Winning an Academy Award is not always a ticket to a golden Hollywood career
THE Oscars can do wonders for a movie at the box office, they can also do wonders for the career of an up-and-coming actor. But some have that the little gold statuette didn’t always illuminate their way.
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THE Oscars can do wonders for a movie at the box office. They can also do wonders for the career of an up-and-coming actor.
Despite being well-known on the Australian stage, Geoffrey Rush was relatively anonymous until his 1996 Oscar-winning performance as David Helfgott in Shine, which propelled him to stardom, bigger films and bigger roles.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal of cerebral palsy-affected author Christy Moore in My Left Foot, earnt him the 1989 Academy Award for best actor, and transformed him from offbeat actor into Hollywood leading man.
But not everybody has been able to convert Oscar’s gold-plated moment of glory into long-term success. Some established actors have also found it more of a hindrance to making good films than a ticket to quality roles.
Hardly anyone today has heard of the 1931 Oscar winner Marie Dressler. Her win for Min And Bill marked a potential revival of a film career stretching back to 1914. But even winning an Oscar couldn’t help her overcome cancer and she died in 1934. Her name consequently is not mentioned in the pantheon of Hollywood greats despite her Oscar.
Paul Muni won the 1936 Best Actor Oscar for playing the lead role in The Life of Louis Pasteur. Born in 1895 in the Ukraine, Muni made his name in theatre before he was discovered by Hollywood.
Warner executives hailed him as “the world’s greatest actor” and cast him in several box office flops but earned him two Oscar nominations regardless.
When he finally won his gold statuette for playing Pasteur it didn’t instantly mean he got his pick of the roles. He was miscast as a Chinese peasant in The Good Earth in 1937 and although his lead role in Oscar-winning The Life of Emile Zola in 1937 earned him another nomination, he lost the Oscar to up-and-comer Spencer Tracy.
He then starred in the critically admired but largely forgotten Juarez, playing Mexican politician Benito Juarez, before being confined mostly to secondary roles. Becoming more and more obscure, in 1946 he opted out of film altogether. He returned in 1959 to play the cranky old doctor lead in The Last Angry Man, again earning a nomination but no gong.
It could have marked a comeback but poor health forced him to retire soon after and he died in 1967. Muni’s name is little known today, outside of fans of Hollywood history.
Actor Quinn Cummings won a popular nomination in 1977 for playing Lucy, the precocious daughter of Paula (Marsha Mason), in The Goodbye Girl. She lost to Vanessa Redgrave, which was nothing to be ashamed of, but only had a handful of roles in films and on television before she gave up acting altogether in the ’80s. She later invented a baby sling, write books and a blog.
Marlee Matlin’s mesermising performance in the 1986 film Children Of A Lesser God saw the deaf actor win the award for best actor. While she has maintained a presence in the acting world, making films, performing in stage productions and appearing on TV, her roles post Oscar have failed to attract as much attention.
When a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience Haing S. Ngor was cast as photojournalist Dith Pran in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, he did such a great job that he took home a little gold man as best supporting actor. He made a handful of mostly forgotten film appearances over the ensuing decade but was shot dead by gangsters outside his Los Angeles home in 1996.
In 1999 Italian actor and director Roberto Benigni burst onto the scene starring in and directing the film La Vite E Bella (Life is Beautiful). The film won Benigni two Oscars — one for best actor and the other for best foreign language film.
His over-enthusiastic antics at the ceremony while collecting the award endeared him to the audience and made him famous. But his 2002 film Pinnochio, in which he also starred and directed, was an expensive flop and he has made few films since.
While Halle Berry continues to work, but critically speaking her career after her Oscar-winning performance in the 2001 film Monster’s Ball has been a bit of an anticlimax. Berry’s gritty portrayal of the widow of an executed murderer should have seen her handed meatier roles but she has mostly made crowd-pleasing superhero roles and box office bombs such as Swordfish, Catwoman and Cloud Atlas.
Originally published as Winning an Academy Award is not always a ticket to a golden Hollywood career
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