12 Best Christopher Walken Movies

The film that won him an Oscar and sealed his status forever. As the fun-loving Pennsylvania steelworker who, after the horrors of the Vietnam War, becomes addicted to Russian roulette in Saigon's underworld, Walken delivers a crushingly tragic performance. The final scene with Robert De Niro cuts deeper than glass.

'Two little mice fell into a bucket of cream...' As the proud but slowly failing father of master forger Frank Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), Walken shows his most delicate and fragile side. Steven Spielberg drew out a warm melancholy in him that rightly earned an Oscar nomination.

A single four-minute monologue. That's all Walken needed to deliver one of the most legendary scenes in film history. As the Vietnam veteran explaining to young Butch how he and Butch's late father kept a gold watch hidden in the most uncomfortable place imaginable for years, Walken switches masterfully between solemn gravity and absurd comedy.

The famous 'Sicilian scene'. Walken opposite Dennis Hopper in a trailer. As mob interrogator Vincenzo Coccotti, he laughs calmly at Hopper's provocations before coolly pulling the trigger. Quentin Tarantino's dialogue and Walken's eerie charm make this a small cinematic masterpiece.

With a messy gray wig and a razor-sharp pinstripe suit, Walken plays corrupt industrialist Max Shreck, the monster of Gotham City pulling the strings behind the scenes. Tim Burton made the most of Walken's gothic screen presence alongside Danny DeVito's Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman.

After five years in a coma, Johnny Smith wakes up with a chilling gift: by touching people, he can see their future. In David Cronenberg's gripping Stephen King adaptation, Walken makes Johnny a tragic martyr who must decide whether to kill a future dictator (Martin Sheen) to prevent nuclear war.

With filed-down pointed teeth, pale eyes and bloodthirsty grimaces, Walken gallops through misty forests as the Headless Horseman. Even without spoken dialogue, his physical menace and wild energy are breathtaking.

Denis Villeneuve chose Walken to embody the ruler of the known universe. Far from his familiar mannerisms, Walken brings a restrained, weary melancholy to the emperor, trapped in his own web of manipulation and fear of Paul Atreides.

As psychopathic tech billionaire Max Zorin, a product of Nazi experiments, Walken laughs hysterically as he mows down his own workers in a mine near Silicon Valley. One of the most memorable and unhinged villains in the entire James Bond series.

As a devout dog-napper with ascetic calm, Walken steals the show in Martin McDonagh's black crime comedy. His flat refusal to put his hands up when a gun is pointed at him is a textbook example of Walken's brilliant comic timing.

After his release from Sing Sing, drug lord Frank White wants to regain control of New York's cocaine trade and use the proceeds to build a hospital in the slums. In Abel Ferrara's raw neo-noir, Walken dances, shoots and philosophizes with deadly elegance.

As a powerful Treasury Secretary and stern patriarch of a zany family, he hosts wedding crashers Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn at his estate. Walken's subtle glances and stern authority make the comic chaos around him all the more effective.