What metrics are we talking about? Which performance is the worst? Which actor has the least range? Or which actor went on to have the least dignified career?
Or all three? Let’s say all three.
Nicolas Cage’s very real financial problems have severely interfered with his career, tragically overshadowing the brilliant actor from Leaving Las Vegas, Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, and Adaptation. Cage may have the worst career but my goodness, he can be exceptional.
The easy choice is Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful.
Roberto Benigni didn’t even win for his performance. He won because everyone wanted to see what speech he would give. Miramax launched an aggressive campaign for Roberto Benigni and turned this Italian comic auteur whom nobody stateside had ever heard of into a household name and the talk show guest du jour. As soon as Miramax realized that Shakespeare in Love was their Best Picture horse, they pivoted to pushing Life is Beautiful as a vehicle for Benigni to win Best Actor and he beat an incredible field of performances including Tom Hanks for Saving Private Ryan, Ian McKellan for Gods and Monsters (my favorite), Nick Nolte for Affliction, and Edward Norton for American History X for essentially the same performance he gave in every Italian film you haven’t seen.
But here’s the thing: it’s not like Roberto Benigni is bad in Life is Beautiful. He’s actually very good. People complain all the time about comic performances never winning Oscars but when they do, they’re always seen as injustices.
If we’re talking Worst Actor to win a few candidates that come to mind.
- Adrien Brody’s career following The Pianist has been an enormous disappointment, which is a real shame considering how many excellent supporting performances he gave earlier in his career (Summer of Sam, King of the Hill).
- Jamie Foxx who has yet to top his outstanding one-two-three-four punch of Ray, Collateral, Breakin’ all the Rules, and Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story in 2004.
- John Wayne is regularly listed among the worst for True Grit and it may not be his most deserving performance but it just like with comedy, we always complain when our greatest Movie Stars are routinely ignored but then when we honor them, folks complain.
But there’s something all of these have in common: a justified or unjustified perceived general lack of seriousness. And if that’s what we’re talking about, there’s only one name that fits.
Charlton Heston for Ben-Hur.
There really is no world where Charlton Heston should be going anywhere near an Academy Award. Heston ricochets between over-the-top and “Talking Wall,” which actually benefits William Wyler’s film because it renders everyone else in the film more interesting. But it’s a very silly performance by an actor who excels at playing saintly beefcakes, and it’s rendered even sillier because Russell Crowe did a better job giving the same performance in Gladiator.
Heston didn’t even realize that the character he was playing was gay! Gore Vidal was brought on to do a script rewrite (which, by the way, should be the first sign) and needed to create a meaningful and realistic explanation for Messala’s betrayal of his adoptive brother and wrote him as a jilted lover:
VIDAL TO THE LA TIMES (Why has Hollywood put Ben-Hur back in the closet?):
Over the years, I have told the story of how, faced with a hopeless script for Ben-Hur, I persuaded the producer, Sam Zimbalist (this was an MGM film and the writer worked not with the director but the producer; later the director, in this case William Wyler, weighed in) that the only way one could justify several hours of hatred between two lads – and all those horses – was to establish, without saying so in words, an affair between them as boys; then, when reunited at picture’s start, the Roman, played by Stephen Boyd, wants to pick up where they left off and the Jew, Heston, spurns him. This is the scene that was shot and this is the scene that viewers of The Celluloid Closet watched, with my commentary. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote that “seeing an appropriate clip makes a strong case for the truth of Vidal’s assertion that Boyd was in on the scheme while Heston was not.”
Stephen Boyd (who played Messala) was told, but Heston was not. Charlton Heston had no idea the character he was playing was gay for over thirty years. And then when he found out, he got pissed. Remarkable.
And in a year with James Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot, Heston had no business getting anywhere near that stage. But Ben-Hur set a record, winning eleven Academy Awards (missing only for — as always is the case — screenwriting) so I guess they just wrote his name down along with everything else that year. Except of course for the one award that the film missed out on: Best Screenplay. Just like another film that tied that record almost forty years later (Titanic) it must have written itself.
Anyway, let’s put this one to rest. Nicolas Cage isn’t even close. The answer is Charlton Heston.
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