Actor: Christopher Walken
Christopher Walken won Best Supporting Actor for The Deer Hunter, playing a man destroyed by captivity, and the Russian roulette scenes are among the most harrowing in American film.
The delivery, with pauses in places nobody else would put them, became so recognisable that it turned into an impression before he had finished building the career. He has leaned into it deliberately in later comic work.
He trained as a dancer and was a lion tamer as a teenager, and the physical control shows in Pennies from Heaven and in the Fatboy Slim video, made when he was fifty-seven.
The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone, True Romance and Catch Me If You Can are the range, and the True Romance scene with Dennis Hopper is a masterclass in a two-hander.
