Showing posts with label Best Actress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Actress. Show all posts

Best Actress, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress. 

De Havilland and her Oscars
De Havilland had seen Wendy Hiller in the Broadway production of the adaptation of Henry James's novella, Washington Square, by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, and persuaded producer-director William Wyler to obtain the rights to the play and to cast her as the plain, shy Catherine Sloper. It won her a second Oscar in the last of her five nominations, but it also marked the end of the major phase of her Hollywood career. She was only thirty-three when she won for The Heiress, but she would be absent from the screen for three years, returning in 1952 to star opposite Richard Burton in My Cousin Rachel. She then made sporadic appearances in mostly forgettable films through the 1950s and early '60s. In 1964 she appeared in Robert Aldrich's Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte, on which he had hoped to reteam Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, the stars of his hit What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? But after filming for a week, Crawford quit, claiming she was ill, but admitting to friends that she couldn't stand working with Davis again. De Havilland agreed to replace her. It was her last major film: Her later career consisted of guest appearances on TV series and cameo roles in such disaster movies as Airport '77 and The Swarm. 

Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift in The Heiress
De Havilland's Catherine climbs the stairs at the film's end

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Best Actress, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Lew Ayres and Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda 
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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Best Actress, 1947

Awards presented March 20, 1948

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Like the year's best actor winner, Ronald Colman, Young had begun her career in silent movies, making her screen debut when she was three years old and appearing regularly in movies starting in 1927 when she was in her teens. She made scores of movies in the 1930s and early '40s, often in leading roles, without quite becoming a major star. Her Oscar-winning role was her breakthrough, though the part of the Swedish-American farm girl who runs for Congress became hers only after Ingrid Bergman had turned it down. Even then, Rosalind Russell had been expected to win the Oscar for her role in Mourning Becomes Electra, but that film's miserable failure at the box office apparently doomed Russell's chances. Young received one more nomination, for Come to the Stable, and then turned her attention to television, where her series of half-hour dramas, "The Loretta Young Show," ran from 1953 to 1961. After a second attempt at a series, a "dramedy" called "The New Loretta Young Show" was canceled in 1963 after one season, she retired. In 1999, Young, a devout Roman Catholic, finally admitted publicly that her "adopted" daughter, Judy, was in fact the product of her affair in 1935 with Clark Gable.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Jane Greer
Greer is more honored today than she was during her film career, just as Out of the Past, which gave her her greatest role, was ignored by the Academy but is now regarded as a film noir classic, added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry in 1991. She plays the definitive noir femme fatale, concealing her murderous and larcenous aims behind a mask of innocence. Unfortunately, she was under contract to Howard Hughes, who kept a tight rein on her career, so she had little opportunity to establish herself as a major star. After appearing in several more films, including a reteaming with Robert Mitchum in The Big Steal, she began working primarily in television. In 1984 she returned to the movies for Against All Odds, a remake of Out of the Past, playing the mother of the character she had played in the earlier film. She also had recurring roles in the TV series Falcon Crest and Twin Peaks. 
Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past
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Best Actress, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947
The nominees were ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

After two previous losses -- one of them to her sister, Joan Fontaine -- de Havilland, one of Hollywood's most capable stars, must have seemed overdue for an Oscar. And this sentimental melodrama about a woman who gives birth to a child out of wedlock, gives him up for adoption, becomes a successful businesswoman, and is reunited with him later in life, was pure Oscar bait. Moreover, de Havilland had been off-screen for three years while she fought a celebrated legal battle that broke the studios' hold on actors, so To Each His Own was something of a grand comeback and the Oscar a sweet triumph.

... when it should have gone to ... 

The thing is, almost any Hollywood star who was neither too old nor too young could have played de Havilland's role in To Each His Own. But how many actresses, of whatever country, could have brought the beauty, the earth and fire to the role of Pina in Roberto Rossellini's neorealistic masterpiece about Rome under Nazi occupation? It was the film that launched her career and would eventually lead to an actual Oscar, for The Rose Tattoo. A more courageous Academy would have given it to her for this one. 

