Introduction

            Who are the greatest actors and actresses of all-time?  Is Denzel Washington a greater actor than Paul Newman?  How does Meryl Streep compare to Katharine Hepburn?  Personal preferences would provide lots of different answers.  To see who has the best acting skills, we would need to see every thespian play the same role, in the same scene, on the same set, with the same cast and director.

It would be awesome to see the greatest actors and actresses doing their take on the same movie scene.  Who would not want to see acting legends such as John Wayne, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, or Doris Day playing Meg Ryan’s famous restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally (1989)? Unfortunately, that cannot happen.  However, there is a way to compare movie stars.  We can use statistics.

No matter when a movie was made, the goals have always been the same.  Movies are made to make money for the producers while entertaining or educating audiences.  Impressing critics and winning awards is a welcome honor.  There are three main groups of movie statistics: Box office grosses, reviews, and award recognition.  When looking at all three groups together, you can see how well or poorly a movie performed.  Like a quarterback in football, the success or failure of a movie falls on the stars of the movie.

Using those three groups of statistics, we compared the careers of the greatest actors and actresses.  This Top 50 Movie Stars list is the end result of that comparison.   Is it a perfect list?  Of course not.  Will you agree with some of the rankings?  We hope so.  Are some notable people not on our list?  Definitely.  Will you think some of the rankings are horrible and question our thought process?  I am sure you will…..but……that is what lists are born to do…..make people argue.

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How We Got Here

 

As a child, I was very interested in baseball and movies.  As I got older, I was fascinated with baseball statistics and movie box office grosses.  This fascination led me to lots of very knowledgeable people.

On the baseball side, I read anything Bill James wrote.  James is the godfather of baseball stats.  He created mathematical formulas that changed how people viewed, played, and managed baseball.  On the movie side, I became a weekly Variety reader, a weekly viewer of Sneak Previews with Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, a fan of Joel Hirschhorn’s Book Rating The Movie Stars , and a constant moviegoer.

Sometime in 2010, for the millionth time, I was looking at my Rating The Movie Stars book, when I wondered if Joel had updated his ratings lately. A quick Internet check provided the sad news that Mr. Hirschhorn had passed away in 2005.

About a month later, I thought, “I could update the ratings!”  Thinking about Bill James’ baseball formulas, I decided to come up with an algorithm to rate movies.  This decision would lead me to start my own movie website.  Ultimate Movie Rankings.com (UMR) has been ranking movies since 2011.

We have been collecting, categorizing, and storing movie stats for almost ten years.  Originally, all the stats collected were being written in notebooks.  Luckily, my better half, realized a database would be a better place to store the statistics.   She created a database that has now stored movie stats on over 36,000 movies.  Each movie, whether it was made in 1932 or made today, includes box office grosses, reviews, and awards.

Our UMR mathematical formula generates a score from 1 to 100 for each movie, allowing comparison between movies made decades apart.  Now my wife and I can argue over the merits of her favorite movie, The Sound of Music (1965), and one of my favorites, Pulp Fiction (1994), using the same scoring criteria.

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Factors Used in UMR Score

 

1. Box office results. Receives the second highest percentage (31%) of the equation.  The ceiling is $200 million in adjusted for inflation dollars.  Any movie that crossed $200 million maxed out the points in the category.  We use adjusted box office, so it would be easier to compare a movie made years ago to movies made today.
2. Critics and audience reception. Receives the highest percentage (47%) of the equation.  So where do I find critics/audience reception? We use many different sources: RottenTomatoes, IMDb, MetaCritic, Yahoo Movies, Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin, and Fandango.  Put them all together and we get an average review rating,  100% being the highest score possible. You Tube video critic Chris Stuckmann, has replaced the late great Roger Ebert in our calculations when looking at current movies.
3. Award Recognition. The final part of the equation is worth 22%.  A movie gets points for Golden Globe® and Oscar® nominations and wins.  The Golden Globes® get 3.75% while the Oscars® get 18.25% of the equation.

Box Office Results (31%) + Reviews (47%) + Awards (22%) = UMR Score.

These three factors were determined by figuring out what a movie’s producer is hoping their movie accomplishes.  The first goal that the producer would want would be for the movie to be successful at the box office and profitable at the end of the day.  Secondly, the producer would like both the professional critics and moviegoers to enjoy their movie.  And finally the producer would like the movie to receive award recognition through Golden Globe® and Oscar® awards.

For a movie to be rated well in our mathematical equation, it has to do well in all three categories.  Of the thousands of movies we have rated, only 8 have a perfect 100 score.

