Kevin Kline: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

1. Otto - A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Putting in his only Oscar-winning performance to date, Kline has never been so sidesplittingly hilarious as in A Fish Called Wanda. It would seem the obvious choice for the #1 entry on the Most Awesome list, but the fact is that despite his demonstration over a thirty-year career of being able to handle almost any kind of role, Otto was the role he was born to play and likely the role he'll be remembered for. To paraphrase one of Roger Ebert's initial reviews on the movie, there's something that's quite simply refreshing about knowing in the first scenes of a movie that the entire thing is going to be packed with laughs. These laughs can first be attributed to the Monty Python-style writing and the great acting from John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Michael Palin - but if you only remember one thing about A Fish Called Wanda, it's almost certainly the dim-witted intellectual Otto. There are too many hilarious lines to quote here. Again, the physical acting that Kline brings to the performance is as impressive as ever - the sex scene being the funniest - and while his Italian-American Joey Boca in I Love You to Death is charming enough, the use of the Italian language here is used to greater comic effect. Whenever I hear a fake Italian accent I think of Kline singing "Volare" or him standing, shirtless, with a pair of panties draped on his head, majestically intoning: "Benito Mussolini".