9. Marlon Brando - Apocalypse Now
Despite being ludicrously overweight and a complete nuisance on a set that had long ago descended into madness, Marlon Brando gives one of his most troublesome and multi-layered performances as Col. Kurtz. When we first meet Kurtz, in the final quarter of Apocalypse Now, he has long accepted the savagery of war and became part of the horror, without apology. Brando's weight-problems forced Francis Ford Coppola to shoot Brando only from the waist up and in the dark. This resulted in Kurtz being portrayed as an omniscient God who rambled about philosophy in grandiose monologues. Kurtz exists only in the shadows which makes the psychotic colonel more harrowing as it becomes clear that Kurtz long ago left sanity behind. Brando is brilliant in creating depth to a character that could become boring or self-parody in the wrong hands and his impact on the film is monumental. With his death at the climax of the film, Kurtz is finally free and liberated from the darkness he created and his famous final words of "The horror, the horror" are as disturbing as anything in the most extreme of horror films. Brando, on paper is nothing like Kurtz and seemed a strange fit for the role but he has the physicality and essence that a force of nature like Kurtz needs. Despite the endless production problems, Coppola trusted Brando to the end to pull the film and its climax off and he was rewarded with one of the most psychologically disturbing performances of all time.