On a given day, at a given hour, I have adjudged the following fifty persons to be the fifty best film actors of all time. I have rounded up the usual suspects (Chaplin, Garbo, Olivier), but there may be a few surprises as well. The list is alphabetical. ... I have not determined the names purely by subjective hocus-pocus; indeed, the entries themselves disclose what matters most to me, and what matters least to me, about film acting. In summary, I prefer actors who investigate the nature of their characters or human nature in general, including humanity's spiritual nature. I prefer least those actors who are most concerned about themselves and about drawing attention to themselves and their technique. In art, technique should be a path to humane accomplishment, not a means of self-aggrandizement, an end in itself. For me, a Falconetti trumps a Helen Hayes.

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YEVGENY MIRONOV. Yevgeny Mironov's bland good looks are the perfect cover for his diverse gallery of profound portraits. Mironov is tremendous in Vladimir Khotinenko's superlative Moslem (1995) playing Nikolai Ivanov, who returns to his rural home after spending seven years in Afghanistan as a prisoner-of-war, during which time he converted to Islam. At one point "Kolya" nearly bludgeons his brother to death – war's diversion of Kolya's passive, gentle nature, and something more: an implosion of the calm facade of Kolya's Moslem identity, exposing the violent Christian – an identification that war has helped forge in his mind – just below the surface. Calm isn't what Kolya has achieved; it's what he longs for. As a weary officer in the Chechen War, Mironov gives the best performance in House of Fools (Andrei Konchalovsky, 2002), and is especially daring as Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (2002), from Kafka. Through body movements, contortions, and noises he makes, Mironov expresses how the routine-enslaved traveling salesman feels – the "insect" that Gregor has turned into. His acting suits Valery Fokin's painfully hilarious film. Outclassing even this, though, is Mironov's Prince Myshkin in Vladimir Bortko's eight-hour The Idiot (2003), from Dostoyevsky. Here is, after all, the most complex male role – a tangle of seeming contradictions – from literature, post-that other Prince. The Russian television mini-series is mostly "visual storytelling," not cinema, but Mironov's brilliant acting constitutes one of the three or four greatest male film performances ever. (Early on, his Myshkin transports the viewer into the scene so that viewers find themselves constantly responding to Myshkin as though he were standing in front of them, conversing with them.) In Aleksei Uchitel's Dreaming of Space (2005), as "Konyok," Mironov locates with psychological precision a point where loneliness, hero-worship and repressed homosexuality intersect. In 1957, Konyok's first-time encounter with a transistor radio delights.

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