Academy Award For Best Actress - Superlatives

Superlatives

Superlative Best Actress Best Supporting Actress Overall
Actress with most awards Katharine Hepburn 4 Shelley Winters
Dianne Wiest
2 Katharine Hepburn 4
Actress with most nominations Meryl Streep 14 Thelma Ritter 6 Meryl Streep 17
Actress with most nominations
(without ever winning)
Deborah Kerr 6 Thelma Ritter 6 Deborah Kerr
Thelma Ritter
Glenn Close
6
Film with most nominations All About Eve
Suddenly, Last Summer
The Turning Point
Terms of Endearment
Thelma & Louise
2 Tom Jones 3 All About Eve 4
Oldest winner Jessica Tandy 80 Peggy Ashcroft 77 Jessica Tandy 80
Oldest nominee Jessica Tandy 80 Gloria Stuart 87 Gloria Stuart 87
Youngest winner Marlee Matlin 21 Tatum O'Neal 10 Tatum O'Neal 10
Youngest nominee Keisha Castle-Hughes 13 Tatum O'Neal 10 Tatum O'Neal 10

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.

Emma Thompson won a Best Actress Oscar for Howards End (1992) and a Best Adapted Screenplay Award for Sense and Sensibility (1995).

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. Unlike the earlier 1932 tie for Best Actor, however, Hepburn and Streisand each received exactly the same number of votes.

Barbra Streisand is the only actress who won a Best Actress Award (for Funny Girl) and a Best Original Song Award (for composing the song "Evergreen"); the latter one shared with lyricist Paul Williams.

Only twice have siblings been nominated for the Best Actress award during the same year: Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine in 1942, and Lynn Redgrave and Vanessa Redgrave in 1967.

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 (1997). These are the only instances of the younger and older versions of a character in the same film both yielding Academy Award nominations, thus making Kate Winslet the only actor to twice share an Oscar nomination with another for portraying the same character.

The 71st Academy Awards (1999) 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 of England in Elizabeth, while Judi Dench was nominated for (and won) Best Supporting Actress for playing the same character in Shakespeare in Love.

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.

Halle Berry, who won in 2002 for her role in Monster's Ball, is the only black woman to win the Best Actress award. Eight other black actresses have been nominated: Dorothy Dandridge, Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Bassett, Gabourey Sidibe and Viola Davis. Ross and Tyson were nominated in the same year (1972) for their respective performances in Lady Sings the Blues and Sounder; both lost to Liza Minnelli in Cabaret.

Charlize Theron, a South African, is the only African actress to win the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her role in Monster (2003).

The only Asian actresses to win are Vivien Leigh, whose mother had an Irish and Indian background, and Natalie Portman, who was born in Israel from an Israeli father and has dual Israeli and American citizenship. Merle Oberon, born to an Anglo-Sri Lankan mother and father of unknown ethnic origin, was nominated.

Ida Kaminska is the only Polish actress nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her role in The Shop on Main Street (1965).

Only five actresses of Hispanic or Latin American descent have been nominated for the Best Actress award, but as of 2008 none has yet won: Helena Bonham Carter (1997; her mother is Spanish), Fernanda Montenegro, Brazilian, (1998; the first Latin American actress ever nominated), Salma Hayek, Mexican (2002), Catalina Sandino Moreno, Colombian (2004), and Penélope Cruz, Spanish (2006). However, Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress award for her role in the 2008 film Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Nicole Kidman is the only Australian actress to win the Best Actress award (The Hours, 2002). Kidman also received nominations for Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Rabbit Hole (2010); other Australian nominees include May Robson for Lady for a Day (1933), Judy Davis for A Passage to India (1984), Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) and Naomi Watts for 21 Grams (2003). New-Zealander Keisha Castle-Hughes was nominated for Whale Rider (2003).

Sophia Loren, Marlee Matlin, 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 (1961), Matlin for her American Sign Language performance in Children of a Lesser God and Cotillard for her French-language performance in La Vie en rose (2007).

Cotillard was the second French actress to win the Best Actress award after Simone Signoret for her role in Room at the Top (1959). Claudette Colbert, who won the award in 1934 for her comedic performance in It Happened One Night, was born French but later became a U.S. naturalized citizen.

Jane Wyman, Marlee Matlin and Holly Hunter are the only actresses in the post–silent era to receive Academy Awards for roles that were non-speaking (in Wyman's case) or predominantly non-speaking (in Matlin and Hunter's cases). Wyman, playing a deaf 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, who speaks just once when she argues with actor William Hurt, won the award for her American Sign Language performance in Children of a Lesser God (1986), and Hunter, who narrates several scenes and speaks on camera in the last scene (although her face is covered) for her British sign language role in The Piano (1993). Unlike Matlin, who is almost completely deaf in real life, Hunter and Wyman can hear.

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. The only posthumous nomination of a woman for any acting award was Jeanne Eagels, who was nominated for Best Actress in 1929 for The Letter. She was the first woman to be posthumously nominated for an Oscar in any category.

The earliest nominee in this category who is still alive is Luise Rainer (1936), followed by sisters Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine (both 1941).

Luise Rainer is one of only two acting winners who have ever reached the age of 100, the other being George Burns.

The earliest Oscars where all 5 Best Actress nominations are alive is at the 44th Academy Awards. The most recent where all 5 have died is at the 35th Academy Awards

As of 2011 the earliest Oscars where all 4 acting winners are alive is the 34th Academy Awards, while the most recent where all 4 have died is the 54th Academy Awards.

The earliest Oscars where both lead acting winning are alive is at the 34th Academy Awards. The most recent where both have died is at the 54th Academy Awards.

The earliest Oscars where all 20 acting nominations are alive is at the 56th Academy Awards (1983), the most recent all 20 have died is at the 15th Academy Awards (1942).

The first woman to win Best Actress for a Performance in a color film was Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind; to date the last woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress in an all black-and-white film was Elizabeth Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

The longest living winner is Luise Rainer, still alive at 102. The most short-lived to date is Judy Holliday, dying at 43 years of age.

In 1984, three of the five nominees—Sally Field in Places in the Heart, Jessica Lange in Country, and Sissy Spacek in The River—were all nominated for playing strikingly similar roles: farmers struggling to keep their properties running against the odds, not a particularly common role. Field won the Oscar for her performance; this was her second award. Lange and Spacek had both won previously.

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