10 Actors Who Gave Their Best & Worst Performance In The Same Year

3. Alec Baldwin - 2003

Alec Baldwin The Cooler The Cat in the Hat
Lionsgate/Universal Pictures

When thinking of the great Alec Baldwin movie performances, three films that immediately spring to mind are Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cooler, and The Departed.

For sure, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Departed find a Baldwin in majestic, magnetic form, but those respective roles are relatively small ones. So, if truly breaking down Alec's greatest cinematic outing - and no, it's not Beetlejuice - one has to go with his turn as Shelly Kaplow in 2003's The Cooler.

In that Wayne Kramer-helmed offering, Baldwin's Shelly is a Las Vegas casino manager obsessed with keeping his 'cooler' - the venue's resident bad luck charm - miserable in order to stop said casino from having too many winners. For his work here, the 30 Rock star picked up his only Academy Award nomination to date.

Hot the heels of this impressive outing, that November would see Baldwin as Larry Quinn, the main villain of Mike Myers' dreadful The Cat in the Hat feature. So bad was this Dr. Seuss adaptation, it failed to make its budget back at the box office, it currently has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the widow of Theodor Seuss Geisel refused to allow a planned sequel to be made.

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