42. Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle 
      Taxi Driver (1976)

How do you get people to linger over a landscape painting of an open sewer? This was, in a sense, one of the questions facing director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader as they cooked up their complex, lurid study of a loner’s growing fixation on violently cleansing New York’s mean streets. They found their solution in De Niro’s mesmerizing performance, which was informed partly by the diary of George Wallace shooter Arthur Bremer. Even in Travis Bickle’s seemingly benign moments, De Niro has an unsettling intensity that makes us—not to mention the other characters—squirm. Just the sort of chilling effect you’d expect from an actor who took the script direction “Travis speaks to himself in the mirror” and forever burned “You talkin’ to me?” into pop-culture consciousness.

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