Showing posts with label Best Supporting Actor. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best Supporting Actor. Show all posts

Best Supporting Actor, 1949

Awards presented March 23, 1950


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

After studying acting in Chicago, Jagger came west, where he made his film debut opposite Mary Astor in a 1929 silent, The Woman From Hell. For the next decade he made frequent appearances in minor films, but in 1940 landed the title role in Brigham Young, which starred Tyrone Power. The part gave him substantial name recognition, and while he was never a leading man, he had a significant mainstream career as a supporting player in movies and on television for the next four decades. His last appearance was a guest shot on the TV series "St. Elsewhere" in 1985, six years before his death at the age of eighty-seven. His part in Twelve O'Clock High as a major under the command of an army air force general played by Gregory Peck earned him his sole Oscar nomination and win.    

... when it should have gone to ...  

Juano Hernandez
Hernandez plays Lucas Beauchamp, a black man accused of killing a white man in a rural Mississippi county, and targeted by a gathering mob eager to lynch him. But he has a defender in a white teenager, Chick Mallison (Claude Jarman Jr.), who proves that Lucas is innocent. Intruder in the Dust is not one of William Faulkner's better novels, but its film adaptation is one of Hollywood's great neglected movies. Directed by Clarence Brown, a Hollywood veteran who earned five Oscar nominations without winning, from a screenplay by Ben Maddow that shows signs of close collaboration with Faulkner, and filmed by Robert Surtees in Faulkner's home town of Oxford, Mississippi, it's a movie without major stars, but a beautifully chosen cast of supporting players: David Brian as Gavin Stevens, Chick's lawyer uncle who has to be persuaded to defend Lucas; Elizabeth Patterson as the indomitable Miss Haversham, the elderly spinster who stands off the mob at the jailhouse door; Porter Hall as the dead man's father; Will Geer as the county sheriff; and the citizens of Oxford and Lafayette County, Faulkner's Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha. But the standout in the cast is Hernandez, who was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Brazil and the Caribbean before moving to the United States. He was an acrobat and a boxer, performed in vaudeville and on radio and studied Shakespeare to improve his English diction, and made his Broadway debut in the chorus of the 1927 production of Show Boat. In the 1930s he appeared in several films by the pioneering black director Oscar Micheaux that were made for primarily African-American audiences. Intruder was his first mainstream film, and he continued his career, sometimes playing Indians or Polynesians, in films and TV through the 1960s. He appeared in another Faulkner adaptation, The Reivers, in 1969, and made his last appearance in They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970, the year of his death.

Lawyer Gavin Stevens (David Brian) speaks with Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez) in his jail cell
Hernandez and Brian in Intruder in the Dust 
Chick (Claude Jarman Jr.) falls into a frozen creek while out hunting with Aleck (Elzie Emanuel), and is rescued by Lucas (Hernandez), who takes him to his cabin while his clothes dry. Chick tries to pay Lucas, who proudly refuses. 
WHEN WE WERE EXTRAS from Joe York on Vimeo. A documentary about the Oxford citizens who appeared in Intruder in the Dust




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Best Supporting Actor, 1948

Awards presented March 24, 1949

And the nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 

Walter Huston in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Walter and John Huston with their Oscars. John won two: for directing
and for the screenplay of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Huston finally won an Oscar on his fourth nomination, though he should have been honored for Dodsworth, which earned him his first nomination. The reason he was a regular nominee but not a winner may have been that he was a determined and successful underplayer, never willing to sacrifice the integrity of the character for a showy moment. But the cantankerous old coot he plays in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre demanded showy moments -- it was the kind of role on which Walter Brennan built a career that won him three Oscars. It also made him the first (and so far the only) person to be directed to an Oscar by his own son. He had also appeared, in a small, unbilled role, in John Huston's first film as director, The Maltese Falcon.) 
 
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Best Supporting Actor, 1947

Awards presented March 20, 1948

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

This happens to be one of the few Christmas movies I can watch without feeling like I've OD'ed on plum pudding, and Gwenn's lovely performance as Kris Kringle is one of the reasons. I'm not sure that it's really a supporting performance, but I suppose that John Payne, who gives a charming performance in one of his few memorable films, is nominally the lead actor. In fact, this is a movie with an abundance of wonderful character performances: Porter Hall as the Macy's in-house psychologist, who goes nuts himself trying to deal with Gwenn's claim to be who he says he is; Gene Lockhart as the judge who finds his re-election bid threatened by having to put Santa Claus on trial; William Frawley as the judge's cigar-puffing campaign manager; Jerome Cowan as the reluctant prosecuting attorney; Thelma Ritter in her film debut as a Macy's customer; and even Jack Albertson in a bit part as a postal worker. And, of course, nine-year-old Natalie Wood. But the whole thing would fall apart with Gwenn's skillful knowledge of when to turn the twinkle on and off, a skill that Richard Attenborough lacks in the unfortunate 1994 remake. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Richard Widmark
This was Widmark's debut film, and it landed him not only an Oscar nomination but also a contract with 20th Century-Fox. It was also, in his own view, almost a kiss of death for his career: He believed that it handicapped him by typing him as a giggling psychotic who pushes old ladies downstairs, and he spent the rest of a career that lasted more than forty years avoiding roles that would have him playing the heavy. Still, he never got another role quite so memorable, but became a reliable second-tier star, one of those welcome presences like Sam Neill or Tom Skerritt or Scott Glenn, who can always be trusted to give a solid performance without stealing the thunder from the top-tier stars. On the other hand, who remembers that the nominal stars of Kiss of Death were Victor Mature and Brian Donlevy? 
Mildred Dunnock and Widmark in Kiss of Death

