100 Most Memorable Film Characters Of All Time: The Top Ten
© Jason O'Brien
If you'll recall from my first article when I laid out my criteria for making these selections, here's what I said went into the selections for memorable film characters. My criteria for selecting what makes a memorable film character for this list is typically a character who is remembered long after the film is over, or is a character so unique that they exist beyond the machinations of the story. I also selected characters who usually had some incredible depth to them, were written and performed with such skill ... characters who became perfect embodiments of the type of people they were portraying. Or they could have been characters who were simply larger than life, clear icons of cinema history. Memorable characters don't always have to be likeable ... sometimes the most evil of people can make for memorable film characters. So there will be characters of all types in my top 100 ... heroes, villains, anti-heroes, and just plain regular people.
And that has been true of my entire list, and the top ten will be no different. But as I mentioned in my Part 5 article last time, these characters truly have depth to them, and often have layers which end up defying regular classification. There are some characters in my top ten which some might view as heroic, while others may view them as sad, lonely villains. Could a top ten listing of one's most memorable film characters perhaps reveal things about the person making the list? Who knows ... I'm not sure what one might make of the grouping of these ten individuals. Let's see ... one of the wealthiest yet loneliest men in the country, a suburban father and husband suffering through a midlife crisis, a ruthless yet charming serial killer, a loner who has to resort to violence to try to make the world better, a simple man who stands tall for the rights of others, a man who sacrifices everything in the wake of enormous consequences to save innocent lives, a complex woman filled with so much sadness and rage, and even a computer with homicidal tendencies. It's time to reveal my choices for the ten most memorable film characters of all time, including the one who I feel is the most memorable character in all of film history.
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