The greatest leading actor of all time, according to science
Time to pick up our clipboards, put on a white coat, and do our best impression of Beaker from The Muppets, as we do our utmost to find out who the greatest leading actor of all time is. Could it be Jack Nicholson? Maybe. Robert Redford? Possibly. Timothée Chalamet? Categorically no.
Alright, so a disclaimer, we are not actually putting in the hard yards in order to answer this question, it’s lunchtime (if it’s lunchtime when you’re reading this) and besides, the much cleverer people at Stat Significant have already grafted to find out the answer according to actual irrefutable science, which is something to do with numbers and graphs, we think.
Among the sources of data they plugged into their whirring, chugging machine was Letterboxd, the movie site that’s turned into some kind of millennial Tinder, and cross-referenced it with the number of ‘lead’ roles an actor has had – essentially, where they were either first or second on the film’s casting sheet. And one interesting thing that leapt out straight away is that movie stardom is not something that comes to many: just 13% of all actors will ever get to lead a film, and of those, more than 75% will never get the chance to do it more than once.
But in order to find the true stars, they then filtered the huge amount of working actors by those who are Screen Actors Guild members and have starred in a movie, which drops the numbers to less than 0.2%. But of those incredibly few actors, which are putting in the best performances in the best films? Well, they cross-sectioned that against movies that Letterboxd rates as 3.5 or higher out of five stars and looked at the data across an actor’s entire career to date, giving a percentage score of ‘hits’.
That showed that at the top of cinema’s history of actors with the most acclaimed number of films was the late Gena Rowlands, on 66.7%, the star of films like the astonishing 1974 classic Woman Under the Influence, plus 1980’s Gloria, both of which she was Oscar-nominated for. In second place was the iconic Audrey Hepburn on 64.7%, thanks to a string of acclaimed films including Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Roman Holiday and Sabrina, Hepburn winning an Oscar and two Golden Globes over her long career.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the modern-day actor with the highest percentage was third-placed Daniel Day-Lewis on 63.7%, the three-time Academy Award-winning star having put in jaw-dropping performances in films like Gangs of New York, My Left Foot, There Will Be Blood, Lincoln and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Fourth on the list came another true modern great, Leonardo DiCaprio, just behind on 63.6%.
But critical acclaim isn’t everything – sometimes being a movie star is simply about putting bums on seats and popcorn in hands. In the past 40 years or so, nobody has done that more than Top Gun legend Tom Cruise, and it is he that the site found on top of the pile when the US National Research Group asked moviegoers back in 2023, “Who do you most want to watch in theatres?”
He led the way ahead of, possibly surprisingly, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in second place, while the next three spots were taken by names you might imagine would be ahead of the former wrestler, namely Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Denzel Washington. The leading female star that cinemagoers want to watch on the big screen, meanwhile, is still Julia Roberts, despite her not really having had a hit since 2010’s Eat Pray Love and Valentine’s Day. The only other woman in the list of top 15 stars was Sandra Bullock.
