10 Famous Actors Who Only Ever Managed One Legitimately Great Performance

It can be galling to recognize that some of the most famous thesps in the world got to be in their position without actually being able to act much at all. Look at Ryan Phillippe, Megan Fox, or Ashton Kutcher. All three are recent examples of famous 'actors' who never really proved they could act a damn. Not that any of them should be written off as unqualified failures just yet, though. Even the worst actors prove from time to time that they can still have one great performance in them, being able to out of nowhere give it as good as the very best. This isn't a list of usually bad actors who've occasionally been great. No. This list is instead for those always bad actors who nevertheless gave a legitimately great performance on just a single occasion in their career. Unfortunately, it doesn't happen too often, but here are ten prime examples of this particular phenomenon occurring. 10) Vin Diesel In Find Me Guilty Vin Diesel has been doing his humorless hard-man schtick for years. No matter if the movie's big (the Fast and Furious films) or relatively small (Riddick), Diesel just seems to get lost as a prop who's present simply to facilitate the explosive action. Not so in Find Me Guilty, though, a blackly comic courtroom drama and the great Sidney Lumet's penultimate movie. Find Me Guilty got buried at the box office upon release in 2006, but not for lack of Diesel trying. Roger Ebert called Diesel's performance - as a lunk-headed Mafioso jailbird representing himself in trial - "remarkable." Here, the actor is everything he's not in any of his other movies: vulnerable, convincingly capable of emotion and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. 9) Sharon Stone In Casino Martin Scorsese has worked wonders with a few normally disappointing actors - Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver and Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy, for example. Arguably, though, none have benefited from the magic touch of Scorsese more than Sharon Stone, the Total Recall actress probably - up until she got the Marty treatment - most famous for pretending to bare her knackers in Basic Instinct. In Casino, Scorsese's Goodfellas-esque Vegas mob epic, Stone is revelatory. She's the MVP in a film that also stars Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and James Woods, giving a whirlwind of a performance as a drug-addled, manipulative ex-hooker who slowly crumbles into emotional wreckage. You can't help but wish that Scorsese and Stone had paired up again. 8) Hayden Christensen In Shattered Glass Hayden Christensen was woefully miscast as a young Anakin Skywalker quite simply because the actor was incapable of being all the things the character was supposed to be: strong, conflicted, full of passion. Instead, Christensen was weak, emotionally inscrutable and wholly unenthusiastic. He was an uninteresting blank where young Skywalker was supposed to be a charismatic hothead. Presumably writer-director Billy Ray took note of Christensen's weaknesses when he was casting his biopic Shattered Glass, and saw an opportunity to turn a much-maligned actor's failings into strengths. As Stephen Glass, the journalist who fabricated his own most famous news stories, Christensen is truly pitiful, a detestable figure sympathetic only because of his inherent patheticness. It's everything Anakin was, only this time, it's intentional. Christensen is at last a perfect fit: compelling even as he's squirm-inducingly spiralling into a pit of lies of his making. 7) Jennifer Lopez In Out of Sight Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight is what so many rom-com actresses wish they could be: naturalistic, confident and perfectly able in facing off against the men that usually end up dominating these things. Shame then that Lopez hasn't shown any of that promise in any of her other movies, like Maid in Manhattan and Monster-In-Law. Perhaps it's because Lopez had the directorial strength of Steven Soderbergh behind her on Out of Sight to prompt her into giving that one great performance. She matches co-star George Clooney for cool in Out of Sight, playing a US Marshal that ultimately proves more capable than Clooney's wily bank robber. Retreating into cliched romantic comedy since has done nothing to take advantage of the promise that Lopez showed in her first real movie hit. 6) Orlando Bloom In The Good Doctor The Good Doctor is one of those films where the only thing to recommend it is the compelling lead performance. What's surprising is that that lead performance in this case comes from the usually stiff Orlando Bloom, playing charming doctor Martin Blake, who intentionally keeps a female patient sick and in his care after he becomes obsessed with her. In this chilly thriller, director Lance Daly lets Bloom play his otherwise problematic lack of inner life beautifully. Where elsewhere directors have largely just traded on Bloom's outer beauty, Daly has the intelligence to see there's a cold, incomplete air to Bloom's acting personality that makes perfect sense for Martin Blake. In the end, he makes for a great movie sociopath, selfishly trying to dig himself out of a hole even at grave cost to others. 