Best Supporting Actress, 1944

Awards presented March 15, 1945
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ... 

Barrymore was not the first choice for the role of Cary Grant's mother: Grant wanted Laurette Taylor, but her alcoholism took her out of the running. Of the three Barrymores, Ethel was the most reluctant film star. Lionel much preferred movies to the stage and made more than two hundred films. John oscillated between film and stage until his drinking made remembering lines and showing up every night too difficult. Ethel made a handful of silent films, but found the gratification of live audiences preferable, and had consented to make only one talkie, Rasputin and the Empress, with her brothers. Returning to the screen for None but the Lonely Heart at the age of sixty-five, she found the work much easier than the stage, and the good reviews and generous pay led her to make a score of movies before her death in 1959.  

... when it should have gone to ... 

Tallulah Bankhead
Bankhead got top billing in Lifeboat, but the film is an ensemble piece in which all the characters are literally in the same boat, so a supporting nomination would seem appropriate. Moreover, none of her previous films had amounted to much, so she was hardly in a position to demand recognition as a leading lady. She had made a few silents, and her distinctive husky voice led to her casting in several films in 1931 and 1932, but reviews were generally unfavorable so she returned to the stage. She scored her greatest theatrical triumph in 1939 as Regina in The Little Foxes, but the part went to Bette Davis when the play was filmed. She followed with another stage triumph in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which her role, as Sabina, allowed her to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience. It was a foreshadowing of Bankhead's greatest success as a performer, as a TV talk show guest. Her part as the cynical journalist who boards the lifeboat in a mink coat after their ship is torpedoed suited her to a T. It didn't revive her film career, however. After one more film, the flop A Royal Scandal, she gave up movies altogether. Lifeboat did provide one choice addition to the many anecdotes about her lack of inhibitions: A complaint was lodged with the studio because a visitor to the set, which was the huge 20th Century-Fox water tank, had seen Bankhead hike up her skirts to climb into the lifeboat, thereby revealing that she wore no underwear. Director Alfred Hitchcock, asked to discuss the incident with Bankhead, declined, saying it was unclear who should take responsibility for the matter: wardrobe, makeup, or hairdressing.
Hume Cronyn, Henry Hull, Bankhead, John Hodiak, Mary Anderson, Canada Lee in Lifeboat

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