Robin Williams’s final film role is still to come – he voices a dog in the forthcoming sci-fi comedy Absolutely Anything from Monty Python’s Terry Jones – but the late actor does reprise his Teddy Roosevelt role in Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third instalment of Ben Stiller’s history-comes-to-life franchise. How will critics appraise his work? Probably gently, positively and reverently, as is often the case when it comes to posthumous acting, even if the movie itself is less than highly regarded.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
After his death in February of this year by drug overdose at the age of 46, The New York Times declared him “perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation.” The glowing epitaphs continued in the reviews of A Most Wanted Man, which featured the last significant Hoffman performance. (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 came later in the year, with Part 2 still to come.) Though New York Magazine’s David Edelstein described A Most Wanted Man as unshapely, he noted a “great actor at his absolute peak.”
James Gandolfini
The Austin Chronicle’s Marc Savlov savaged the Sopranos star’s final film, 2014’s crime drama The Drop, but he singled out the burly actor for praise, noting that “Gandolfini’s wintry silences and bitter outbursts are enough on their own to merit seeing.” And for his penultimate role, in the 2013 romantic comedy Enough Said with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Gandolfini was lavished with numerous major award nominations, though none from less sentimental Golden Globe or Academy Award voters.
Heath Ledger
Perhaps the most scrutinized case of posthumous acting involved the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight, a thriller beloved by critics. The New Yorker’s David Denby was less impressed with the film (and Christian Bale’s “dogged but uninteresting” performance as Batman), but he lauded “the great Ledger” as the villain Joker. Ledger, he wrote, was “mesmerizing in every scene,” and reminded him of “Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating.”