5 - Spencer Tracy - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

4 - Bruce Lee - Enter the Dragon

3 - Massimo Troisi - Il Postino

2 - James Dean - Giant

1 - Heath Ledger - The Dark Knight

                      Heath Ledger: Oscar-bound?

We're fortunate this week that Bernie Mac left us with a very funny final performance in Soul Men. He's never been better, so watching his work in that comedy is certainly bittersweet, but it's better to go out on top than, say, Bela Lugosi in Plan 9 from Outer Space or Emmitt Smith with the Arizona Cardinals.

Thanks for all the suggestions, which included Stanley Kubrick for directing Eyes Wide Shut, Brandon Lee in The Crow, John Candy (Wagon's East), Natalie Wood for Dreamscape, Adrienne Shelly (who wrote, directed and co-starred in Waitress), Oliver Reed in Gladiator, Clark Gable in The Misfits, and John Ritter's very funny supporting performance as the mall manager in Bad Santa, among others.

Incidentally, while Peter Finch did win the Academy Award posthumously for his role in Network, he passed away between the time the film was released and his Oscar win. And last week, we said, "Last performances for which the actor, actress, or director wasn't around to see it on screen," and Finch doesn't fit that bill, I'm afraid.

So why did we settle on these Top Five and not some of those? We don't think of Gable for his final performance like we do in the cases of Bruce Lee or James Dean. Natalie Wood and John Candy were in bad movies, so that doesn't help, and Kubrick would probably have preferred a different final line on his résumé, as well. Three of these performances showcase unreal talent muted too soon, and their work has and will continue to inspire many young actors. Another is legendary for winning a posthumous Oscar, and the fifth entry may be the most miraculous one of all.

Spencer Tracy was one of the first, honest-to-goodness character actors we ever had in the movies. Tracy could not rely on his looks - he was no Cary Grant - but for decades he embodied the kind of everyman role we associate with James Stewart and Henry Fonda, and nine Oscar nominations (then a record for an actor) certainly tell all the story.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is not Tracy's finest moment among many great ones, although he did earn a nomination for the role. He passed away weeks after the film's completion in 1967. Today, the movie means more than the performance, but to the end, Tracy stayed true to his contract with the audience, and summoned the will for one last shining moment that seems more a message of love to his lifelong unmarried partner Katharine Hepburn than anything in a movie script.

How long would Bruce Lee have made martial arts films? Would Enter the Dragon have become a worldwide phenomenon had he lived to see it? The film came out a month after Lee mysteriously died. The $850,000 movie grossed over $200 million worldwide, and opened up the genre to an international audience. Enter the Dragon was the first martial arts film to be produced by an American studio, Warner Bros., and the first to star an Asian or Asian-American lead actor. That movie's impact, and the reverberations of Lee's unequaled physical abilities, are still being felt today.

Here's all you need to know about Massimo Troisi's performance in the 1996 Foreign Language nominee, Il Postino: The guy knew he was going to die any day. He required surgery to fix a potentially fatal heart condition, but wanted so badly to complete the film he co-wrote, that he literally worked himself to death. Troisi died 12 hours after principal photography wrapped.

And you can't see it in Troisi's eyes or on his face when you watch Il Postino, which is a testament to how good an actor he truly was. He lost the Oscar that year to Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, but watch them side-by-side and you tell me who should have won the honor.

The top two are indisputable, but perhaps you'd change the order. James Dean is James Dean. He gave us three movies, was nominated for consecutive Oscars (both posthumous), radically altered our perception of movie acting, and was gone. Dean's story is one of the more tragic among Hollywood's boulevard of broken dreams, because if it hadn't been a Porsche Spyder, it probably would've been something else sooner than later, and Dean conveyed that dangerous but vulnerable nature a lot.

He is a true icon, not just another pretty face who died too soon.

Heath Ledger's death was shocking to all of us. Having finally proved his mettle as an actor in Brokeback Mountain - a performance that has a little James Dean in it, by the way - Ledger was poised to enjoy great mainstream success as The Joker in The Dark Knight. He was an unknown quality back in January. Some of us thought it was good casting, some of us did not, but none of us ever thought he'd replace Jack Nicholson as that villain in our memories. Just couldn't happen.

And then The Dark Knight was released, and Ledger gave the best superhero movie performance - hero or villain - we've ever seen, playing one of the great bad guys in literature. And he made it his own: Creepy, funny, unhinged, frightening, and unforgettable. If you think that the movie has made over a billion dollars around the world for any reason other than this performance, you're crazy. And truly, when you step away from the Batman movie for a bit, he really is the only thing in it that makes it a great film. There are other things about it that are good, but you miss him when he's not on screen, and so does The Dark Knight.

Ledger will almost certainly nab an Oscar nomination, and you could put him in either category, although a Supporting shot seems most likely. And I'd be surprised if he lost. The performance is perfect and the box office will help get him there. Ledger has another role still to come, the one he did not complete in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. I kind of don't even want to see that because The Joker is so revelatory.

We'll lighten the mood next week with the very simple Top Five Bond Girl Names. Have fun with that. Seriously, they named a broad Christmas Jones just so they could end a bad movie with the line, "I thought Christmas only came once a year." And there are much, much better/worse names.

Here's your incentive: Hellboy II: The Golden Army on DVD. Get some of that, why don't you?

So give it some thought, and then shoot us an e-mail with your votes for the Top Five Bond Girl Names, and you could win Hellboy II: The Golden Army on DVD, Please include your mailing address, and you'll have until Thursday night November 13th at 10pm Pacific to get us your lists.