The Top Five Villainous Portrayals

5 - Malcolm McDowell - A Clockwork Orange

4 - Daniel Day-Lewis - There Will Be Blood

3 - Anthony Perkins - Psycho

2 - Ralph Fiennes - Schindler's List

1 - Anthony Hopkins - The Silence of the Lambs

There was apparently a little confusion about our list, because we got way too many nominations for Darth Vader. He's a great villain, but anytime you have to include the name Dave Prowse...well, you might want to reassess your pick.

It might be hard to separate the character from the performance, I realize, but there are maybe ten, fifteen characterizations that go so far beyond what's written on the page that they become an incarnation rather than a performance. In fact, if you look at Anthony Hopkins you don't see him but Lecter, who's a much better character in Hopkins' hands than in the book, and Anthony Perkins never fully lived down playing Norman Bates. Those are the kinds of performances we're looking for, and not so much Jaws or Hal 9000.

We got a ton of suggestions, and this is one of those lists that deserves to be longer. Among the heartbreaking omissions: Jack Nicholson (The Shining/Batman), Daniel Day-Lewis (Gangs of New York), Kathy Bates (Misery), Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction), F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men), Margaret Hamilton (The Wizard of Oz), Joe Pesci (GoodFellas), Al Pacino (The Godfather/Scarface), Kevin Spacey (Se7en, The Usual Suspects), and Linda Blair (The Exorcist). Sadly, nobody voted for Charlize Theron from Monster.

Others left out that didn't break my heart included Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Robert Englund (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Robert Mitchum (Night of the Hunter), Robert De Niro (Cape Fear), John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire/Dangerous Liaisons/Con-Air), Michael Wincott (The Crow), Ralph Fiennes (Harry Potter), Dennis Hopper (Blue Velvet), and Gene Hackman (Superman).

There were others, but those are the highlights.

Now...about this list. How do I defend Alex DeLarge to anyone who hasn't seen A Clockwork Orange? How do I even explain him? One of the most unusual performances and one of the most difficult to watch, it did for Malcolm McDowell what Bates did for Perkins. He's such a talented actor but after this, it was kind of hard for him to not play maniacs and get away with it. That's happened to a lot of actors, although McDowell has been able to work consistently ever since. You still don't buy him as a good guy. Ever.

The best example of an actor being forever ruined by one role is Steve Railsback, who had done a few things here and there in the 70s and was cast to play Charles Manson in the TV movie Helter Skelter. He was extraordinary. Too extraordinary, in fact. Because you've never heard of him despite the remarkable portrayal.

I don't think we know the full effect of Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview just yet. I'm confident in this much, though: It's the best performance by the best male actor of his generation, and it's one of the best performances by anybody in anything since Raging Bull. He overpowers There Will Be Blood and everyone in it. And look at it this way, he's worse than Butcher Bill, another Day-Lewis performance that got votes, and it's a better performance, as well.

A lot of people would have Anthony Perkins higher on this list, and I might, too, if I didn't believe there's very little villainy in his performance. There has never been a more apologetic murderer in cinema than Norman Bates, and very few killers more profoundly confused and cursed. Still, he's an awful human being and the role forever defined and confined Perkins. In fact, when I was writing down the list, I wrote down Norman Bates instead of Anthony Perkins. There you go.

Also worth noting is how few excellent performances emerge from Alfred Hitchcock movies. There are two in Rebecca, a few scattered around in the 40s and early 50s, James Stewart in Vertigo, and Anthony Perkins. That's really about it. I love James Mason in North by Northwest, though. Another good villain, incidentally.

My shocker here is Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List. The reason I love the performance is that even without Amon Geothe, we hate the Nazis. Anybody who's seen this movie hates the Nazis. Kind of impossible not to. But to so resonantly embody both the bogie man qualities the Nazis carried throughout the world after WWII as well as their rabid, despicable inhumanity during the Holocaust has never been done before or since.

We've had Nazis on screen, yes, but none of them compare to this complete madman, a character who on the surface is unnecessary in a movie like Schindler's List because of how much evil surrounds the story, but becomes absolutely vital the minute he shows up onscreen. It's a towering achievement. Amon Geothe is, in his own maddening, inexplicable, sickening way, the human holocaust.

And what can be said about the grinning, mugging, flesh-eating monster at number one? A loose collection of good lines sprinkled over 17 minutes of screen time without Anthony Hopkins. And his career, with very few bumps either way, was a slow climb to that summit and a slow descent from it. The talent was always there in Hopkins, but in 1991, he was mostly thought of as a washed-up drunk, largely because he was a washed-up drunk a few years earlier.

But Lecter is instantly memorable, chilling, and smarter than you. And he knows it.

What's curious about Lecter, of course, is that he's not really a villain in Silence. He's more an anti-hero. Unless you're poor old Jim Pembry...