Willem Dafoe’s 20 best films – ranked!

As his new film Nightmare Alley hits cinemas, the possessor of Hollywood's most piercing stare gets the ranked treatment

Dafoe wasn't natural casting as the clerkly TS Eliot in this literary biopic, which chronicled the poet's troubled first marriage - and it showed, despite his customary actorly intelligence. If nothing else, it proved that, his highbrow credentials notwithstanding, Dafoe wasn't really cut out for the anglophile heritage pics that littered the 1990s.