5. Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988)
Directed by the oftentimes-brilliant David Cronenberg, Dead Ringers features the oftentimes-brilliant actor Jeremy Irons playing a pair of diabolical twin gynecologists who share women in oftentimes-brilliant (though always very creepy) charades of "mistaken" identity. Long before advances in CGI made dual performances a cake walk in visual terms, Cronenberg and Irons create a flawless depiction of fictional twins using good-old-fashioned ingenuity with inspired split-screen tricks.
4. Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap (1961)
Okay, I'll admit that long before she choked the life out of her acting career by hugging it close on her long descent from stardom to ridiculousness, Lindsay Lohan certainly had promise. But even her charming depiction of reunited twins in the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap was nowhere near as wonderful as Hayley Mills' in the original. The film, made long before one-actor-two-character filming techniques were perfected, used very few shots of Susan and Sharon (Mills' twins) on screen together. Instead, there was liberal use of body doubles. But that does nothing to take away from Mills' wonderful performances. Sometimes remakes are better than originals. Sometimes, as in this case, they are definitely not