The nominees were ...
- Charles Coburn in The Green Years
- William Demarest in The Jolson Story
- Claude Rains in Notorious
- Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives
- Clifton Webb in The Razor's Edge
And the Oscar went to ...
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.
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| Madame Sebastian (Leopoldine Konstantin) and her son Alexander (Claude Rains) discuss the fate of the drugged Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in Notorious |
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| Devlin (Cary Grant) maneuvers the Sebastians into helping him rescue Alicia |
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| Sebastian goes to meet his fate |
