a catastrophic effect on the fiction that filmmakers are trying to create. But rarely does an actual tragedy cause more heartache and horror for a production than when a key actor passes away.
It’s a potentially blockbuster-dismantling grief, and it’s one that the new comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear, which opens Friday, faced when Ray Liotta died in May 2022. In honor of the late Goodfellas star, here are the best instances of actors not just starring in movies released after their death, but absolutely nailing their posthumous performance.
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One omission I can think of… Massimo Troisi for Il Postino. It might have been his international break-through, but he died just after shooting finished.And sort of, but not completely, The Lives of Others was released well before Ulrich Mühe died, but the movie didn’t really receive much international attention until after his death.
The Lives of Others is the most brilliant film I’ve only ever seen once. Keep meaning to watch it again.
I often think of that scene in the cafeteria where one of the Stasi officers makes a joke about the East German chancellor and everyone’s laughing, until his superior just looks at him and flatly asks for his name. The atmosphere changes instantly as everyone realises this guy could pretty much have anyone in the room disappeared in an instant. And then the boss starts laughing again and the tension breaks, only not really.
I lovee the context in which the guy who made the joke appears once more before the end of the film.
Thanks for the recs.
There aren’t many foreign-language films on this list.
Would Chadwick Boseman count for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom? Hell of a final performance.
#SlideshowSoWhite
Right? While a number of these did receive awards nominations, it’s hard to argue that some others are better than Boseman in Ma Rainey.
It’s an odd list. For “best posthumous performances”, we have Ray Liotta, in a movie that has not come out yet and I am pretty sure is not one of the “best performances” of his career. More like, “Random list of movies where someone died before it came out”.
Inexcusable.
I’m surprised to not see him on here, as he’s this generation’s James Dean.
Just posting this on the featured article but, where do people go after the A.V. Club? I’ve never check out The Avocado but I just can’t stand it here anymore. I’d still like to get pop culture news tho.
Vulture is good. So is The Reveal over at Substack. Polygon has gotten better under former AV Club editor Tasha Robinson.
Thank you for the list. How do you become a commentor on The Reveal? Just subscribe? Is it free?
To comment on The Reveal, you need to be a paid subscriber, but I think it’s only ~$5/month.
Thanks
I used to send people to Den of Geek, but that place has gotten bizarrely bad lately. It’s still at the “fun to mock” stage, though.
Somehow I never stopped visiting this site every morning, even though it’s now been years since it was worth visiting, but if you’re like me and the TV recaps were your entry point, I’ve found Vulture to be my favorite replacement. Vulture cover a ton of shows, and will even bring in guest reviewers when the material would be better illuminated by an author with a particular background. The biggest problem with Vulture is that while you can fairly easily work around the article limit/paywall, the commentariat is knee-capped because once you create an account and login to comment, all the paywall stuff really rears its ugly head. The result is, sadly, even the most popular articles there rarely have over 10 comments.
As for The Avocado, while I appreciate the idea, the coverage over there of movies and television is so scattershot, I rarely end up finding articles or series that interest me.
I agree on The Avocado. They’re definitely my people over there but the page layout and site navigation isn’t very user friendly. Even if there is something that interests me, it’s usually buried under a lot that doesn’t.
How do you get around the paywall. I’ll sacrifice commenting for the content.
I believe that in Chrome one of my ad block extensions, uBlock Origin or Adblock, is keeping the Vulture paywall at bay. I checked and I don’t have any site-specific settings in Chrome for Vulture (e.g. Javascript disabled), so my best guess it’s one of those two. Once I log into my Vulture account, or if I use a browser without ad blockers, then I get hit with the typical countdown of “you have # number of article views left this month” popups.
Thanks!
Somehow I never stopped visiting this site every morning, even though it’s now been years since it was worth visiting
OOF tell me about it. I’ve been coming here so long, at this point it’s just a habit/reflex.
I like Indiewire.
Collider, Indiewire, Slashfilm
Avocado for the comment sections, Vulture or Polygon for articles. Den of Geek has fun articles, but stay the hell away from the comments.