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Best Supporting Actor, 1946

Awards presented March 13, 1947
The nominees were ... 

Russell was born in Nova Scotia and grew up in Boston. As an army sergeant he lost his hands while working with explosives during the making of a training film. Director William Wyler had spent the war working on films for the Army Air Force, and remembered seeing Russell in a documentary about amputees, so he cast him in the part of Homer Parrish, originally written as suffering from neurological damage causing spastic paralysis. He coached Russell through his scenes, letting his genuine non-actorness show through. It worked splendidly, but the Academy presented Russell with an honorary Oscar that seemed to be designed as a consolation prize if he lost the race for supporting actor. Instead, he became the only performer to take home two Oscars for a single role. He left films after his Oscar win and earned a business degree at Boston University, but returned thirty-six years later for a small role in Inside Moves, and also appeared on episodes of the TV series "Trapper John, M.D." and "China Beach" and in the movie Dogtown. In 1992 he made headlines by selling one of his Oscars to pay his wife's medical bills.  

... when it should have gone to ... 

Rains's tortured mama's boy is one of his finest portrayals: menace tinged with charm tinged with guilt and more than a bit of psychopathology. This would be the last of his four unsuccessful nominations, though he would continue to work in films and TV for another two decades, making his last screen appearance as King Herod in The Greatest Story Ever Told. 

Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) and her son Alexander (Claude Rains) discuss the fate of the drugged Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in Notorious
Devlin (Cary Grant) maneuvers the Sebastians into helping him rescue Alicia
Sebastian goes to meet his fate


 
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Best Supporting Actor,1945

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

The role of the easygoing alcoholic father was the best one that Dunn ever had. A former vaudevillian who made his first films in 1929 and 1930, and had a leading role in Bad Girl in 1930, Dunn became a contract player at Fox, but aside from four Shirley Temple features he appeared mostly in B-movies. Like Jimmy Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, he was an alcoholic, and the Oscar did little to help him establish a major career. Despite bouts with the disease he continued to work, mostly in television, up to his death in 1967, including a successful sitcom, "It's a Great Life," in the 1954-56 seasons. In it he played a character not far from the one for which he received the Oscar: a deadbeat dreamer.  

... when it should have gone to ...    
Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not. 

Walter Brennan
Maybe it was the fact that Brennan already had three Oscars that kept the Academy from giving him another chance at one for what is probably his best screen performance: the simple-minded drunk, Eddie, in To Have and Have Not. His rapport with Humphrey Bogart and, in her first film, Lauren Bacall, is a miraculously canny bit of scene-stealing. It helps that he is given the benefit of Howard Hawks's direction, not to mention Jules Furthman and William Faulkner's dialogue. Watch Eddie's befuddlement when Bacall turns his own catchphrase, "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" back on him.  

Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not 

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Best Supporting Actor, 1944

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

If the stereotype persists of Irishmen as either drunks or priests (but never both: the Production Code forbade that), we have Barry Fitzgerald to blame. Trained at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, he was brought to Hollywood by director John Ford in 1936 for the film version of The Plough and the Stars, and stayed on to be Hollywood's go-to Irishman, silver-tongued and hard-drinking, for the next twenty years or so. And even though he was a Lutheran he was a natural as a priest. Fitzgerald was the only person to have been nominated as both actor and supporting actor for the same role; the Academy changed the rules to prevent that from happening again, though the distinction between leading and supporting remains a hard one to make. Fitzgerald also made the news when he accidentally broke the head off of his Oscar. During the war, the statuettes were made of plaster; winners received metal replacements after the war ended.   

... when it should have gone to ... 