Anna Magnani as Pina in Open City 
Aldo Fabrizi and Magnani in Open City



 
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Best Actress, 1945

Awards presented March 7, 1946
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

A bedridden Joan Crawford admires her Oscar
We can argue about what Joan Crawford was and what she became, but one truth persists: No one before or since fought harder to become and remain a movie star than she did, over almost half a century in movies. From Pretty Ladies in 1925 to Trog in 1970 she was a force for producers, directors, co-stars, and studio executives to contend with. And after twenty years in the business, she finally found the definitive role: a determined woman who makes a fortune in business but is almost undone by her poor taste in husbands and her spoiled daughter. If you want to superimpose Mildred Pierce on Joan Crawford née Lucille LeSueur, go ahead. She was nominated two more times after her Oscar win, and when her film career began to sag in the mid-1950s, she found a rich husband, Alfred Steele, the chairman of Pepsi-Cola, and when he died after three years of marriage tried to run the company herself, along with resuming her film career, instead of settling into a comfortable retirement. After the success of the grotesque What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? she accepted roles in low-budget horror movies like Berserk and Trog, and guest appearances on TV series like "The Man From U.N.C.L.E." and "Rod Serling's Night Gallery." (In the latter she was directed by twenty-three-year-old Steven Spielberg.) And as most people know, her image was tarnished posthumously by the tell-all memoir Mommie Dearest, by her adopted daughter Christina, and the 1981 movie in which she's played (or overplayed) by Faye Dunaway. But it's also worth recalling the insecurities that propelled her, and which, on the night of her triumph, led her to take to her bed with a fever. When she heard on the radio that she had won, she recovered and greeted the press in a dressing gown once the Oscar had been delivered to her. Even if I didn't think she deserved the Oscar for the movie, and I do, she deserved it for that performance alone.  
Ann Blyth and Crawford in Mildred Pierce

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Best Actress, 1944

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

Was Bergman's first Oscar win a consolation prize for losing the year before, when she was nominated for For Whom the Bell Tolls and starred in the year's best-picture winner, Casablanca? She was discovered by Kay Brown, who worked in David O. Selznick's New York office, in the 1936 Swedish film Intermezzo, to which Selznick bought the rights and starred Bergman in the 1939 remake. When MGM decided to make Gaslight, Selznick demanded that she receive top billing, which Charles Boyer, who had been a star much longer, protested. So for a time there was talk of replacing Bergman with Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, or Hedy Lamarr. Selznick finally relented on the billing of Bergman when Joseph Cotten, another Selznick player, was cast in a secondary role.  

... when it should have gone to ... 

Stanwyck in Double Indemnity 
Stanwyck was one of the most courageous actresses in Hollywood, second only to Bette Davis in her willingness to take on parts that made audiences love to hate her. And few of her roles were more hateable than Phyllis Dietrichson, who inveigles insurance salesman Walter Neff (a terrific Fred MacMurray) into a scheme to kill her husband and collect the insurance. In fact, Stanwyck was initially reluctant to take the role until writer-director Billy Wilder made her see what a great acting part  it was. This was her third nomination, and it found her at the peak of her career: In 1944 the Internal Revenue Services records showed that she was the highest-paid woman in America.
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity

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Best Actress, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Born Phylis Isley in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Jones married actor Robert Walker while studying acting in New York, and came with him to Hollywood, where she played small roles in B-pictures and the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men. She and Walker returned to New York where he found radio work while she interrupted her career to have two children. One day she went to producer David O. Selznick's New York office to read for a part. Selznick was smitten, signed her to a contract, renamed her Jennifer Jones, and started a publicity campaign for his new discovery. Unable to find the right property for her, he agreed to loan her to 20th Century-Fox for The Song of Bernadette. She won the Oscar and became Selznick's mistress, marrying him in 1949 after divorcing Walker. Selznick continued to manage her career obsessively until his death in 1965, after which she found few suitable roles. She married multimillionaire art collector Norton Simon in 1971, came out of semiretirement for a role in The Towering Inferno, and campaigned for the role of Aurora Greenway in Terms of Endearment, but after losing the part to Shirley MacLaine decided to quit films for good.     

... when it should have gone to ... 

