PIX: Bollywood's Ten Best Actors Of 2012

2012 has been a very, very solid year for actors. We've had some sensational ensembles, and many films underscored by standout performances.

And yet, ironically enough, this is a list with only eight men, testimony to just how stunning one particular actor has been this year. And even he's been bettered.

Thank you, gentlemen.

For creating and inhabiting characters we won't forget.

10. Adil Hussain, English Vinglish

It's easy to play a character like a jerk, but Hussain makes sure his character -- that of Sridevi's husband -- never knows how badly he's behaving.

To him it's okay teasing a wife with a recurring joke, or hugging a colleague.

He's being innocently callous, insensitive as well as indignant.

It's what makes his character a real person, one who needs to be cut down to size and yet one who picks out a good saree.

Khurana plays a lout in this film: completely full of himself, rough around the edges, insouciant to the point of being obnoxious, and generally good for nothing.

Well, unless you look closer and realise he's also the first Indian leading man to give out pedicures.

Khurana creates a Vicky who is jagged on the outside, swaggering around like his world needs him to, while unmistakably tender and well-meaning.

His easy charm goes a long way, and he gets further applause for singing his own songs.

The script structure of Talaash goes awry with Siddiqui.

He plays Tehmur, a limping two-bit hustler. He's a throwaway character, a mere sidekick, but so compelling is this amazing performer that he takes over the film, his track emerging the most genuine and most impassioned -- even though it's meant merely as a distraction.

Siddiqui perfectly creates a creature of the gutters, one raised on ridicule and lovelessness, and one who thus longs only for love.

His eyes do the talking, sure, but that one chase sequence where he bolts through Bombay crowds, still limping, may well be the film's highest point.

One of my favourite actors working in current cinema, Sharma lights up whatever screen he appears in. But rarely does he get to play this unhinged a character.

This one is a wonderfully whimsical wastrel who pretends to be insane just so he can get out of doing the chores.

Sharma plays madcap with glorious elan, making even flatter lines work with consistently killer dialogue delivery and immaculate timing. Super, super fun.

Showy theatrical grandstanding is often mistaken for good acting, and it takes a lot for a leading man in this country to give up the vanity and go deeply internal.

Deol plays a stuffed shirt in Shanghai, a conflicted bureaucrat who seems utterly apathetic to the murky world around him.

Handed a simple assignment merely so he can shove it under the rug, he discovers there is a certain basic honesty, a schoolboy morality perhaps, ingrained within him.

He can't take it lying down. It's a deliberate, constantly solid performance.

Rarely does an actor get a film that steps back and lets him do his thing.

And considering he's the hypertalented Nawazuddin Siddiqui, his thing is very special indeed.

With all the rawness of Pacino in Scarface, he starts out intense and keeps it constantly on the boil.

We first meet his Bachchan-obsessed Faisal as a doped out wastrel, and can't help but be awestruck by his fearsome growth into a truly driven mob overlord.

Who cries when scolded by a pretty girl. Spectacular.

With legs of greased-up lightning and a perpetually intriguing personality, Irrfan's Paan Singh Tomar runs havoc as a character because you have no clue where he'll sprint next.

It's a searingly honest performance, one that has an actor do so much more than act.

Khan's commitment to the biopic comes through in every frame, and even when the film isn't working, he's galloping away, making us gape.

Making it impossible to look away.

The finest mainstream leading man we've had for decades -- or perhaps even ever -- Kapoor's constant and impressive reinvention continues with a film where his effervescence conquers all, from skepticism to disability to violence to, most importantly, silence.

Sunnily enthralling and irrepressible, he plays it with a smile. Mostly.

Because when Barfi isn't smiling, he's busy breaking our collective heart. It's an anguished, soulful, authentic performance, and balancing it with goofy humour makes it an artistic triumph.

He was striking in Talaash, Wasseypur might well mark the yardstick by which he's forever measured, but I firmly believe Kahaani was the ace of Nawaz's pack this year.

There isn't a single false or indulged note, it's all prime. Playing a brutal, boorish Intelligence Agent, he brings an interminable ferocity to the role.

The unceasing harshness, the cigarette smoke, the constantly threatening aura. The result: an authentically unpredictable character who scares you.

In a year where the big three are nowhere to be found on lists like this, it is then Nawazuddin Siddiqui's Khan who deserves to take a bow.

Gobsmacked.

Watching Hashmi in Shanghai an abrupt revelation, like being slapped in the face only to finally see clearer.

His character sounds straightforward, a videographer (with more than a passing interest in porn) who chances on a conspiracy and wants to help out, but Emraan plays him nuanced and authentic and, eventually, tormented. It's a bravura performance, and here's what I'd said about it in my review:

"He occasionally shoots porn -- this is off-camera, we see him ask his subjects to clear up and hear the hurried sounds of straps and zippers -- and later, when the film's heroine is about to sit on his bed, he instinctively barks that she sit somewhere else, because the bed's dirty.

It's a throwaway grunt but Hashmi nails it -- just like he nails highly energetic pelvic thrusts in a streetdance, one where he keeps biting his tongue, faux-scandalised by the words of the song.

It's one of the best performances from one of our leading men in quite some time, and in one chilling pre-climactic moment, when sitting on the floor and confounded by the situation, his plaintive wail is fittingly reminiscent of the late great Ravi Baswani's angst in Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro's darkest minute. Bravo."

Incredibly well done, then, Mr Hashmi.

Yours is the year's finest, bravest and most consistent performance. Congratulations are indeed in order.

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