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.
PB
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.
PB
Factors Used in UMR Score
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 |
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.
PB
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 |
PB
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.
The Guidelines
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
PB
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.
PB
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 |
PB
There is a spelling error in the section “Things To Know About Upcoming Countdown.”:
You have written “Box Office totals are adjusted and use current picket prices…”
This should read “Ticket prices.”
You explained everything thoroughly and I appreciate that. I notice on your list of stars that just missed the list that Fred MacMurray is no longer in the top 50.
By the way – I have seen 5 of the top 10 movies on UMR:
Lawrence of Arabia
Gone With the Wind
On The Waterfront
Ben-Hur
Casablanca
Thank you Flora. Thanks for those headsup….I was just tweaking that section right before putting it here. I will get that fixed ASAP….thanks again. As for Fred….on the first version….I had forgotten that individual award recognition was no longer in the UMR Score. That died when we made the website dynamic. When I put those honors back in a few people fell out and a few people fell in. MacMurray and McQueen come immediate to mind. While Gene Kelly and Errol Flynn fell in. 50% of the Top 10…very cool. Thanks again for the feedback.
At this point, we are fact checking lots of things we say in the book, and we are making sure the photos we used in the book are ones that we can actually use. When we get done with that….it will almost be time to send this puppy to the printers. Just attached the introduction to this page. If you could read the introduction…..spot any mistakes….or if it is confusing please let me know. Some of the formatting is off, due to the change in venues…..sorry about that.
I look forward to buying your book in hard copy form. I am interested to see how the stars are now ranked. I too was sorry to see that Kirk Douglas and Audrey Hepburn were not included. As a fan of classic Hollywood, of course, I was happy to see so many classic stars make the list. I have gone back to the online book several times.
“I’m Spartacus!” Bruce, looking at the top 50 I would give Fred MacMurray the boot and include the far more legendary Kirk Douglas, one of the great Hollywood icons. A lot of your readers will be searching for Kirk when they pick up your book. Not sure Ginger deserves to be in there either.
Hi Bruce,
As mentioned in my comment on the Emma Thompson page, I wanted to share some thoughts on your recently published e-book. Of course, as a regular follower of this site, I am familiar with the UMR scoring method and have seen you applied it before to actors and actresses. However, I still found the book a very interesting read and nicely put together (and I like the price too!).
As you know, I have sometimes taken issue with some of the UMR rankings of films and stars (for instance in your decades pages) as I have found that a statistical method purely based on some aggregated ratings, US box office success and awards does not provide the full picture and can sometimes be misleading. However, in the case of the top 50 stars in your book, I have to say that the resulting ranking makes a lot of sense to me. I think that by building in some new parameters, like excluding supporting players and focusing on the top 24 films of each performers, you have arrived at a credible list that meaningfully assesses and ranks the overall career accomplishments of Hollywood movie stars. I hope that your approach receives the attention it deserves beyond UMR circles and encourages others to use clear and consistent criteria when assessing stars and movies. Having said this, I have to admit that I was somewhat less in agreement with the list of the 51-410 stars that followed, though it was still fun and interesting to go through it.
As you can guess, I was pleased to see Burt Lancaster in the #14 spot, as this suggests a higher (and in my view more accurate) level of recognition that he is often granted. Similarly, I was a bit surprised, though also pleased, to see Steve McQueen come in at #22. There a few stars I would have expected to do slightly better, namely Meryl Streep. Jack Lemmon, Robert deNiro, Sean Connery, Bette Davis and Marlon Brando, while a few were ranked higher than expected, and I was disappointed that Audrey Hepburn and Kirk Douglas did not even make the cut. I also noted that the stats seem kinder to classic stars as opposed to modern ones, with over 2/3 of the 50 having achieved stardom by or before the early 1960s. Finally, and rather unfortunately, male stars do better than female stars, with the first actress (Katherine Hepburn) showing up only at #15. However, as I think someone once observed on this site, on average, female stars tend to have somewhat shorter periods of success than male stars, so this made sense…statistically speaking.
I also thought the brief descriptions of the stars and the lists of their 10 films with the highest UMR scores were helpful. If you go through with updating or revising the book, you may want to develop the descriptions a little bit more in some cases and make them more consistent.
So once again, congratulations to you and your wife for this wonderful and enjoyable little book!
Hey PhilHoF17. Great great comment. I told WoC before going to work that you proved why you are a Hall of Fame commentor. I greatly appreciate the kind words and the suggestions. Thank you for buying the book. It actually sold pretty well during the Christmas season….it has really really slowed since Xmas ended.
With the book earnings, we are investing in getting the book published as a real book. We hired a professional book cover designer, are in talks with a small publishing company and have a rough draft at KDP University. The new book…is going to have lots and lots of stats on the actors.
One of your suggestions we will be using is the “develop the descriptions a little bit more in some cases and make them more consistent”. I agree….those mini-descriptions are all over the board…and could use some uniformity. We tweaked some of the rankings….it is the same 50….just in different order…McQueen is the one that took the biggest hit…..as he dropped like a rock in the new rankings……William Powell fans might not like his drop either. While fans of Meryl Streep will be happy. Don’t worry….Burt kept his stellar spot.
I agree, that the classic stars have an advantage. When you research classic reviews, rarely does a movie get scorched like they do today….seems…if the movie is older…even horrible movies get average ratings. As for the 410 stars…..that is probably not going to make the book. Currently thinking using “the parameters” to edit that list as well.
Part 2….my comment was getting so long…it was hard to read what I had written already. As for the actors versus actresses comment. Overall…there are 9 actresses that made the list. But only 3 in the Top 25. That does seem one sided. I think the bias of age really makes it hard to have a long career. Alicia Vikander is a current great example. Her career is basically just starting….yet at 30…..the age clock is ticking. Hopefully she has a great 10 year run ahead of her….but can she cram in 20 good to great movies in that time frame. Because, historically…when she reaches 40….the scripts start losing quality.
Anyway….great comment PhilHoF17….it means a lot to me that you took the time to really digest our first “book” effort. I feel we made a ton of mistakes with that first attempt…..but hopefully….we will learn from our mistakes and get better.
FYI. WoC suggested, when we get our rough draft completed…and before we send it to the publisher…that we get some UMR regulars to view it first…do you have any interest in doing that?
Hey Bruce, Glad that WoC is now aware that I deserve my Hall of Fame credentials, and happy to hear the book is doing well. If there are many mistakes, they’re not particularly visible, but it’s great that you will be following it up with a extended hard copy. I can understand that McQueen would take a hit if you’re tweaking the approach – he got lucky in the first go – but as long as he’s in the top 50, I’ll buy the book! And yes, I would be honored to review it if there is the time and opportunity.
Hey PhilHoF17 – thanks for the great comment and suggestions.
Hi WoC, my pleasure and thanks for being open to my comments and ideas 🙂