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Academy Award for Best Actress
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Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to recognize an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Prior to the 49th Academy Awards ceremony (1976), this award was simply known as the Academy Award of Merit for Performance by an Actress. Since its inception, however, the award has commonly been referred to as the Oscar for Best Actress. While actresses are nominated for this award by Academy members who are actors and actresses themselves, winners are selected by the Academy membership as a whole.
History
Throughout the past 80 years, accounting for ties and repeat winners, AMPAS has presented a total of 81 Best Actress awards to 67 different people. Winners of this Academy Award of Merit receive the familiar Oscar statuette, depicting a gold-plated knight holding a crusader's sword and standing on a reel of film. The first recipient was Janet Gaynor, who was honored at the 1st Academy Awards ceremony (1927/1928) for her performances in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. The most recent recipient was Marion Cotillard, who was honored at the 80th Academy Awards ceremony (2007) for her performance as legendary French chanteuse Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.
In the first three years of the Academy Awards, individuals such as actors and directors were nominated as the best in their categories. Then all of their work during the qualifying period (as many as three films, in some cases) was listed after the award. However, during the 3rd Academy Awards ceremony (1929/1930), only one of those films was cited in each winner's final award, even though each of the acting winners had had two films following their names on the ballots. For the 4th Academy Awards ceremony (1930/1931), this unwieldy and confusing system was replaced by the current system in which an actress is nominated for a specific performance in a single film. Such nominations are limited to five per year. Until the 8th Academy Awards ceremony (1935), nominations for the Best Actress award were intended to include all actresses, whether the performance was in either a leading or supporting role. At the 9th Academy Awards ceremony (1936), however, the Best Supporting Actress category was specifically introduced as a distinct award following complaints that the single Best Actress category necessarily favored leading performers with the most screen time. Nonetheless, May Robson had received a Best Actress nomination (Lady for a Day, 1933) for her performance in a clear supporting role. Currently, Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role, Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role, and Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role constitute the four Academy Awards of Merit for acting annually presented by AMPAS.
Superlatives
Charlize Theron is the first and only African actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Monster (2004).
Katharine Hepburn, with four wins, has more Best Actress Awards than any other actress. Eleven women have won two Best Actress Awards; in chronological order, they are Luise Rainer, Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Vivien Leigh, Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Glenda Jackson, Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Jodie Foster, and Hilary Swank.
Only two actresses have won this award in consecutive years: Luise Rainer (1936 and 1937) and Katharine Hepburn (1967 and 1968).
Katharine Hepburn holds the record in the Best Actress category with 12 nominations. Meryl Streep has been nominated 14 times (11 for Best Actress and 3 for Best Supporting Actress), which makes her the overall most-nominated performer in all acting categories.
There has been only one tie in the history of this category. This occurred in 1968 when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand were both given the award. Unlike the earlier 1932 tie for Best Actor, however, Hepburn and Streisand each received the exact same number of votes.
Only twice have siblings been nominated for the Best Actress award during the same year: Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine in 1941; and Lynn Redgrave and Vanessa Redgrave in 1966.
Only two pairs of actresses have been nominated for Best Actress for the same role: Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis as Leslie Crosbie in The Letter (1929 and 1940), and Janet Gaynor and Judy Garland as Vicki Lester in A Star is Born (1937 and 1954). In addition, Judi Dench and Kate Winslet both received nominations (Dench for Best Actress and Winslet for Best Supporting Actress) for their portrayals of Iris Murdoch at different ages in 2001's Iris. Winslet and Gloria Stuart were also both nominated (Winslet for Best Actress and Stuart for Best Supporting Actress) for their portrayals of Rose DeWitt Bukater in Titanic.