You could check out the What’s on Tonight disqus channelhttps://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/2023/02/succession-s-end-and-other-friday.html
https://thepopculturists.blogspot.com/
Agreed on Avocado. I like the people but the site is… it has a weird layout that can be hard to get into. And the comment section difficult to navigate when it gets too big. Plus they can be a liiiiittle too strict with their rules and moderation. Anyway I stopped going a year or so ago, just because I lost interest and it was a hassle.Pajiba isn’t bad, it covers a lot of shows and movies and books. And the commenters there are pretty good and frequent.
https://www.theguardian.com/us/cultureSome great interviews / profiles / lists / news pieces. Their reviews – hmmm. Not really.
Honorable mention for Audrey Hepburn’s Grammy-winning Enchanted Tales, which made her the only person to date to complete an EGOT after their death.
Shemp?
For the AV Club, this list must’ve been the most important day of their lives, but for Raul Julia in “Street Fighter,” it was Friday.
Between this and the Boseman omission, I’m wondering if Tucker Carlson is the new AV Club editor.
What’s even more eerie about Brandon Lee’s tragically too-soon death is the manner in which he died and how it relates to his father, Bruce. When Bruce Lee died he was in the middle of filming a movie called (somewhat presciently) ‘Game of Death’ where he basically plays a fictionalized version of himself (a martial arts actor named Billy Lo whose quick rise to fame draws the attention of a criminal syndicate that wants to exploit his fame for monetary gain and which repeatedly sends thugs out to harass him and rough him up when he refuses to join them).Within the plot of the film, the criminal syndicate eventually decides Billy is more trouble than he’s worth and plans to murder him…by having an assassin infiltrate the set of his latest movie and swap out a prop gun for a real gun during a scene where his character is supposed to be shot. Of course, in the movie, Billy secretly survives the assassination attempt, fakes his own death to trick the syndicate into thinking they’ve succeeded, and then comes back as a sort of avenging angel to take down the syndicate’s top goons in (what else?) a series of pitched martial arts fights.If you watch Game of Death today, you can tell pretty easily which scenes are actually Lee and which ones are just a stand-in wearing large sunglasses to obscure his face (thankfully Lee had the forethought to film all the movie’s major fight scenes first, including the ones where he wears the iconic yellow jumpsuit he’s often depicted in, which means the stand-in was mostly only needed for exposition/dialogue and minor fight scenes early in the film).The parallels one can draw between Game of Death and The Crow are certainly striking, not only because of their similar plot beats (a seemingly dead main character coming back to exact vengeance on their killers) but also because of how Brandon Lee was *actually* killed in a virtually identical way as his father’s character in Game of Death (what would be his father’s final movie due to his own real-life death).
What are you talking about, man? This is CLEARLY Bruce Lee. He’s looking directly at the camera. You can very much tell that this is 100% Bruce Lee and not a photo of Bruce Lee taped to a mirror.
You know, I don’t usually mind the A.V. Club snark, but there’s a nasty cavalier attitude threaded throughout this piece that’s just so inappropriate for the subject matter.“insanely controversial”“internet shat itself”“Oh, and his girlfriend was Meryl Streep.”“copious amounts of mechanical violence also added to the awesomeness.”I’m sure these actors would love that this is how their legacies are described.
Sure, but you’re counting Transformers the Movie (which I love), as Orson Welles’s legacy?
Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Just to be clear, the *performances* were not posthumous. That would be disturbing, even for the film industry.
Came here JUST to say that.
Enter The Dragon was Bruce Lee’s final movie? You are sadly mistaken!
Bruce the Shark from Jaws 1 should be on this list. He died making the best movie ever. RIP Bruce.
Jaws is dead! Long live Jaws!
Hmm. The Crow as best 90s superhero movie? Maybe. Main competition seems to be Batman Returns and Blade. So that’s pretty much a toss-up depending on personal preference.I’ll take more exception to The Dark Knight as best-ever. I’d still put the first Superman in that slot.
Wow… googling “90s Superhero movies” reveals it was a pretty rough time. The only one I’d possibly add to your list is the Mask
Yeah I was kind of ready to jump on the author for that but he’s not wrong. 90s superhero movies were mostly cheesy failures.
Go find the “Age of Heroes” series on this site. There was some pretty dire stuff that decade.(Darkman and then maybe Mystery Men were probably the best movies that weren’t Blade)
X-Men came out in July 2000. Let’s just call it a 90s movie and be done with it.
