Article: What is 'great' acting?

"Robert De Niro Greatest Living Movie Star" was the headline of a 2004 poll for the British film magazine Empire, ranking the world's greatest actors "over the age of 50." The results travelled the Internet and appeared in newspapers around the world. Such polls proliferate nowadays, and if they do not rate the 'greatest' then they are 'best' lists, taking their lead from the Oscars. Yet the Empire poll ("of around 10,000 readers") is as good a starting point as any for reflections on what is 'great' screen acting, why there is so little of it, and how the topic is inseparable from the sad state of Hollywood today.

Al Pacino scored second place, Jack Nicholson ...

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