Best performances by non-professional actors

[Part 2]

Both kids in The Warzone had no previous experience if I remember right.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141974/

 

[sheothebudworths]

Salaam Bombay.

 

[Flashman]

 

[DaveCinzano]

Kelli Hollis in the first Tina film was great (later she started earning cash money as a pro, eg Shameless)

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

my dad was part of burnam wood in polanski's macbeth

That's a quality film. Best Shakespeare film IMO

 

[isitme]

That's a quality film. Best Shakespeare film IMO

specially the moving trees

 

[ska invita]

Only at the point in The Wire where Felicia 'Snoop' Pearson's character has been introduced, but Im one of the many who thought she was a boy.

Article about her here:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E0DB163FF932A15753C1A9609C8B63

Stephen King, in Entertainment Weekly, called her ''perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series.''
[...]
Ms. Pearson has lived the kind of hard life embodied by her character. She was born to two drug-addicted and incarcerated parents and reared in an East Baltimore foster home.

''I was a crack baby,'' Ms. Pearson said by telephone from Baltimore. ''I was, like, three pounds, and I had to get fed with an eyedropper.'' She started selling drugs at 10 and at 14 was locked up for more than seven years after shooting a woman. ''I grew up not giving a damn about anything, because why give a damn if you are in a foster home and your parents didn't care anything about you?''

Ms. Pearson said. She added that she had so many drugs in her system when she was born that she was cross-eyed as a child. ''Kids would tease me, saying that I'm cross-eyed and don't have a real mother, and all those kids who said those mean things, I beat the hell out of them,'' she said.
[...]There's nothing more Baltimore than Snoop's accent, which at times is so hard to decipher that a fan on the Internet Movie Database said she watched her scenes with closed captioning so she could read her words. ''It's basically a Baltimore thing,'' Ms. Pearson said. ''I say everything that's in the script, but I put a little twist on it, like the way we would say it in Baltimore.''

 

[ska invita]

Just heard about (but haven't seen) a neo-realist French movie called 'La bataille du rail' - shot just after the end of the war (1946) tells the story of French railworkers who took part in acts of nonviolent resistance, generally pissing about with the trains (particularly sabotaging Nazi reinforcement-troop trains). The cast is predominantly made up of real rail workers who really did those things - sounds like a good un.

From the clips ive seen it looks great with some wonderful faces.

 

[danny la rouge]

That kid is amazing.

I keep telling people about Outnumbered, but nobody's seen it.

 

[chooch]

This kid in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana Torrent.

Another kid with huge eyes who doesn't say a lot...

 

[ska invita]

That kid is amazing.

I keep telling people about Outnumbered, but nobody's seen it.

I like it - really good writing, and good realistic performances from all the kids i think

 

[Reno]

Both the kids in Let the Right One In were fantastic.

 

[Ted Striker]

Pele et al in Escape to Victory

 

[Kaka Tim]

Your man who played the drill instucter in Full Metal Jacket.

 

[Bakunin]

IIRC, Ken Loach's Spanish Civil War film 'Land And Freedom' also had a fair number of non-professional actors in it as well.

 

[Bakunin]

Your man who played the drill instucter in Full Metal Jacket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Lee_Ermey

 

[subversplat]

Your man who played the drill instucter in Full Metal Jacket.

R Lee Ermey is definitely a bona-fide actor nowadays, and had already done films in his stereotype by FMJ, so I'm not sure that counts, even though it was a outstanding performance.

 

[Orang Utan]

R Lee Ermey is definitely a bona-fide actor nowadays, and had already done films in his stereotype by FMJ, so I'm not sure that counts, even though it was a outstanding performance.

he wasn't a professional in that role, so surely it does count? lots of people here went on to do it professionally

 

[subversplat]

he wasn't a professional in that role, so surely it does count? lots of people here went on to do it professionally

He'd already been in Apocalypse Now!

 

[Orang Utan]

He'd already been in Apocalypse Now!

he was mainly a military advisor though

 

[subversplat]

he was mainly a military advisor though

But he was a paid actor! Or do you have to graduate from Acting School to be a professional now?

 

[Bakunin]

he was mainly a military advisor though

And was originally hired to be the military advisor for Full Metal Jacket, before bagging the role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman after the original actor departed the film.

 

[Orang Utan]

and that's when his acting career took off...

 

[subversplat]

Sooo, this is best breakthrough performances by previously paid actors?

Sorry, I'll just take the bee out of my bonnet and let the thread carry on

 

[Weller]

For a recent one - Kate Jervis in Fish Tank chosen for the role after being seen arguing with her boyfriend on a train station platform - excellent homegrown movie too

 

[Kel]

Karroom Ben Bouih was 103 1/2 y.o. when he made his acting debut in John Huston's "The Man Who Would Be King" (1975), in which he starred opposite Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Saeed Jaffrey and Christopher Plummer. It was his one and only appearance on film, as he died shortly thereafter

 

[strummerville]

For me, if I think of the best acting I have ever seen, it most often seems to be by non-professional actors. There's something about "famous" actors that makes it harder to believe the characters and suspend your disbelief - but also non-professionals, at their best, give a better, more natural, qualty of performance.

Please post the best non-professional performances you can think of.

Three that spring to mind for me:

The all real-monk cast in Francessco, God's Jester:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042477/

Ivan Dobronravov and Vladimir Garin the two kids in Russian cross-over film The Return. Ivan tragically died after the making of the film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376968/

Valdamir was particularly brilliant as a kid who's both pissed off with, and looks up to his macho dad:

Martin Compston who carries Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen - he's gone on to do tv and uk films, but at the time was completely untrained.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0313670/

As a trained actor, can I say you are talking a bit of bollocks. The craft of acting on film is incredibly technical and the only way for directors to work with untrained non actors is to shoot loads of footage, very loose, in a (for want of better word) semi documentary style, not sticking to a script. This means as a film maker your options are incredibly ltd, both writing wise and style wise. It takes an enormous amount of work and time to get the finished film to the level of the films you're talking about. If you were to make anything different style wise, you would fall at the first hurdle with non actors. Its like when people talk about heavily emoted performances as being the great ones. As any actor will tell you, thats the easy stuff, the hardest thing to do on film is to act a very normal conversation which is scripted completely naturalistically. When you see that and believe it, thats a great screen actor. Look at Jeff Bridges in his earlier films, William H Macy, Ray MacNally, Kristin Scott Thomas in her more recent French films for these kinds of performances.

 

[N_igma]

Eamonn Owens in The Butcher Boy.

 

[DaveCinzano]

R Lee Ermey is definitely a bona-fide actor nowadays, and had already done films in his stereotype by FMJ, so I'm not sure that counts, even though it was a outstanding performance.

Indeed, R Lee Ermey had played essentially the same character (albeit with much less screen time) ten years previously in The Boys In Company C.

 

[Bakunin]

Indeed, R Lee Ermey had played essentially the same character (albeit with much less screen time) ten years previously in The Boys In Company C.

And also has in his mental database the single largest selection of original and unique insults in human history. And that's a Bakunin Fact.