Actor: Al Pacino

Al Pacino came out of the Actors Studio and spent the 1970s giving performances built almost entirely on stillness. Michael Corleone barely raises his voice across two films, and the effect of watching him decide things behind his eyes is the reason The Godfather works.

Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface followed, and the range in those three is remarkable: a quiet man being ground down, a chaotic man improvising in public, and a performance so large it entered the culture as a set of quotations.

He won Best Actor for Scent of a Woman, which is generally regarded as a compensation prize for the earlier nominations he lost. The shouting register that arrived around that film has dominated the later work.

Heat gave him one of his best late performances and the diner scene with De Niro is the first time the two shared a frame, which the film treats with appropriate weight.