Typically there isn’t much middle ground when it comes to teachers in the movies. Either they are inspirational heroes or tyrannical monsters. The template for the former came with 1939’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, in which Robert Donat played the eponymous teacher with considerable warmth (and aging makeup).
There is one trait onscreen teachers tend to share: they wield influence, which itself is a catalyst for great drama or laughs. The classroom is one of the few arenas where a single personality can shape dozens of lives simultaneously, for better or worse, which is why the teacher figure has produced some of filmdom’s most compelling heroes and its most chilling villains. And sometimes the teacher in question is as unforgettable as that one who had a role shaping your life—hopefully for the better. Here are 10 of the most memorable.
10. Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver (1988, dir. Ramón Menéndez)
In 1982, 18 students of Garfield High School passed Advanced Placement Calculus. That feat alone is impressive; the test is notoriously difficult. But then the Educational Testing Service grew suspicious because the passing students came from a largely Hispanic class in a rundown section of East Los Angeles. ETS investigated if cheating was involved. But the kids had only cheated low expectations, thanks largely to a teacher who believed in them. Edward James Olmos received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of math teacher Jaime Escalante. It’s a distinctive performance for an otherwise conventionally told story from writer-director Ramón Menéndez. Wearing an ill-fitting sweater and sporting a bad combover, Escalante mumbles, tells bad jokes and makes awkwardly inappropriate comments in class. But he is also relentless in his teaching, confident—correctly, it turns out—that his students can learn calculus.
9. Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969, dir. Ronald Neame)
Maggie Smith took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in this odd melodrama of a self-mythologizing teacher at an all-girls school in Edinburgh circa 1932. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is an ironic title, given that it is only Miss Brodie who is insistent she is in her “prime,” whatever that is. She is cultured, charismatic and profoundly self-deluding—a lover of art and beauty with a soft spot for fascist strongmen like Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco. Jean fancies herself a mentor to her students, but her nurturing is selective, favoring a small group of “Brodie’s girls” whom she calls “the crème de la crème.” The evemtual skeptic in the close-knit cult, Sandy (Pamela Franklin), senses the danger in the teacher’s reckless delusions combined with the hold she exerts over the students. Particularly disturbing is Miss Brodie’s pushing Jenny (Diane Grayson), whom she has designated as the beautiful “Brodie girl,” into an affair with the lecherous, married art teacher (Robert Stephens) with whom Jean has had an affair. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a disquieting examination of a teacher’s influence.
8. Richard Dadier in The Blackboard Jungle (1955, dir. Richard Brooks)
The Blackboard Jungle purports to tackle the social problem of “juvenile delinquency,” but what newbie English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford) finds at North Manual Trades High School is more violent hooliganism than mere teenage hijinks. Richard’s class is leery of him from the start, but their hostility turns violent when he physically restrains a student he catches assaulting a female teacher (Margaret Hayes). Shortly thereafter, Richard and another teacher (Richard Kiley) are waylaid by a posse of bad boys led by the cretinous Artie (Vic Morrow). The Blackboard Jungle generated controversy at the time, and not just for its early use of rock ‘n’ roll—Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” which bookends the film—but also for its unflinching depiction of classroom violence. The melodramatics are admittedly overripe at times. Still, Richard Brooks takes some risks, confronting the school’s racial tensions with startling candor—Sidney Poitier portrays a popular classroom leader who still has racial epithets lobbed at him—and successfully conveys the physical peril that Richard faces daily.
