10 Best Movie Characters Not Introduced Until The End

Marlon Brando received top billing as Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's revered outing Apocalypse Now when the film was released in 1979. Despite this, the legendary actor only actually has 15 minutes of screen time throughout the entire film, finally appearing for the first time as the Vietnam war epic reaches its thunderous conclusion.

After Kurtz breaks away from the US army, building a cult of personality around himself in the process, Captain Benjamin Willard is assigned to terminate the rogue colonel. After a harrowing journey upriver encountering all manner of wartime horrors, the Captain eventually finds himself face to face with the man himself, in a temple so dark that one can barely make out Brando's features for large chunks of the scene.

Cinema icon Brando makes the most of his brief time on-screen, delivering an epic soliloquy on the intricacies of warfare; while he acknowledges Martin Sheen's Willard's right to kill him, he scolds the Captain as nothing more than an "errand boy" in an unforgettably poignant monologue. Despite being brutally dispatched by a machete wielding Willard in Apocalypse Now's relentlessly intense psychedelic finale, Brando even manages to cram one of the most iconic lines in cinematic history into his fleeting performance as the enigmatic Kurtz.

"...The horror...the horror..."