Edward G. Robinson
Robinson's omission from the nominees remains one of the Academy's most glaring injustices. His quietly diligent insurance investigator, Barton Keyes, is a wonderful foil for Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray's murderous insurance-scam artists. The omission is compounded by the fact that Robinson never received a nomination, even in the days when he was a gangster for Warner Bros. or when he starred in Fritz Lang's noir classics The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild in 1970, but his 1973 honorary award from the Academy, although voted on before his death, was accepted by his widow.
Robinson and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 

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Best Supporting Actor, 1943

Awards presented March 2, 1944
The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

Often cast as an Englishman, Coburn was actually born in Savannah, Georgia. He spent most of his early career on stage and made his film debut in his late fifties, in 1933. His career as a lovable, sophisticated grandfather type flourished in the 1940s, but extended through the 1950s, including two memorable outings with Marilyn Monroe, Monkey Business and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. He made his last screen appearance in Pepe at the age of eighty-three in 1960, a year before his death. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

With four nominations and no wins, Rains is one of Oscar's most notorious also-rans. Film after film, from The Invisible Man in 1933 to The Greatest Story Ever Told in 1965, is enlivened by his suave presence, and his role as in Casablanca as the amoral police chief whose heart is really in the right place fits like a glove. No one was better at charming menace or menacing charm. It helps, of course, that Rains is given some of the best lines ever written for a supporting player, from "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" to "Round up the usual suspects," and that he delivers them perfectly. And it has to be acknowledged that it takes skill and finesse to stand out in the company of accomplished scene-stealers like Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, S.Z. Sakall, Marcel Dalio, and Leonid Kinskey. 

Conrad Veidt and Claude Rains in Casablanca 



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Best Supporting Actor, 1942

Awards presented March 4, 1943

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 

Heflin, as the alcoholic buddy of gangster Johnny Eager (Robert Taylor), steals the movie, which is MGM's not very successful attempt at a gangster-noir movie. Warner Bros. would have cast Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis in the leads, but MGM goes for waxworks like Taylor and Lana Turner. Heflin was discovered on Broadway by Katharine Hepburn, who had him cast in the stage version of The Philadelphia Story, in the role played by James Stewart in the film. Heflin's Oscar helped him build a career of second leads and character roles, the most memorable being the besieged homesteader in Shane and the mad bomber in Airport.

... when it should have gone to ... 

Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert, and Rudy Vallee in The Palm Beach Story 
Vallee plays J.D. Hackensacker III, one of the richest men in the world, who gets entangled in the marital and monetary affairs of the penniless Tom and Gerry Jeffers (Joel McCrea and Claudette Colbert). He gives one of the great comic performances in the Preston Sturges oeuvre, adding to the mystery of why the Academy overlooked this film completely. Vallee first gained fame when, after graduating from Yale, he formed a band, "Rudy Vallée and the Connecticut Yankees." He became a popular radio crooner, with screaming and swooning teenage followers, in the late 1920s, and in public appearances would compensate for the lack of electronic amplification by singing through a megaphone. He made several film musicals in the 1930s, but his evident gift for comedy in The Palm Beach Story sent his movie career in a new direction. He appeared in two more Sturges films, Unfaithfully Yours and The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.  He also created the role of J.B. Biggley in the original Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and re-created his performance in the 1967 film version.
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Best Supporting Actor, 1941

Awards presented February 26, 1942

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

Crisp was born in Scotland and came to the United States in 1906. He began his acting career on stage, but moved into film work in 1908, as both actor and director. One of his most memorable early performances was as Lillian Gish's abusive father in D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms, and he played Gen. Ulysses Grant in Griffth's The Birth of a Nation. He continued to direct until 1930, when he became one of the most durable character players in Hollywood, making his last appearance in 1963 in Spencer's Mountain. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

What a great age for character actors this was. Ball of Fire was full of them: Sakall, Oscar Homolka, Henry Travers, Tully Marshall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, Aubrey Mather. So was The Lady Eve: Demarest, Coburn, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper. And even in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet had to shine in the company of Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook Jr. The film provided a definitive role for Greenstreet, who as Mary Astor noted, never "did a picture later in which that evil, hiccupy laugh wasn't exploited." It was his first film, too. He had been on stage since 1902 in England and then in America, but refused to make movies until he was sixty-two years old. His great scene in The Maltese Falcon comes at the end, when his smug, sinister façade crumbles at his discovery that the falcon is a fake. The teaming of Greenstreet and Lorre was so irresistible that they made eight more films together.
Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon
 

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Best Supporting Actor, 1940

Awards presented February 27, 1941

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

It was Brennan's third Oscar, and his record for most acting wins would stand until the 1968 awards, when Katharine Hepburn got the third of her record-setting four, followed by three-timers Ingrid Bergman (1974), Jack Nicholson (1983), Meryl Streep (2011), and Daniel Day-Lewis (2012). Brennan was nominated one more time, for Sergeant York. 

... when it should have gone to ... 