This was, remarkably, the only nomination for Arthur, even though she starred in a number of classics, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Easy Living, You Can't Take It With You, Only Angels Have Wings, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. She had been in movies since 1923, and survived the transition to sound because of her distinctive squeaky-husky voice. She had signed a long-term contract with Columbia, and when it expired in 1944 she withdrew from movies, with two notable exceptions: Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair and George Stevens's Shane. Arthur was a favorite of both Stevens and Frank Capra. She attempted to move into theater, but was prone to crippling bouts of stage fright. She was set to play Billie Dawn in the original production of Born Yesterday, but quit the play before it opened on Broadway, presenting Judy Holliday with her breakthrough role. She did, however, have an extended run on Broadway in 1950 as Peter Pan. Her attempt at a TV sitcom, "The Jean Arthur Show," was canceled in mid-season in 1966. She did have some success as a drama teacher: One of her students at Vassar College was Meryl Streep.  

Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier

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Best Actress, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Garson was discovered by no less than Louis B. Mayer, when the MGM head, traveling in London, spotted her in a stage production. He signed her to a contract and cast her in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, creating a new Metro star virtually overnight. And MGM needed one, owing to the retirement of Greta Garbo and Norma Shearer in 1941, which gave Garson her choice of roles at the studio, including Mrs. Miniver, which had first been offered to Shearer. Garson was a major star through the war years, but her career began to decline in the 1950s. She caused a scandal by marrying Richard Ney, who played her son in Mrs. Miniver. Ney was twelve years younger than Garson. Though she or her studio publicists had claimed she was born in 1909, at her death in 1996 her true birth year was revealed to have been 1904. (During their divorce proceedings in 1947, her lawyer asserted that Ney had frequently commented on her age.) Garson's Oscar acceptance speech has become legendary for its length; it lasted a little more than five minutes. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

An essential Davis performance in what is perhaps the quintessential Davis movie: one that triumphs as entertainment (if not art) largely because of her performance. The director was the otherwise undistinguished Irving Rapper; the real auteur of the movie was Davis, who has to transform from an ugly duckling into a swan, skillfully showing the steel inside the mousy, withdrawn Charlotte Vale in the early part of the movie, as well as the insecurity lingering later in the poised and self-confident Charlotte. It's the archetypal "woman's picture," a genre scorned by critics until feminist writers began to question why portrayals of women's emotions and problems had been dismissed by them as inferior material for the movies, and began to seriously examine the themes and subtexts of such films. Still, there's a lot of hokum in the screenplay, based by Casey Robinson on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, who also wrote Stella Dallas, this movie's chief rival as the great Hollywood weeper. 

Paul Henreid lights one of the many cigarettes Bette Davis smokes in Now, Voyager

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Best Actress, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Fontaine's early film career was overshadowed by that of her older sister, Olivia de Havilland, who became an established star in 1935, her first year in movies. Fontaine made her first movie, No More Ladies, the same year, under the name Joan Burfield, but it was a small part in a forgettable film, and it was not until 1937, when she costarred with Fred Astaire in A Damsel in Distress, that she began to get more notice under the name Joan Fontaine. In the Astaire film, and even in such movies as Gunga Din and The Women, she seemed tentative and awkward, though undeniably beautiful. Alfred Hitchcock took advantage of the awkwardness by casting her as the shy second Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca, which made her a star and earned Fontaine her first Oscar nomination. The role in Suspicion, again directed by Hitchcock, was hardly a stretch from the part she played in Rebecca: In both, she's the passive spouse of strong-willed men. It's possible that the Oscar was a consolation prize for losing the award for Rebecca -- just as James Stewart's win for The Philadelphia Story was interpreted as a compensation for losing for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But it was a peculiar triumph for Fontaine in another regard: Her sister, de Havilland, was also a nominee. The only other time that sisters have been competitors for the same acting award was when Vanessa Redgrave was nominated for Morgan! and Lynn Redgrave for Georgy Girl. Though the Fontaine-de Havilland sibling rivalry is the stuff of Hollywood legend, it has probably been exaggerated by the press, and in the end de Havilland had the more substantial screen career, winning her own Oscars for To Each His Own and The Heiress.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

There's certainly nothing wrong with nominating Stanwyck for Ball of Fire instead of The Lady Eve, though the latter is a much better picture. In both films she displays the special Stanwyck blend of toughness and chic that earned her four Oscar nominations but never made her a winner. She received one of those consolation-prize honorary awards at the 1981 ceremonies. She had been in movies since the silents of the late 1920s, became a star in the 1930s, and shone brightest in the 1940s, when she was allowed to show off her range from the farce of Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve to the noirest of film noir, Double Indemnity. Her later career was primarily in television, especially the 1960s series The Big Valley and the 1980s series The Colbys. 