I don’t mean to be rude, but we are really stretching this headline with the inclusion of Bella and Orson and Plan 9 and The Transformers Movie aren’t we?I am of the Transformers generation-I ran home to watch the original cartoon every day, I had as many of the toys as I could get my grubby little hands on, and I was just old enough to watch in horror as the movie brutally murdered all my mechanical heroes so Hasbro could make a new toy line. But even at that age parts of the movie were awesome, and it has grown better with age.But the Wells performance in the movie was absolutely terrible. It was barely intelligible, partly because the vocal director could not get him to read the lines at a proper tempo, so the whole thing had to be sped up and distorted later. Wells is an icon actor, but Unicron as a “great” performance? C’mon.
This seems to be a list of posthumously released performances not the greatest posthumously released performances.
I agree. Which is why it is weird that the headline it is under is: “The greatest posthumous movie performances of all time”
Look, Cocaine Bear is out and they need the SEO hit.
It’s more like ‘here’s a list of things I thought 0f while in the shower this morning but couldn’t be bothered researching further’.
Especially since this is Welles’ greatest posthumous role:
Please take the star you have earned.
The Transformers movie is at least enjoyable instead of a movie people “like” because they’re told to like it (Citizen Kane).
The comic book purists initial reaction to Heath Ledger is why you never, ever listen to comic book purists about anything.
Never ONCE, since George Reeves shoved his beer belly into a pair of tights, have comic book nerds been right with their complaints about who was cast.
Never. Fucking. Once.
The Sheik is mostly notable these days for standing as proof that Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey didn’t invent the concept of a female writer creating a bizarrely misogynistic story of a guy horribly abusing a woman until she falls in love with him.
Perhaps that’s whom Ayn Rand was ripping off.
“Then, in Giant, he was the central presence in this sweeping epic—no mean feat, considering his co-stars were big-screen heavyweights Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.”Not sure I agree with this. Yes, James Dean makes the most of his scenes in Giant, but this really was a supporting role. He’s not on screen too much, whereas Rock Hudson really dominates the film.
I would argue Dean is not that good in Giant. Strutting grievance in the first act, drunken grievance in godawful age makeup in the last. Overall, Jett Rink is a shadow of Dean’s performances in East of Eden and Rebel.
It doesn’t help that he died before all his intended scenes were filmed, including his big final speech which had to be dubbed by another actor.
Thanks, I forgot how unintentionally funny that drunk scene with him was.
These are not posthumous performances.
In order for them to be posthumous performances they would have to be dead BEFORE filming the movie.
Peter Finch only won Best Actor in 1976 for Network. But sure, let’s not do any research.
I’ve heard that in the scene where Robinson ostensibly whispers to Heston what soylent green is, he actually whispered that he was dying of cancer. It is a very underrated film. Some production values are lacking but it’s portraying a world falling apart so it kind of works.
Damn right!
According to Heston, Robinson’s last scene filmed was the death scene, he writes very movingly about it in his autobiography.
No Peter Finch for “Network”? If there was only a relevant quote that could convey my feelings regarding the omission…
I’ve got one for you.“Great horny toads!”- Yosemite Sam.
I was thinking that one would have thought that a performance that was awarded a posthumous Academy Award would have been on their list somewhere – at least ahead of Bela Lugosi’s. Actually, to be honest, I wasn’t thinking that – I was actually thinking, “I’m reasonably sure that Peter Finch’s performance will *not* be on their list.” And I was right.
As for the quote, I believe that “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” will probably do as well as any.
“I’m mildly peeved but I’m open to continuing to take it!”
I’m surprised that they would write an article about Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner mentioning Katharine Houghton playing Katharine Houghton Hepburn’s daughter without mentioning that she was, in actuality, Hepburn’s niece. Their close relationship in real life informed their relationship in the film.
The greatest posthumous movie performances of all timeFrom the second its title was announced, Cocaine Bear was at the center of a hurricane of hype, and we’re more than curious to see if it lives up.Soooo, you haven’t seen it, but it belongs on the list for SEO, got it.
Bela Legosi in Plan 9 was almost as good as the guy pretending to be Bela Legosi in Plan 9.
You fell victim to Poe’s Law.
RE: Ledger. Why not go ahead and mention The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It was a terrible film, but it was his last, and I don’t think that citing it would have spoilt the article. It was disaster but he gave his life trying to make it.I even have to wonder if working with Gilliam was the best idea. I’d never do it: it would always be a question of who would lose their mind first.
Tom Waits was a lot of fun in it though (as usual)
Yes!
