Stars’ Final Films: Out With a Whimper or a Bang?

James Gandolfini is earning lovely reviews for "Enough Said," the new film, opening Wednesday, from writer-director Nicole Holofcener ("Friends With Money"). The movie marks "The Sopranos" star's first foray into love-story territory, and his last work as a leading man.

It's not the way Gandolfini intended to go out — he died unexpectedly last June of a heart attack at age 51 — but for an actor, it's not a bad way to go.

Not every great actor has done so well when it's come to that final point on their résumé. Especially when a film is released after the actor's passing, the air of expectation can be enormous, only to be deflated by a lackluster last work. Here's a rundown of how some other stars fared after their sudden deaths gave their posthumously released films the final words on their careers.

WENT OUT WITH A BANG

1. Peter Finch: He raged in "Network." He won his first acting Oscar, posthumously awarded.

2. Oliver Reed: It was only fitting the hard-living British actor would make his last on-screen appearance in a gladiator film called "Gladiator."

3. Bruce Lee: The electric performer died just months before his signature martial-arts movie, "Enter the Dragon," hit theaters. "Game of Death," released five years after Lee's death, is hardly a masterpiece, but even that hodgepodge features the must-see showdown of Lee versus basketball's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

4. James Dean: Nearly all of his brief, brilliant career, it seems, occurred after his death in a car crash at age 24. "Rebel Without a Cause" was released posthumously. So was "Giant." Both of his Best Actor nominations, for "East of Eden" and "Giant," likewise were posthumous.

WENT OUT WITH A WHIMPER

1. Bela Lugosi: He was Dracula. He was Universal Studios classic horror. And, in the end, he was a player in an Ed Wood movie. Cult-movie fans would come to embrace "Plan 9 From Outer Space" as a camp classic and Tim Burton's Wood biopic would further burnish the legend, but it was a long way from Transylvania.

2. River Phoenix: The onetime Oscar nominee died in 1993 before completing his work on the thriller "Dark Blood." Nearly 20 years later, director George Sluizer screened the finished unfinished film at festivals (narration papers over the scenes that Phoenix never shot). Reviews were charitable, if not exactly encouraging — an "engagingly modest" movie that "can feel like a puzzle whose missing pieces have been sketched in pencil," Jordan Mintzer judged for The Hollywood Reporter. Instead of theaters, as hoped, the film turned up on YouTube.

3. Chris Farley: Critics typically weren't enthusiastic about the comic's movies, but they really didn't like "Almost Heroes," the 1998 frontier comedy with Matthew Perry that was released about six months after Farley's death. Audiences agreed: "Almost Heroes" was Farley's lowest-grosser.

4. Whitney Houston: More than her handful of movies, the entertainer's handful of soundtrack albums were epic. So, it was a comedown when the gospel music of "Sparkle," Houston's posthumous movie, "fizzle[d]" beyond some brief success on Billboard's soundtrack chart.

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN

1. Heath Ledger: He dominated "The Dark Knight," and he won only the second-ever posthumous acting Oscar. But the on-screen story of Ledger didn't end in those triumphs. It ended in the hall of mirrors of "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," released in late 2009, nearly two years after Ledger's death. The movie, which saw Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law fill in the scenes that Ledger had yet to film, was an ambitious, visual dazzler that flopped at the U.S. box office, but was a solid performer overseas.

2. Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe: The sex symbols do fine work in John Huston's "The Misfits," written by Monroe's then-husband Arthur Miller. Gable's performance, in particular, is remarkable — the ultimate product of the studio system giving Hollywood's new realism a shot. But "The Misfits" is almost too quiet an end for the outsized stars. Gable died a few months before the film's 1961 release; Monroe, who never completed another movie, died more than a year after.

3. Orson Welles: You can say Welles sounds gravelly and looks immobile in "Someone to Love." You can say a Henry Jaglom movie, long on talk and short on dynamics, is ill-suited as a last on-screen work for the innovator of "Citizen Kane." But you can't say Welles is bad, or that Jaglom isn't sincere (and loyal to Welles), or that "Someone to Love" didn't save Welles' filmography from ending with a voice-over gig for the animated "The Transformers: The Movie."