The 71st Academy Awards (1998) presented the unique case of actresses being nominated in the same year for the same character in different films. Cate Blanchett was nominated for Best Actress for playing Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, while Judi Dench was nominated for (and won) Best Supporting Actress for playing the same character in Shakespeare in Love. In addition, Cate Blanchett is the only actress to be nominated twice for the same role (Queen Elizabeth I), first for 1998's Elizabeth and then again for 2007's Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Blanchett is also the only actor to win an Oscar for playing an Oscar winner, when she won Best Supporting Actress in 2004 for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.
Kate Winslet, at age 31, became the youngest actress to be nominated for five Academy Awards.
Halle Berry, who won in 2002 for her role in Monster's Ball, is the first and only woman of African descent to win the Best Actress award. Only six other black actresses have been nominated: Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Whoopi Goldberg, and Angela Bassett.
In addition, only Four actresses of Hispanic descent have been nominated for the Best Actress award but no one has yet won: Salma Hayek, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Penélope Cruz and Helena Bonham Carter. One Brazilian actress has been nominated: Fernanda Montenegro, who was the first Latin American actress ever nominated. Nicole Kidman is the first and only Australian actress to win the Best Actress award (The Hours, 2003); other Australian nominees include Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), and Naomi Watts for 21 Grams (2004).
Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard are the only actresses to win this award for a foreign-language performance: Loren for her Italian-language performance in Two Women (1960) and Cotillard for her French-language performance in La Vie en Rose (2007).
Jane Wyman, Marlee Matlin, and Holly Hunter are the only actresses in the post-silent era to receive Academy Awards for non-speaking roles. Wyman, playing a deaf-mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda (1948), was the first person in the sound era to win an acting Oscar without speaking a line of dialogue. Matlin won the award for her American sign language performance in Children of a Lesser God (1986), and Hunter for her British sign language role in The Piano (1993). Unlike Matlin, who is almost completely deaf in real life and thus does not speak a single word in the film, Hunter's narrating voice can be heard offscreen in a few scenes, especially at the end of the film.
Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep, and Jessica Lange have each won both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards.
No Best Actress winning or nominated performance is lost, although Sadie Thompson (1928) is incomplete and missing portions have been reconstructed with stills.
There have been no posthumous winners of the award. Jeanne Eagels was posthumously nominated in 1929 for The Letter (1929). She was the first person to be posthumously nominated for an acting Oscar, and is still the only woman ever to be so nominated.
The earliest nominee in this category who is still alive is Luise Rainer (1936 & 1937) followed by Joan Fontaine (1941). The earliest winner in this category who is still alive is Luise Rainer (1936 & 1937) followed by Joan Fontaine (1942).
Winners and nominees
Following the Academy's practice, the films below are listed by year of their Los Angeles qualifying run, which is usually (but not always) the film's year of release. For example, the Oscar for Best Actress of 1999 was announced during the award ceremony held in 2000. Winners are listed first in bold, followed by the other nominees.
1920s
1930s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
International presence
As the Academy Awards are based in the United States and are centered on the Hollywood film industry, the majority of Academy Award winners have been Americans. Nonetheless, there is significant international presence at the awards, as evidenced by the following list of winners of the Academy Award for Best Actress.
- Australia: Nicole Kidman
- Belgium: Audrey Hepburn
- Canada: Marie Dressler, Mary Pickford, and Norma Shearer were the winners 3 years consecutively.
- France: Claudette Colbert, Simone Signoret and Marion Cotillard
- Germany: Luise Rainer
- Italy: Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani
- Japan: Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine
- South Africa: Charlize Theron
- Sweden: Ingrid Bergman
- United Kingdom: Vivian Leigh, Julie Andrews, Julie Christie, Greer Garson, Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Elizabeth Taylor, Emma Thompson
At the 37th Academy Awards (1964), for the first time in history, all four of the top acting honors were awarded to non-Americans: Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Peter Ustinov, and Lila Kedrova. This occurred for the second time at the 80th Academy Awards (2007), when all four acting categories were similarly represented: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Javier Bardem, and Tilda Swinton.
See also
External links
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