And the nominees were ...
- Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc
- Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit
- Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama
- Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number
- Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda
- Jean Arthur in A Foreign Affair
- Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc
- Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit
- Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number
- Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda
And the Oscar went to ...
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| Lew Ayres and Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda |
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| Jane Wyman |
It wasn't a great year for roles for leading actresses, and Wyman's stands out largely because she was mute the entire film, so it's the first Oscar for a silent role since Janet Gaynor won the 1927-28 award. Which is not to say that Wyman's performance was undeserving. She rediscovered the art of acting with the eyes that had been standard technique for any film actress before 1928. The film is a well-made melodrama that among other things challenged the Production Code by its presentation of rape and illegitimacy as facts of real life. It also ventured outside the comfort of the studio with fine location filming in Mendocino, California, which fills in for the story's Nova Scotia setting. Wyman had started appearing in movies when she was only fifteen -- she was born in 1917 but claimed to be three years older to get work. She was a "Goldwyn Girl" in The Kid From Spain in 1932 and one of the chorus girls in Gold Diggers of 1933, among other films. By 1938 she had moved into featured roles in films like Brother Rat, which also starred her future husband, Ronald Reagan, but her breakthrough didn't come until 1945, when she appeared in The Lost Weekend. The following year she earned her first Oscar nomination, for The Yearling. When her movie career began to fade in the late 1950s, she turned to TV work, and in 1981 began a long run as the manipulative Angela Channing on the prime-time soap "Falcon Crest."
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