My favourite villains on film and tv
by herbertlom-45016 | created - 14 Sep 2017 | updated - 28 Dec 2020 | Public
1. Herbert Lom
Actor | The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Herbert Lom was born on September 11, 1917 as Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru into an aristocratic family living in genteel poverty. His incredibly long surnames led him to select the shortest surname he could find extant ("Lom") and adopt it as his own, professionally. He ...
Chief Inspector Dreyfus. (Pink Panther Series)
2. David Tomlinson
Actor | Mary Poppins
David Tomlinson is best known for his role as George Banks in Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (1964). As a youth he spent a short spell in the guards. He joined the RAF in WW2 where he survived the trauma of a plane crash on his first solo flight due to engine failure, then becoming a flying instructor ...
Peter Thorndyke. (The Love Bug)
3. Harold Sakata
Actor | Goldfinger
The most famous henchman of the entire James Bond series of spy thrillers, Harold Sakata will forever be remembered as the villainous "Odd Job" in the ultimate Bond film, Goldfinger (1964), with his lethal martial arts and steel-brimmed bowler hat. He was born Toshiyuki Sakata in Hawaii, of ...
Odd Job (Goldfinger)
4. Eli Wallach
Actor | Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo
One of Hollywood's finest character / "Method" actors, Eli Wallach was in demand for over 60 years (first film/TV role was 1949) on stage and screen, and has worked alongside the world's biggest stars, including Clark Gable, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Yul Brynner, Peter O'Toole,...
Calvera (The Magnificent Seven)
5. John Vernon
Actor | National Lampoon's Animal House
John Vernon was a prolific stage-trained Canadian character player who made a career out of convincingly playing crafty villains, morally-bankrupt officials and heartless authority figures in American films and television since the 1960s. Vernon was directed by some stellar filmmakers, including ...
Mr Prindle (Herbie Goes Bananas)
6. Robert Loggia
Actor | Big
Born and raised in New York City, Robert Loggia studied journalism at the University of Missouri before moving back to New York to pursue acting. He trained at the Actors Studio while doing stage work. From the late 1950s he was a familiar face on TV, usually as authoritative figures. Loggia also ...
Bruno Langois (Pink Panther Series)
7. Burgess Meredith
Actor | Clash of the Titans
One of the truly great and gifted performers of the century, who often suffered lesser roles, Burgess Meredith was born in 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was educated in Amherst College in Massachusetts, before joining Eva Le Gallienne's Student Repertory stage company in 1929. By 1934 he was a star ...
The Penguin (Batman tv show)
8. Lee Van Cleef
Actor | Escape from New York
One of the great movie villains, Clarence Leroy Van Cleef, Jr. was born in Somerville, New Jersey, to Marion Lavinia (Van Fleet) and Clarence LeRoy Van Cleef, Sr. His parents were of Dutch ancestry. Van Cleef started out as an accountant. He served in the U.S. Navy aboard minesweepers and sub ...
Angel Eyes (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly)
9. Joseph Wiseman
Actor | Dr. No
Joseph Wiseman was born on May 15, 1918 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He came to Broadway in the 1930s, where he was critically hailed for performances in Shakespeare's "King Lear", Clifford Odets' "Golden Boy" and Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya". Motion pictures in which Wiseman has been seen include ...
Dr. No (Dr. No)
10. Gert Fröbe
Actor | Goldfinger
Tall, portly built German born actor (and talented violinist) who notched up over 100 film appearances, predominantly in German-language productions. He will forever be remembered by Western audiences as the bombastic megalomaniac "Auric Goldfinger" trying to kill Sean Connery and irradiate the ...
Goldfinger (Goldfinger)
11. Christopher Lee
Actor | Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee was perhaps the only actor of his generation to have starred in so many films and cult saga. Although most notable for personifying bloodsucking vampire, Dracula, on screen, he portrayed other varied characters on screen, most of which were villains, whether it ...
Francisco Scaramanga
(The Man With The Golden Gun)
Dracula
(Dracula series)
12. Ian Holm
Actor | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Sir Ian Holm was one of the world's greatest actors, a Laurence Olivier Award-winning, Tony Award-winning, BAFTA-winning and Academy Award-nominated British star of films and the stage. He was a member of the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company and has played more than 100 roles in films and on ...
Voice of Skinner (Ratatouille)
13. Adolfo Celi
Actor | Thunderball
Sicilian born actor/writer/director was very popular with European audiences, but largely unknown to the west apart from his portrayal of the villainous SPECTRE agent "Emilio Largo" in the spectacular James Bond film Thunderball (1965). However, due to his heavy accent, Celi's voice was dubbed by ...
Emilio Largo (Thunderball)
14. Keenan Wynn
Actor | Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
The talented scion of a show-business family, Keenan Wynn's father was the great burlesque and television buffoon Ed Wynn while his maternal grandfather, Frank Keenan, earned distinction on the other side of the entertainment ladder as a Shakespearean tragedian. Mother Hilda Keenan was also a minor...
