The most important actor in the history of cinema, according to science
How on earth do you choose just one actor as the most important of all time? There are so many people, without whom Hollywood would look very different today, and so, as we always do in situations like this, we must turn to our old friend science.
In February 2020, Rhyd Lewis, a student at Cardiff University School of Mathematics, decided to answer this question in a very unique way in his published paper titled ‘Who is the Centre of the Movie Universe? Using Python and NetworkX to Analyse the Social Network of Movie Stars’.
His plan was to find out which actor had accrued the most different co-stars across their career, and he did this by creating a ‘social network’ of every actor listed on IMDB and then seeing how many other actors they connected to. It’s a shame he didn’t start this project a year later, for he would have had a lot more spare time come March 2020.
Lewis considered three primary factors when reading the data from his monumental study (warning: if you have a fear of statistics, then look away now). First, he considered Degree Centrality, which is simply the number of different connections an actor has; second, he considered Betweenness Centrality, which highlights the actors who serve as links between the highest number of other actors; and third, he considered Closeness Centrality, which measures the average number of connections between one actor and any other.
The Degree Centrality category is dominated by Indian actors, in which Nassar comes out on top, having appeared alongside 2,937 different co-stars across his remarkable career, almost 400 more than his nearest challenger, the late, great Sukumari, at 2,549. When it comes to the other two categories, however, they are dominated by a man who is famous across the globe.
According to Lewis’ findings, Christopher Lee is the true centre of the acting world, as he has the best score in both of the remaining areas. On average, it takes just 2.88 ‘hops’ to get from Lee to any other actor on the list. Within four hops, 86% of actors can be linked to the British icon, while a staggering 99% of every actor on the world’s largest movie database can be reached in five hops or less.
Perhaps the biggest reason why the former Nazi hunter scores so well on this test is his longevity, as despite initially being told by a producer he was “too tall” to be an actor, Lee had a career that lasted from 1948 right up until his death in 2015.
This included eight films in his debut year, although three of them were uncredited, and it also helped that he tended to star in movies with huge casts, such as The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Star Wars prequels.
This is far from the only record that Lee accrued during his outstanding time on this Earth. He is a truly inspirational figure, one of the most unique men to have ever lived, and, as we can now categorically prove, the very centre of the modern cinematic universe.