5) Jason Statham In Hummingbird It was David Fincher who recommended that Hummingbird writer-director Steven Knight cast Jason Statham in his existential London-set thriller, apparently assuring Knight that there was more to Statham than other directors had up to that point assumed. And even if the film on the whole doesn't totally work, Statham does indeed make good on Fincher's promise and reveal heretofore un-witnessed depths. As a homeless, PTSD-stricken ex-soldier taking on the identity of a wealthy out-of-town artist, Statham is more affecting than he's ever been. There's a heartbreaking compassion to him here that none of his action movies have ever asked him to display. Impressive for a different reason in Paul Feig's hilarious Spy, Statham's Hummingbird turn is his sole great dramatic performance, giving us proof that there's still a career for him after he stops being able to take the physical roles. 4) Jean-Claude Van Damme In JCVD Statham isn't the only action star who's proved he can also do this acting when he's called upon to tackle it; in Mabrouk El Mechri's meta, faintly autobiographical JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme commands the screen in a way he never did as a glorified fight-bot in countless 80s and 90s actioners. The plot is simple, if a tad bizarre - Van Damme plays himself as a weary, jaded action star in financial difficulty, who gets caught up in a Brussels bank robbery - but it all just feels like an excuse to prove that JCVD has been otherwise wasted. A centrepiece monologue, given straight to the camera by Van Damme, encapsulates his appeal in this movie: he's desperately, heart-wrenchingly honest and real, cathartically explaining where it all went wrong in a turbulent career. 3) Adam Sandler In Punch-Drunk Love If it weren't for Paul Thomas Anderson, we wouldn't have a single film to point to whenever someone accuses Adam Sandler of having done nothing of worth for cinema. Sandler's career - and his performances across them - really has been that bad. Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love, in which the actor plays a lovelorn salesman with emotional issues, is however, a great shining jewel in Sandler's crappy crown. Sandler as ever brings the apoplectic rage as Barry Egan, but he also bears layers he hasn't been brave enough to display in his glut of comedies. Egan is a man suffering from crippling loneliness and dealing with issues of deep self-loathing - and shockingly, Sandler nails the emotional complexity. It's unlikely that he will as long as he keeps making megabucks with his cliched comedies, but the evidence suggests Sandler should do more offbeat, character-driven rom-coms like this. 2) Burt Reynolds In Boogie Nights Paul Thomas Anderson has form in helping middling actors briefly figure out how to act - Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love, Tom Cruise in Magnolia, Eric Roberts in Inherent Vice. In Boogie Nights, Anderson encouraged the frustratingly inconsistent Mark Wahlberg to deliver his defining cinematic turn, while in the same film he got Burt Reynolds to give his one and only great performance, to Oscar-nominated effect. An eight-time Razzie-nominated actor, Reynolds has never justified his star status as well as he does in Boogie Nights, in which he plays the porn baron Jack Horner like a paternal mix of mentor and exploitative businessman. God knows how Anderson managed it, but he made the usually wooden Reynolds into a fully-fledged three-dimensional figure, hiding rage and insecurity behind a mask of dim-witted charm. The Oscar should have been his. 1) Jessica Alba In The Killer Inside Me Fantastic Four; Into the Blue; The Love Guru. None of these are exactly films that ask Jessica Alba to show off her abilities as an actress. Even her better movies don't require her to do much other than show up as eye candy, though - in Sin City and Stretch, Alba plays a stripper and a receptionist, respectively (hardly big character roles) - with the exception being Michael Winterbottom's disturbing 50s noir, The Killer Inside Me. It's the one film in which Alba displays any depth. Playing a prostitute used as a pawn in the nefarious plan of Casey Affleck's sociopathic cop, Alba is indelibly, traumatically human. In the film's most notorious (and violent) scene in particular, Alba is haunting, a vulnerable girl betrayed and trapped by someone who - her eyes tell you - she clearly once loved and trusted.