Gotta have a Western villain on this list. He could be Jack Palance’s stirrup-ringing sadist from Shane or Henry Brandon’s Comanche chief from The Searchers. But we’ll go with Fonda, who possessed one of the movies’ naturally heroic faces and was turned niftily against type to play a gunman for hire in this Sergio Leone epic. Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies notes that Fonda showed up on the set with a beard and brown contact lenses, so he’d look more villainous; Leone said no, you should look just as you always have — just be evil. So the smile turned into a scowl, and Fonda the torturer of good men and children came blazingly to life.