Top 10 UMR Movies
The Godfather (1972)	100.00 UMR Score
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)	100.00 UMR Score
Gone With The Wind (1939)	100.00 UMR Score
Schlinder’s List (1993)	100.00 UMR Score
On The Waterfront (1954)	100.00 UMR Score
Ben-Hur (1959)	100.00 UMR Score
Casablanca (1942)	100.00 UMR Score
The Return of the King (2003)	100.00 UMR Score
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)	99.99 UMR Score
The Godfather Part II (1974)	99.99 UMR Score

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An Example of UMR Rating Formula

Let’s look at one of the best movies that featured one of my favorite actors: Bruce Willis’s The Sixth Sense (1999).

Figure 2 – UMR Database – Picture from UltimateMovieRankings.com

#1 Shows the original domestic box gross ($291 million) and its adjusted box office gross ($516 million) based on today’s average movie ticket price.  Those massive grosses easily max out the points (31% of equation) in the box office category.  Of a possible 31 points,  it earned the maximum of 31 points.

#2 Shows the different sources (IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, Metacritics) we used to get a review percentage for The Sixth Sense (1999).  Put all of those reviews together and you end up with a 81.4% review rating.  Of a possible 47 points, it earned 37.60 points.

#3 Shows how well The Sixth Sense (1999) did with major awards.  Awards is the third and final part of the equation.  The Sixth Sense (1999) earned 6 Oscar® nominations, including a Best Picture nod.  It did not win any Oscars® and was ignored by the Golden Globes®.  Of a possible 22 points, it earned a total of 9.15 award points.

#4 Shows the end result of the equation.  When you add up the total points for #1, #2, and #3, you end up with 78.25 points.  When comparing that total with all the movies in the database you end up with a 98.82 percentile score.

So what does a 98.82 percentile mean? Well, let’s find out.  We have 36,123 movies in the database.  36,123 times 98.76% equals 35,675.  That means there are 35,675 movies that earned fewer points than The Sixth Sense.  Another way to look at it would be by saying the The Sixth Sense (1999) is the 448th best movie in our database.

Figure 3 –  Bruce Willis – Drawing by DoC2

So let’s see if Bruce Willis has the stats to crack the Top 50.  Willis has 72 movies in the database. His Top 25 UMR movies (best combination of box office, reviews and awards) are listed on the next page.

If we add up all the UMR points, we see he earned 2,144 points.  When we divide that by 25, we get an average UMR score of 85.76.  Now we need to look at his acting honors.  His only major acting honor is a Golden Globe® nomination for In Country (1989).  That did nothing for his score, as In Country (1989) did not make his Top 25.  That leaves his UMR score at 85.76.

A 85.76 UMR average score would be 74th best average of all the stars that qualified.  A deecent finish for him, but not good enough to make our Top 50.

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Top 25 UMR Score Bruce Willis Movies

Movies with best box office, reviews and awards

 

Rank	Movie (Year)	UMR Score
1st	Pulp Fiction (1994)	99.68
2nd	The Sixth Sense (1999)	98.82
3rd	Die Hard (1988)	97.51
4th	Over the Hedge (2006)	94.68
5th	Die Hard 2 (1990)	94.14
6th	Live Free or Die Hard (2007)	94.01
7th	Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)	92.07
8th	Twelve Monkeys (1995)	90.78
9th	Unbreakable (2000)	90.10
10th	Look Who’s Talking (1989)	90.02
11th	Armageddon (1998)	88.04
12th	Sin City (2005)	87.92
13th	Looper (2012)	86.98
14th	Nobody’s Fool (1994)	86.70
15th	Moonrise Kingdom (2012)	85.64
16th	The Fifth Element (1997)	85.63
17th	Red (2010)	84.06
18th	The Expendables 2 (2012)	80.35
19th	Death Becomes Her (1992)	79.82
20th	The Last Boy Scout (1991)	77.44
21st	G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)	74.71
22nd	Glass (2019)	74.01
23rd	Disney’s The Kid (2000)	71.50
24th	Bandits (2001)	70.13
25th	The Whole Nine Yards (2000)	69.49

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Test Run

So it was time to find out the Top 50 Movie Stars Statistically Speaking.  The movie database calculated the UMR scores of over 36,000 movies and over 10,000 different actors and actresses.  Some of the results are listed below.