Edmund Gwenn in Foreign Correspondent
Only Alfred Hitchcock would have had the perversity (or the good sense) to cast George Sanders as a good guy and Edmund Gwenn as a villain in Foreign Correspondent. Gwenn, who would later become the Oscar-winning embodiment of Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, plays a creepy little man who almost succeeds in shoving Joel McCrea off the Westminster Cathedral tower. And then, in the same year, he's the gentle but ineffective Mr. Bennet, saddled with a foolish wife and five marriageable daughters in Pride and Prejudice. Gwenn had established himself on the London stage in the early years of the 20th century, attracting the attention of George Bernard Shaw and appearing in numerous Shaw plays. He made his first film in 1916 and appeared in one of Hitchcock's early films, The Skin Game, in 1931. Before World War II he divided his screen appearances between England and Hollywood, but settled in the latter, where he became a major character actor in the 1940s, working steadily until a few years before his death in 1959. 
Mary Boland and Edmund Gwenn as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice 

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Best Supporting Actor, 1939

Awards presented February 29, 1940
The nominees were ... 
Thomas Mitchell

In the same year, Mitchell could have been nominated (and would probably have won) for Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Only Angels Have Wings. Though he had made a silent film in 1923, Mitchell had been a stage actor until 1936, when he came to Hollywood and became one of the most valuable character players in the movies. In the 1950s he moved into television, where he won an Emmy in 1953, the same year in which he won a Tony award for his performance in the musical Hazel Flagg, becoming one of the nine actors with the Oscar-Emmy-Tony trifecta.
Claire Trevor and Mitchell in Stagecoach

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Best Supporting Actor, 1938

Awards presented February 23, 1939

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
A Technicolor feature, handsomely filmed by Ernest Palmer, this Romeo and Juliet in the bluegrass story about lovers (Loretta Young and Richard Greene) from rival horse-raising clans gave Brennan the second of his three Oscar wins. 

... when it should have gone to ... 
Ayres plays the trapped, alcoholic son of the Seton clan in this superb romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and directed by George Cukor. The film was a disappointment at the box office, which may explain why it received only one nomination: for art direction. Today it's regarded as a classic, thanks to the sparkling performances of its leads, but also to Ayres's poignant role, a melancholy counterpoint to the generally comic tone of the movie. Ayres began as a bit player and first gained notice when he was cast in the leading role in All Quiet on the Western Front. In 1938 he began playing Dr. Kildare in the popular series of MGM programmers, but his career was interrupted by World War II, during which, having been influenced by the antiwar sentiment of All Quiet, he declared himself a conscientious objector. Although there was a great deal of public outrage at his decision, Ayres served with distinction as a combat medic in the South Pacific. He resumed his career with an Oscar-nominated role in Johnny Belinda, and continued to work in film and television well into the 1980s. 

Lew Ayres, Doris Nolan, and Cary Grant in Holiday 

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Best Supporting Actor, 1937

Awards presented March 10, 1938

The nominees were ... 
... when they should have been ... 
And the Oscar went to ... 
Born in Vienna, Schildkraut studied acting under Albert Basserman in Germany and became a star in the company headed by Max Reinhardt before coming to America in 1920. He was a major Broadway star in the 1920s and made several important silent films, including D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm and Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings, in which he played Judas. His last major film appearance was as Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank, a role he had created on stage.   

... when it should have gone to ... 
Bellamy was the perfect stooge, the guy who, by his own admission, never got the girl. At least, he didn't in the two great comic films in which he lost out (as who wouldn't?) to Cary Grant, The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday. The genius of Bellamy in both movies is that he makes us believe that Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell might fall for this nice, dull guy as a way of escaping from the volatility of life with Grant. It's worth comparing Bellamy to another actor who plays a stooge to Grant: John Howard in The Philadelphia Story. We remember Bellamy in his stooge roles, but who can even remember Howard, who loses not only to Grant but also for a while to James Stewart? Bellamy had a long, long career: He made his first movie in 1931 and his last, Pretty Woman, in 1990, a year before his death at the age of eighty-seven. In 1933 he was one of the founders of the Screen Actors Guild, but from 1945 until 1960 his career was spent largely on stage and TV. From 1952 to 1964 he served as president of Actors' Equity, the union that represents theatrical performers, and at the height of anti-communist hysteria was responsible for preventing the blacklist from imposing itself on the theater, which became a refuge for blacklisted film actors and screenwriters. He won a Tony award in 1958 for his performance as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Sunrise at Campobello, a role that he re-created for the 1960 film version. His film career had a late revival in a handful of memorable roles: as the sinister Dr. Sapirstein in Rosemary's Baby and as one of the Duke brothers in the Eddie Murphy movies Trading Places and Coming to America. He reportedly turned down the role of Noah Cross in Chinatown, leaving the part open for John Huston's memorable performance. He received an honorary award from the Academy in 1987 "for his unique artistry and his distinguished service to the profession of acting." 

Ralph Bellamy, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth

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