7. Sylvia Barrett in Up the Down Staircase (1967, dir. Robert Mulligan)
Sandy Dennis is at her best in director Robert Mulligan’s humane yarn about a first-year teacher navigating her way through a challenging high school in a low-income area of New York. Dennis’ Sylvia Barrett is refreshingly unremarkable but immensely appealing. She is kind and eager to make a difference, but she is not perfect. She is timid and unsure of herself, but such traits simply make her normal, not flawed. Scripted by Ted Mosel from a Bel Kaufman bestseller, Up the Down Staircase is more atmospheric than plot-driven. It is also frank about the travails of teaching—crowded classrooms, burdensome paperwork, kids with stacked odds against them—but the rewards, too. “This is where they spend 18 hours a day. We have them for six. Almost insurmountable odds, 18 to six,” a veteran teacher tells her as they walk along a ramshackle street near Calvin Coolidge High. “You’ll notice I said ‘almost’ because you can’t give up. You can’t give them up. They’ve been given up by too many already.” Too often overlooked today, Up the Down Staircase still resonates.
6. Lisa Spinelli in The Kindergarten Teacher (2018, dir. Sara Colangelo)
An English-language remake of a 2014 Israeli film of the same name, The Kindergarten Teacher presents a compelling, albeit pathetic, central character. Kindergarten teacher Lisa Spinelli (Maggie Gyllenhaal) is a would-be poet frustrated with her adult poetry-writing class, where her instructor (Gael García Bernal) and classmates are hardly encouraging about her work. Then she overhears one of her kindergarten students reciting a poem he has made up. Lisa is struck by its simple but potent imagery. She commits it to paper, turns it into her poetry class as her own, and is roundly praised. From that moment, she resolves to help this child (Parker Sevak) develop his gift. “Talent is so fragile,” she muses to a relative of his. “It’s so rare, and our culture does everything to crush it.” Gyllenhaal is perfectly cast, projecting the melancholy of someone who feels the world has let her down. Writer-director Sara Colangelo steadily ratchets up our anxiety as Lisa’s commitment to the boy becomes obsessive, and the nurturing teacher transforms into a parasitic one.
5. Paul Hunham in The Holdovers (2023, dir. Alexander Payne)
Alexander Payne’s prickly comedy-drama about three broken people making a connection over the Christmas holidays earns its sentiment. A purposeful throwback to American cinema of the 1970s, The Holdovers feels like a long-forgotten Hal Ashby movie rescued from the vault. Paul Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a flinty, thoroughly unpleasant teacher disliked by students and faculty alike at a New England all-boys boarding school. Professor Hunham hasn’t been dealt a generous hand. He has a distracting eye turn and a rare medical condition called trimethylaminuria that makes him smell like fish. Left in charge of a few students without homes to return to over Christmas break, the misanthropic teacher develops a bond with a volatile outcast, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and the school’s head cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) grieving the recent death of her son in Vietnam. Randolph’s heartbreaking performance won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Giamatti, who earned a Best Actor nomination, brilliantly captures the complexities of a man whose arrogance masks an aching loneliness.
4. Terence Fletcher in Whiplash (2014, dir. Damien Chazelle)
Damien Chazelle’s sophomore feature introduces arguably the most psychopathic teacher in cinema history. Set in a Julliard-style music college, Whiplash stars Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman, a first-year student determined to be the best jazz drummer since Buddy Rich. That is, if Andrew can survive Terence Fletcher, his demanding mentor—or tormentor, to be precise—played to vein-popping, Oscar-winning perfection by J.K. Simmons. He throws a chair at Andrew’s head, humiliates the young man routinely in front of classmates, and belittles him at every turn. Sample pedagogical moment from Fletcher: “You are a worthless, friendless, faggot-lipped little piece of shit whose mommy left daddy when she figured out he wasn’t Eugene O’Neill, and who is now weeping and slobbering all over my drum set like a fucking 9-year old girl!” Is Fletcher’s behavior really to push students to be their best, or is it no more complicated than the guy is a sadist? Do motives even matter when the teacher is sending furniture flying? Considering that Chazelle based the character on a high school music teacher of his youth, it’s a wonder the director isn’t still recuperating in a padded cell somewhere.
3. Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker (1962, dir. Arthur Penn)
The Keller family is nonplussed when Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft) arrives in Alabama to teach their daughter, Helen (Patty Duke, then 15), who was left blind and deaf from what was likely scarlet fever. The parents are desperate for the help, yet Annie, just in her 20s and never having taught, seems an improbable miracle worker. She is nearly blind herself and forced to wear dark glasses as any amount of light bothers her eyes. As history bore out, however, Annie Sullivan did work miracles, as did her challenging pupil, Helen Keller. For the girl’s parents, it is excruciating to watch their nearly feral child driven so hard by Annie, especially when Helen appears only to have learned obedience. “I don’t want her just to obey,” Annie tells Helen’s father (Victor Jory). “But let her have her way, then everything is a lie to her.” Arthur Penn, who had directed the William Gibson play on Broadway, maintains a stage sensibility. The Miracle Worker has a spare, simple beauty. It wisely understands that its power rests with Bancroft and Duke’s strong, physical and visceral performances. Both took home Oscars for their work. In the end, the indomitable will of teacher and pupil is the engine that fueled the miracle.
2. Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher (2001, dir. Michael Haneke)
Michael Haneke films scratch at the darker recesses of the human experience. The Piano Teacher is no exception. At the Vienna music conservatory where she teaches piano, Erika Kohut (Isabelle Huppert) is strict, demanding and casually cruel to her pupils. That classroom persona lies in stark contrast to her fraught, sometimes violent relationship with the overbearing mother (Annie Girardot) she lives with. There’s something else to know about Erika. She consumes graphic pornography at peepshows while inhaling the discarded tissues left by male customers. She cuts herself in tender regions of her body. Erika’s masochistic desires, albeit the controlled kind, bubble to the fore when she surrenders to the advances of a cocky, handsome student (Benoît Magimel) and presents him with a written list of demands for her own humiliation. Huppert is mesmerizing, revealing volumes with just a glance or a subtle shift of her lips. The film dives into the struggle for sexual dominance, even the control within sexual submission. What is fantasy? What’s love, for that matter? Is control a false construct? There’s a lot to chew on in The Piano Teacher, but viewers must come with an appetite.
1. John Keating in Dead Poets Society (1989, dir. Peter Weir)
Set in a snooty boarding school circa 1959, Dead Poets Society conjures an extraordinary prep-school teacher in John Keating. Portrayed by a glint-eyed Robin Williams, Mr. Keating begins shaking things up shortly after arriving at Welton Academy. “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys,” he whispers to his poetry students as they study vintage photographs of previous graduating classes displayed in a trophy case. “Make your lives extraordinary.” Mr. Keating urges his students to challenge conformity and dream big, an ostensibly noble lesson if ever there was one. What ignites the class’ imagination, however, is when they learn of the Dead Poets Society, a group Mr. Keating had organized back when he was a Welton student. The kids revive the club. Tragedy waits around the corner, and Mr. Keating the hero can become Mr. Keating the scapegoat in the repressive ‘50s. Williams’s finely calibrated performance demonstrates what makes the teacher so effective, but it stops short of idealization. Screenwriter Tom Schulman modeled the character on a beloved teacher at his own alma mater. It is unknown whether the future writer and his classmates ever stood on top of their desks in tribute to a teacher wrongly blamed for a student’s tragedy.
Honorable mention: Jim McAllister in Election (1999, dir. Alexander Payne), Charles Chipping in Goodbye Mr. Chips (1939, dir. Sam Wood), Dan Dunne in Half Nelson (2006, dir. Ryan Fleck), Mademoiselle in Mademoiselle (1966, dir. Tony Richardson), Bachir Lazhar in Monsieur Lazhar (2011, dir. Philippe Falardeau), Glenn Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995, dir. Stephen Herek), Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. in The Paper Chase (1973, dir. James Bridges), Dewey Finn in School of Rock (2003, dir. Richard Linklater), Carla Nowak in The Teachers’ Lounge (2023, dir. İlker Çatak), Mark Thackeray in To Sir with Love (1967, dir. James Clavell)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 