The most memorable screen roles.
A fan-editorial round-up of the performances that have stayed with the audience longest — and why.
A ‘memorable role’ is not the same as a great role, and it is not the same as the role with the most screen time. The roles that stay with the audience are the ones that become reference points — the ones critics and fans return to when they describe what an actress is for.
1. Malèna Scordia
Tornatore’s wartime widow remains the role that fixed her cinematic register most decisively. The performance has the unusual property of seeming, in retrospect, both inevitable and risky — it was a part most actresses would have played differently, and Bellucci played it her way.
2. Alex — Irréversible
The most demanding role in her filmography, and almost certainly the most artistically respected. Critics continue to teach the performance in writing about European cinema in the early 2000s.
3. Persephone — The Matrix
A reminder that screen time is not destiny. Persephone is on screen for very few minutes and yet has, twenty years on, the strongest fan afterlife of any minor character in the franchise.
4. Mary Magdalene
A near-silent role that demonstrated, more clearly than any of her other 2000s films, what Bellucci can do with restraint. The performance has aged better than the film around it.
5. Lucia Sciarra — Spectre
A small Bond role with outsized cultural consequence. The casting opened, and arguably permanently changed, the conversation about which women the franchise is willing to put on screen.
6. Herself, in Twin Peaks
Three minutes in a Paris café, one sentence, and a permanent place in the late-Lynch canon. The kind of cameo most actors never get to give.
7. Sylvia — Brotherhood of the Wolf
Less remembered internationally than the others, but a core text for French audiences and for any account of her early 2000s work.
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