Rank	Star
1st	James Dean
2nd	John Cazale
3rd	Grace Kelly
4th	Judy Holliday
5th	Charlie Chaplin
13th	Thelma Ritter
16th	Sydney Greenstreet
23rd	Thomas Mitchell
27th	Walter Brennan
34th	Claude Rains
38th	Charles Laughton
49th	Barry Fitzgerald
95th	Jack Nicholson
102nd	Clint Eastwood
136th	John Wayne

 

Gotta say, I was pretty underwhelmed by this list.  A quick look at the rankings revealed some issues.  The top 5 is a solid list for sure, but with a combined total of 40 movies, it seemed that the low number of movies really helped their UMR averages.

Another issue with the initial rankings were the amount of supporting actors and actresses.  I love Thelma Ritter, Sydney Greenstreet, Thomas Mitchell, and all the others, but they are not movie stars.  If I was making a list of the greatest character actors of all-time, they would be some of the first people I would pick.

On even further review, many actors that are considered to be legends, such as John Wayne, were near the bottom of the rankings.  I noticed that if an actor or actress had over 40 movies, their UMR averages seemed to be very low.

We also realized that individual acting Oscar® and Golden Globe® nominations and wins should be factored into the UMR scores.

The final result of the first test run? It became clear we were going to have to include some guidelines in the rankings.

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The Guidelines

1. Cameos, television roles, and movies not released in the United States were excluded from the rankings.  World-Wide box office figures were much harder to find and less reliable, so U.S. Domestic was used.  Sadly, movies that have unknown box office grosses were also excluded from the rankings, since a box office gross is needed to calculate the UMR score.
2. We included a feature that we do not use on the website anymore.  That feature gives credit for individual nominations and awards such as Best Actor/Actress.  An actor can earn up to 10 additional points per movie.  Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, and Jack Nicholson benefited the most from the inclusion of this feature.
3.   An actor or actress had to have appeared in a minimum of 25 movies.  That left out some great stars like Daniel Day-Lewis, Montgomery Clift, Marie Dressler, Audrey Hepburn, Greta Garbo,  Barbra Streisand, and the Marx Brothers.
4.   The Top 50 Movie Stars needed to be leading actors and actresses.  That excluded the supporting performers above and other favorites like Donald Crisp, Elsa Lanchester, Samuel L.  Jackson, and Roddy McDowall.
5.   Only the performer’s top 25 highest rated UMR movies are used in the rankings.  This benefited John Wayne, Myrna Loy, and Robert Mitchum.

Once we had determined the guidelines to use, we queried the database to rank all of the actresses and actors that reached those criteria.  Overall, 647 different people qualified.  When we reviewed the top 50, the list finally looked like a winner.  We decided to roll with it.

Feel free to add your comments to the website on a page dedicated to this book. https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/top-50-movie-stars

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Figure 4 – UMR TagLine – Picture from UltimateMovieRankings.com

Things to know about the upcoming countdown.

Before we start the countdown.

 

• Our Honorable Mention section, shows in ranking order, the next 25 actors and actresses, who just missed our Top 50. Al Pacino, Laurence Olivier, Claudette Colbert & Jane Fonda were the first ones to miss our Top 50.
• When looking at Golden Globe® tallies, we are only listing movie roles, no television roles.
• When looking at Oscar® nominations and wins, we are only listing acting nominations.
• “100” is the top score for Best Review Percentage and UMR Score.
• Adjusted Domestic Box Office totals are calculated using ticket sold and average movie admission prices. Currently, the final 2018 ticket price has not been announced, so we are still using the average ticket price of 2017 in our calculations.

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Honorable Mentions

25 Actors and Actresses Who

Just Missed The Top 50

 

Actors	Actresses
Al Pacino	Claudette Colbert
Laurence Olivier	Jane Fonda
Kirk Douglas	Shirley MacLaine
Matt Damon	Shirley Temple
Fredric March	Susan Hayward
Wallace Beery	Ingrid Bergman
Fred MacMurray	Cate Blanchett
Robert Taylor	Diane Keaton
Dean Martin	Rosalind Russell
Ray Milland	Jane Wyman
James Mason	Deborah Kerr
Bruce Willis	Mary Pickford
Dana Andrews	Loretta Young
David Niven	Marlene Dietrich
Anthony Quinn	Maureen O’Sullivan
Robert Downey Jr.	Betty Grable
Ronald Colman	Natalie Wood
Robert Young	Julia Roberts
Bill Murray	Irene Dunne
Mel Gibson	Maureen O’Hara
Eddie Murphy	Lana Turner
Edward G.  Robinson	Maggie Smith
Alan Ladd	Marilyn Monroe
Johnny Depp	Sandra Bullock
Tony Curtis	Jean Arthur

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