Academy Award for Best Actress

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 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 [edit]

Throughout the past 85 years, accounting for ties and repeat winners, AMPAS has presented a total of 86 Best Actress awards to 71 different actresses. 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 (1929) for her performances in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. The most recent recipient was Jennifer Lawrence, who was honored at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony (2012) for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook.

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 (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 (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 (1936), 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 (1937), 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. 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.

Other awards for acting [edit]

Actors have also received special awards, or Academy Honorary Awards, for acting in specific films (such as in the case of James Baskett, who received a special honorary award for Disney's Song of the South). Child actors have also been awarded the Academy Juvenile Award.

Winners and nominees [edit]

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.

For the first six ceremonies, the eligibility period spanned two calendar years. For example, the 2nd Academy Awards presented on April 3, 1930, recognized films that were released between August 1, 1928 and July 31, 1929. Starting with the 7th Academy Awards, held in 1935, the period of eligibility became the full previous calendar year from January 1 to December 31.

Winners are listed first in colored row, followed by the other nominees.

1920s [edit]

1930s [edit]

1940s [edit]

1950s [edit]

1960s [edit]

1970s [edit]

1980s [edit]

1990s [edit]

2000s [edit]

2010s [edit]

Superlatives [edit]

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Katharine Hepburn, with four wins, has more Best Actress Oscars than any other actress. Twelve women have won two Best Actress Academy 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, Hilary Swank and Meryl Streep.

With two Best Actress Oscars and one for Best Supporting Actress, Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep are the only actresses, after Katharine Hepburn, to have won three competitive acting Oscars.

Only two actresses have won this award in consecutive years: Luise Rainer (1937 and 1938) and Katharine Hepburn (1967 and 1968).

Five women have won both the Best Actress and the Best Supporting Actress awards: Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep, and Jessica Lange.

Meryl Streep holds the record of 14 nominations in the Best Actress category. Streep has been nominated 17 times (14 for Best Actress and 3 for Best Supporting Actress), which makes her the overall most-nominated performer of all time.

There has been only one tie in the history of this category. This occurred in 1969 when Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand were both given the award. Hepburn and Streisand each received exactly the same number of votes.

Life expectancy of winners [edit]

In 2001 Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh published a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine in which they found that

"Winning an Academy Award was associated with a large gain in life expectancy for actors and actresses... Winning an Academy Award can increase a performer’s stature and may add to their longevity. The absolute difference in life expectancy is about equal to the societal consequence of curing all cancers in all people for all time (22, 23). Moreover, movie stars who have won multiple Academy Awards have a survival advantage of 6.0 years (CI, 0.7 to 11.3 years) over performers with multiple films but no victories. Formal education is not the only way to improve health, and strict poverty is not the only way to worsen health. The main implication is that higher status may be linked to lower mortality rates even at very impressive levels of achievement."^[3]

The authors did an update to 29 March 2006 in which they found 122 more individuals and 144 more deaths since their first publication. Their unadjusted analysis showed a smaller survival advantage of 3.6 years for winners compared to their fellow nominees and costars in the films in which their performance garnered them their award.^[4] However, in a 2006 published study by Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, MSc, Ella Huszti, MSc, and James A. Hanley, PhD, the authors found:

"The statistical method used to derive this statistically significant difference gave winners an unfair advantage because it credited an Oscar winner's years of life before winning toward survival subsequent to winning. When the authors of the current article reanalyzed the data using methods that avoided this "immortal time" bias, the survival advantage was closer to 1 year and was not statistically significant. The bias in Redelmeier and Singh's study is not limited to longevity comparisons of persons who reach different ranks within their profession."^[5]

International presence [edit]

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 for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

• Australia: Nicole Kidman (Kidman was born in the United States to Australian parents who were temporarily living in Hawaii; she is a citizen of both countries.)
• Canada: Marie Dressler, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer (Pickford, Shearer, and Dressler won their respective awards in three consecutive years, 1929–1931.)
• France: Claudette Colbert, Marion Cotillard, Simone Signoret (Colbert later became a dual French and American citizen.)
• Germany: Luise Rainer
• Italy: Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani
• Israel: Natalie Portman (Portman, born in Israel, has an Israeli father and an American mother, and is a dual Israeli and American citizen.)
• The Netherlands: Audrey Hepburn (Hepburn had a British father and a Dutch mother; hence, she was a native-born citizen of both countries. Hepburn spent her childhood and teenage years mostly in The Netherlands and Belgium.)
• South Africa: Charlize Theron (Theron later became an American citizen.)
• Sweden: Ingrid Bergman (Bergman became an Italian by marriage.)
• United Kingdom: Julie Andrews, Julie Christie, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, Greer Garson, Audrey Hepburn, Glenda Jackson, Vivien Leigh, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Jessica Tandy, Elizabeth Taylor, Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet (Taylor was born in England of American parents who were living there temporarily and who returned to the United States permanently in 1939. Hence, Taylor had dual citizenship and has been eligible to receive a damehood in the United Kingdom.)

There have been two years in which all four of the top acting Academy Awards were presented to non-Americans.

• At the 37th Academy Awards (1964), the winners were Rex Harrison (British), Julie Andrews (British), Peter Ustinov (British), and Lila Kedrova (Russian-born French).
• At the 80th Academy Awards (2007), the winners were Daniel Day-Lewis (British and Irish), Marion Cotillard (French), Javier Bardem (Spanish), and Tilda Swinton (British).

Multiple Awards for Best Actress [edit]

4 awards

• Katharine Hepburn

2 awards

• Ingrid Bergman
• Bette Davis
• Olivia De Havilland
• Sally Field
• Jane Fonda
• Jodie Foster
• Glenda Jackson
• Vivien Leigh
• Luise Rainer
• Meryl Streep
• Hilary Swank
• Elizabeth Taylor

Multiple nominations for Best Actress [edit]

Note: Bette Davis has ten nominations. Her performance in Of Human Bondage was not nominated for an Oscar. Several influential people at the time campaigned to have her name included on the list, so for that year (and the following year also) the Academy relaxed its rules and allowed a write-in vote. Technically this meant that any performance was eligible, however, the Academy does not officially recognize this as a nomination for Davis.

Multiple Nominations for Best Actress without winning [edit]

† Blanchett, Dench, Redgrave and Zellweger have each won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.
‡ Garbo, Kerr, Russell and Stanwyck received an Honorary Oscar.

Multiple awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress combined [edit]

Note: Ingrid Bergman, Helen Hayes, Jessica Lange, Maggie Smith and Meryl Streep have won Oscars in both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories, while Dianne Wiest and Shelley Winters have both won two Best Supporting Actress Oscars.

Multiple nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress combined [edit]

Note: All three nominations received by Cooper, Holm, Ladd, Lansbury, Revere, Tomei, Trevor and Wiest, as well as all four received by Adams, Barrymore, Grant, and Moorehead and all six received by Ritter, were in the Supporting Actress category.

See also [edit]

• List of Academy Awards ceremonies
• List of Best Actress winners by age
• Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
• List of actors who have won an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe, a SAG, and a Critic's Choice Award for a single performance
• List of actors nominated for Academy Awards for foreign language performances
• List of actors nominated for two Academy Awards in the same year
• List of actors with two or more Academy Awards in acting categories
• List of Big Five Academy Award winners and nominees
• List of superlative Academy Award winners and nominees
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
• Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role
• BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role
• César Award for Best Actress

References [edit]

External links [edit]

• Oscars.org (official Academy site)
• Oscar.com (official ceremony promotional site)
• The Academy Awards Database (official site)
• Photos of the best actress nominees for the 80th Academy Awards (People.com)