Henry Fonda falls under the spell of Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve

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Best Actress, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle.

Rogers's Oscar looks a bit like one of those semihonorary awards that get presented to performers who have done better work in better films but somehow never got rewarded for it. She had been in the movies since the early 1930s, and in addition to the magical teaming with Fred Astaire, had given delightful performances in Stage Door and Bachelor Mother, among other films. Her career lasted into the 1950s, and in 1965 she came out of semiretirement to appear on Broadway in Hello, Dolly! Rogers had a special quality of being bold but not brassy -- the girl next door, if that girl happens to be a sensational dancer and gifted comedian.

... when it should have gone to ...
Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story.

One of the most professionally made romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood, a tribute to taste and talent, particularly that of Cary Grant, James Stewart, director George Cukor, and Donald Ogden Stewart, who adapted Philip Barry's play for the screen. But mostly to that of Hepburn, who had worked with Barry on the play, turning what had often seemed like her weaknesses -- artificiality and condescension -- into integral parts of the character, and then allowing her to transcend them at the end. She had bought the rights to the filming of the play and used it to revive her screen career, which had stalled. After the commercial failure of Bringing Up Baby was blamed on Hepburn, who had been labeled "box office poison" on an infamous list compiled by a theater owners' organization, she bought her way out of her contract at RKO, went to Broadway and had a smash with Barry's play, and returned able to name her terms in a new contract at MGM.

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story 

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Best Actress, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940


The nominees were ... 
Vivien Leigh with her Gone With the Wind Oscar
Leigh's win was pretty much a foregone conclusion, especially after the celebrated nationwide hunt David O. Selznick mounted for an actress to play Scarlett O'Hara. It was mostly a publicity stunt, since Selznick had no intention of casting an untried actress in such a key role. Paulette Goddard, Jean Arthur, and Joan Bennett came closest to getting the role out of the roster of famous also-rans: Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, Margaret Sullavan, Tallulah Bankhead, Miriam Hopkins, Ann Sheridan, Anita Louise, Lana Turner, Frances Dee, and Catherine Campbell (the future mother of Patty Hearst). Leigh wanted the part from the moment she read the novel and heard it was to be filmed. She was not a complete unknown; her films Fire Over England and A Yank at Oxford had been widely seen. While filming the former, she fell in love with her co-star, Laurence Olivier, and came to the States to be with him during the filming of Wuthering Heights. They married in 1940 after both were divorced. The legend (too good to be entirely true, so it probably isn't) has it that she was first brought to Selznick's attention by his brother, the agent Myron Selznick, during the filming of the burning of Atlanta, which Selznick decided to go ahead with even though the casting wasn't yet complete. That scene was shot on December 10, 1938, but Leigh wasn't finally set for the role until somewhere around Christmas Day. Her performance easily eclipsed even her formidable competition for the Oscar, yet between Scarlett O'Hara and her other great Oscar-winning role as Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire more than a decade later, Leigh made only a handful of films. The war, which she and Olivier spent in England, is partly to blame, as is her delicate physical and mental health, but Selznick, to whom she was under contract, also has to be blamed for not providing her with suitable roles.
Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara

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Best Actress, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
One of the many times that a Davis performance, abetted by Warner Bros. production values, triumphed over questionable material: a cornball melodrama. It's often said that Jezebel was a consolation prize for Davis's not getting the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind -- polls had been taken that showed she was a popular favorite for the role -- but David O. Selznick never really considered her for the part. It's more likely that Warners used the opportunity to cast her as a Southern belle as a way to get a jump on GWTW. Though she had previously won an Oscar for Dangerous, Jezebel was the film that made Davis a superstar. It was her first major role after an epic battle with the studio. Infuriated by the poor quality of the roles she had been cast in after her first Oscar, Davis tried to break her contract, sailing for England, intending to make films there. A court ruling in the studio's favor returned her to the fold, but she had apparently gotten the message across: The studio paid her court costs and offered her a series of superior scripts. The lead in Jezebel had been sought by Tallulah Bankhead and Miriam Hopkins. The latter had played the role on stage, and losing the part to Davis touched off a famous feud that would rage off-camera when both were cast in The Old Maid. Though her second Oscar was her last, Davis would accumulate ten nominations.    
Bette Davis, Fay Bainter, and Henry Fonda in Jezebel 

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