“Breaks my heart on eight levels”: Martin Short names the single greatest acting performance of all time
Unlike most of his comedic contemporaries, Martin Short has never felt the overwhelming need to try to prove himself as a dramatic actor, not that he needs to when he’s well-entrenched as a beloved veteran.
For the last 50 years, he’s almost exclusively called comedy his home, although there are the odd exceptions. He was excellent as a series regular in the third season of the small-screen legal thriller Damages, deservedly earning a Primetime Emmy nomination for ‘Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series’.
That was more than enough to showcase that he can play it straight and succeed if he wanted to, but since the vast majority of his filmography is geared toward making people laugh, it’s clear that he didn’t really want to. There’s nothing wrong with that, and his body of work speaks for itself.
From his beginnings as an Emmy-winning writer and performer on SCTV in the early 1980s to his five-time Golden Globe-nominated misadventures in Only Murders in the Building four decades later, with Saturday Night Live, Three Amigos, Innerspace, and many more between, Short is a Canadian national treasure.
However, ask him to name the single greatest acting performance in cinema history, and he wouldn’t even consider allocating that honour to a comedian. Instead, when asked that very question, he pointed to not only a seminal turn from a Hollywood icon, but one of the most important and influential turns ever committed to celluloid.
“I would say Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront,” he declared, and while it’s not a particularly revelatory answer when it’s been celebrated as one of the all-time finest performances from any actor for over 70 years, it’s still a worthy response. “I just love Brando, and that performance just breaks my heart on eight levels.”
A Streetcar Named Desire may have been the one that put him on the map and announced the arrival of a generational talent, but On the Waterfront might just be Brando’s finest hour in front of the camera. His first Academy Award-winning performance was unlike anything Hollywood had seen before, and from that point on, the age of the method actor was in full swing.
His Terry Malloy is a force of nature, a down-and-out former boxer on a soul-searching quest for redemption; it was a watershed moment in more ways than one. You can draw a clear line between pre and post-On the Waterfront in terms of its impact on both American cinema and the craft of acting, and Short is far from the only person who thinks it’s the best performance there’s ever been.
At this point, it’s become somewhere between a foregone conclusion and cliché for other actors to bring up Brando when discussing the pinnacle of onscreen excellence, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