Alonzo Hawk (The Absent Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, Herbie Rides Again)
15. Richard Kiel
Actor | Moonraker
Towering 7' 2" tall actor who cornered the market on playing giants, intimidating henchmen, bayou swamp monsters and steel toothed villains! Kiel worked in numerous jobs including as a night club bouncer and a cemetery plot salesman, before breaking into film & TV in several minor roles in the late...
Jaws (The Spy Who Loved Me)
16. Hervé Villechaize
Actor | The Man with the Golden Gun
Hervé Villechaize was born in Montauban, France on April 23, 1943. He stopped growing very early and his father (who was a surgeon) tried to find a cure by visiting several doctors and hospitals. But there was none, so Hervé had to live with his small height and also with undersized lungs. He ...
Nic Nac (The Man With the Golden Gun)
17. Bernie Kopell
Actor | Get Smart
Genial character comedian Bernie Kopell is undoubtedly best known as Dr. Adam Bricker, doling out sage advice on TV's The Love Boat (1977) for its entire run of ten seasons and 250 episodes. He once described the experience as "a paid vacation. We got to be in 98 countries". While this may have ...
Siegfried (Get Smart tv show)
18. Cesar Romero
Actor | Batman: The Movie
Tall, suave and sophisticated Cesar Romero actually had two claims to fame in Hollywood. To one generation, he was the distinguished Latin lover of numerous musicals and romantic comedies, and the rogue bandit The Cisco Kid in a string of low-budget westerns. However, to a younger generation weaned...
The Joker (Batman tv show)
19. Robert Shaw
Actor | Jaws
Robert Archibald Shaw was born on August 9, 1927, in Westhoughton, Lancashire, England, the eldest son of Doreen Nora (Avery), a nurse, and Thomas Archibald Shaw, a doctor. His paternal grandfather was Scottish, from Argyll. Shaw's mother, who was born in Piggs Peak, Swaziland, met his father while...
Donald Grant
(From Russia With Love)
Doyle Lonnegan
(The Sting)
20. Joe Pesci
Actor | Goodfellas
Compact Italian-American actor Joe Pesci was born February 9, 1943 in Newark, New Jersey, to Mary (Mesce), a part-time barber, and Angelo Pesci, a bartender and forklift driver. Pesci first broke into entertainment as a child actor, and by the mid-1950s, was starring on the series "Star Time Kids"....
Harry Lime (Home Alone)
21. Brian Cox
Actor | Succession
Brian Cox is an Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor. He was born on June 1, 1946 in Dundee, Scotland, to Mary Ann Guillerline Cox, maiden surname McCann, a spinner, and Charles McArdle Campbell Cox, a shopkeeper and butcher. His father was of Irish ancestry and his mother was of Irish and Scottish ...
Ward Abbott (The Jason Bourne series)
22. Bernard Fox
Actor | Titanic
Endearing, bushy-whiskered Welsh character actor whose screen repertoire seemed to consist for the better part of variations on a similar theme, namely stereotypical stiff-upper-lip or bumbling British gents. The son of an actress and an actor-manager and on stage from early childhood, Fox began ...
Max (Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo)
23. Roy Kinnear
Actor | Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
After his schooling in Edinburgh, the British character actor Roy Kinnear attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Following national service, Kinnear appeared on stage, radio, and television in Scotland before becoming a household name in Britain in the early 1960s as one of the ...
Quincey (Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo)
24. Laurence Olivier
Actor | Sleuth
Laurence Olivier could speak William Shakespeare's lines as naturally as if he were "actually thinking them", said English playwright Charles Bennett, who met Olivier in 1927. Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, to Agnes Louise (Crookenden) and Gerard Kerr Olivier, a High ...
Szell (Marathon Man)
25. Marlon Brando
Actor | Apocalypse Now
Marlon Brando is widely considered the greatest movie actor of all time, rivaled only by the more theatrically oriented Laurence Olivier in terms of esteem. Unlike Olivier, who preferred the stage to the screen, Brando concentrated his talents on movies after bidding the Broadway stage adieu in ...
Can you guess?
26. Roy Barcroft
Actor | The Purple Monster Strikes
After serving in World War I, Roy Barcroft spent most of the 1920s and early 1930s moving from job to job. It was in the 1930s, after he moved to California with his wife, that he found his calling while acting in amateur theatrical productions. In 1937 he was appearing in bit parts in various ...
27. Louis Jourdan
Actor | Gigi
Louis Jourdan was born Louis Robert Gendre in Marseille, France to Yvonne (née Jourdan) and hotel owner Henry Gendre. He was educated in France, Britain, and Turkey. He trained as an actor with René Simon at the École Dramatique. He debuted on screen in 1939, going on to play cultivated, polished, ...
Kamal Khan (Octopussy)
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