Gilliam had a lot of mis-fires in his career. I think 12 Monkeys may have been his last great movie. I struggled to get through ‘Parnassus’
12 Monkeys is brilliant, imo. There is either a Special Feature along with the DVD or some other commentary that details his incredibly difficult struggles while making that film. It was very very bad from one day to the next. I never expected him to do anything else after that, and I didn’t think the Ledger film had a chance from the start . I hear that Gilliam has done something else. Not interested. I don’t think he has surrounded himself with people who help him, rather than shelter him.Thanks for the reply. I hope you get approved here.
I’m ‘staring’ some of your posts so they’ll be seen. I’ll do more when I get time. Good luck. You’ve got things to say.
Can’t decide if this was a genius bit of writing or just the author filling out a list after hitting wikipedia, BUT…
Kudos to including Pedro Armendariz in From Russia With Love. He is an absolute joy in that movie and one of the best page-to-screen adaptations of a Fleming character. (Other than a Mexican playing a half Turkish/half English guy, but it was 1962)
“We need a foreign actor.”“Like, Mexican?”“That’s what I said, foreign.”
The greatest performances is subjective, Watership Down, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, The Matrix Reloaded, Bridesmaids. All good movies, all great performances, imo.
Not to be too pedantic, but wouldn’t a “posthumous performance” be a corpse on film? The performance didn’t occur after death, it was just released after a death. A performance can be awarded posthumously. But an award-winning posthumous performance would be a sight to see…
I think Richard Harris was possibly already dead for a good half of ‘Chamber of Secrets’.
Obligatory.
How did they miss this one? You should get a writing credit for this one
Richard Jordan was dying of cancer when he played Confederate General Lew Armistead in Gettysburg, who knew he was participating in a doomed charge on the 3rd day of the battle. Quite a moving performance
We lost him playing the bad guy in the Fugitive because of his illness. I like Jeroen Krabbe, but no one did handsome slime better than Richard Jordan.
He was really good in his small role in Hunt for Red October and The Bunker where he played Albert Speer (opposite Hopkins as Hitler).
How can you ignore Peter Finch in Network? What the hell!
Lugosi in Plan 9 doesn’t belong on any “best” list. And how can you put Liotta on the list without apparently having seen his performance in Cocaine Bear?
I find it odd that you mentioned two of the time period’s Vic Morrow visits, but not Vietnam, which actually killed him & the child actors. That’s why there was a helicopter!
I’m a Millenial and I’ve never seen the Transformers movie.
I’ve never seen “Oliver!” either. I know Reed from films like The Devils, The Brood, Tommy, Lion of the Desert & Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
Okay I gotta question this bit about The Crow:At a time when the genre was box office poison,In 1992 Batman Returns was a top grosser (despite controversy over how dark it was- probably could have made more, but hardly a flop) and in 1995 Batman Forever would be the biggest film of the year. The superhero genre was not yet the colossus it would become but it wasn’t exactly something studios actively avoided.
Yeah; this was not accurate. Box office poison (for comic book movies) happened after 1997s ‘Batman & Robin’ lol
The Crow is an interesting one because so much of the look and feel of that movie is defined by filming and editing around Brandon Lee’s death. The first 20 minutes is completely different than what they’d planned, as the intent was to have more “happy family unit” scenes before the murder. Since they only had a limited number of those filmed they opened with the aftermath of the murder, the “happy family” stuff became quick flashbacks, and pretty much the whole “return from the grave” sequence was unused footage and a body double (Chad Stahelski, who went on to co-create John Wick), along with a bleeding-edge-tech-for-the-time digital face-mapping of Lee’s face onto Stahelski’s body for the “Crow-makeup-reveal” shot.
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Unpopular Opinion: I didnt care for Ledger’s Joker. It wasnt the Joker. It was a good Tom Waits. Feel free to roast me.
I was born well after James Dean died, so maybe I wasn’t the appropriate audience for it, but I thought Rebel Without a Cause was rather bad. His performance was over the top (and not in a good way.) I watched it because I had seen it referred to so many times in pop culture and in discussions of movies, and it just seemed ridiculous.
Vic Morrows died in a helicopter crash, huh? Thats… certainly one way to put it.
I suppose it was too much to hope that Julian Beck would get a notice for his Reverend Kane in POLTERGEIST II. Forgettable film, unforgettable performance.
Got to Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 and realized “Greatest” would be doing some serious heavy lifting.