Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
Awarded for "Performance by an actor in a supporting role"
Presented by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Country United States
First awarded 1936 (for performances in films released in 1936)
First winner Walter Brennan,
Come and Get It (1936)
Currently held by Christoph Waltz,
Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Official website

Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role is one of the Academy Awards of Merit presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to recognize an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance while working within the film industry. Since its inception, however, the award has commonly been referred to as the "Oscar for Best Supporting Actor". While actors are nominated for this award by Academy members who are actors and actresses themselves, winners are selected by the Academy membership as a whole. Under the system currently in place, an actor is nominated for a specific performance in a single film, and such nominations are limited to five per year.

Contents

History

Throughout the past 74 years, accounting for ties and repeat winners, AMPAS has presented a total of 74 Best Supporting Actor awards to 67 different actors. 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. Prior to the 16th Academy Awards ceremony (1943), however, they received a plaque. The first recipient was Walter Brennan, who was honored at the 9th Academy Awards ceremony (1936) for his performance in Come and Get It. The most recent recipient was Christoph Waltz, who was honored at the 82nd Academy Awards ceremony (2010) for his performance in Inglourious Basterds.

Until the 8th Academy Awards ceremony (1935), nominations for the Best Actor award were intended to include all actors, whether the performance was in a leading or supporting role. At the 9th Academy Awards ceremony (1936), however, the Best Supporting Actor category was specifically introduced as a distinct award following complaints that the single Best Actor category necessarily favored leading performers with the most screen time. Nonetheless, Lionel Barrymore had received a Best Actor award (A Free Soul, 1931) and Franchot Tone a Best Actor nomination (Mutiny on the Bounty, 1935) for their performances in clear supporting roles. 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

Superlative Best Actor Best Supporting Actor Overall
Actor with most awards Spencer Tracy
Fredric March
Gary Cooper
Marlon Brando
Dustin Hoffman
Tom Hanks
Jack Nicholson
Daniel Day-Lewis
Sean Penn		 2 Walter Brennan 3 Walter Brennan
Jack Nicholson		 3
Actor with most nominations Spencer Tracy
Laurence Olivier		 9 Walter Brennan
Claude Rains
Arthur Kennedy
Jack Nicholson		 4 Jack Nicholson 12
Actor with most nominations without ever winning Peter O'Toole 8 Claude Rains
Arthur Kennedy		 4 Peter O'Toole 8
Film with most nominations Mutiny on the Bounty 3 On the Waterfront
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II		 3 On the Waterfront
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II		 4
Oldest winner Henry Fonda 76 George Burns 80 George Burns 80
Oldest nominee Richard Farnsworth 79 Hal Holbrook 82 Hal Holbrook 82
Youngest winner Adrien Brody 29 Timothy Hutton 20 Timothy Hutton 20
Youngest nominee Jackie Cooper 9 Justin Henry 8 Justin Henry 8

Walter Brennan, the winner of the inaugural award in 1936, is the only actor to win the award three times (from four nominations). Five other actors have won the award twice: Anthony Quinn, Melvyn Douglas, Michael Caine, Peter Ustinov, and Jason Robards. Robards was the only person to win consecutive Best Supporting Actor awards, for All the President's Men (1976) and Julia (1977).

Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy share the greatest number of unsuccessful nominations, four each. The only other actors with four nominations were Walter Brennan (won three times) and Jack Nicholson (won once). Charles Bickford, Jeff Bridges, Robert Duvall, Ed Harris, and Al Pacino have each had three unsuccessful nominations.

Harold Russell was the first (and only) actor to receive two Academy Awards for the same performance when he won the Best Supporting Actor award and was also presented with an Academy Honorary Award for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Thanks to a voting quirk, in 1944 Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way became the only actor nominated in both the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor categories for the same performance, winning the latter. (Today, Academy bylaws preclude this from happening.)

Robert De Niro's 1974 win as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II is unique as the only Supporting Oscar won for playing a part previously played by a Best Actor winner (Marlon Brando in The Godfather). De Niro and Benicio del Toro (who won for Traffic) are the only winners for foreign-language performances in this category.

Although five actresses have been nominated for non-speaking supporting roles, John Mills was the only male actor to be so nominated. Mills won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a mute brain-damaged village idiot in Ryan's Daughter (1970). (This excludes actors who were nominated for Best Actor for silent movies in the silent era.)

Heath Ledger is the only person to posthumously win an acting Oscar in a supporting role. He won the Best Supporting Actor award for his portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight, 2008. He is only the second person to posthumously win any acting Oscar (the other was Peter Finch, who won Best Actor for Network, 1976), and the first to win from a posthumous acting nomination (Finch was alive when his nomination was announced).

The earliest nominee in this category who is still alive is Kevin McCarthy (1951). The earliest winner in this category who is still alive is George Chakiris (1961).

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 Supporting Actor of 1999 was announced during the award ceremony held in 2000. Winners are listed first in bold, followed by the other nominees. For a list sorted by actor names, please see List of Best Supporting Actor nominees. For a list sorted by film titles, please see List of Best Supporting Actor nominees (films).

1930s

1940s

Beginning with the 1943 awards, winners in the supporting acting categories were awarded Oscar statuettes similar to those awarded to winners in all other categories, including the leading acting categories. Prior to this, however, winners in the supporting acting categories were awarded plaques.

1950s

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 Supporting Actor.

There have been two years when none of the four top acting awards went to an American:

See also

External links

Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
1936–1940

Walter Brennan (1936) · Joseph Schildkraut (1937) · Walter Brennan (1938) · Thomas Mitchell (1939) · Walter Brennan (1940)
1941–1960

Donald Crisp (1941) · Van Heflin (1942) · Charles Coburn (1943) · Barry Fitzgerald (1944) · James Dunn (1945) · Harold Russell (1946) · Edmund Gwenn (1947) · Walter Huston (1948) · Dean Jagger (1949) · George Sanders (1950) · Karl Malden (1951) · Anthony Quinn (1952) · Frank Sinatra (1953) · Edmond O'Brien (1954) · Jack Lemmon (1955) · Anthony Quinn (1956) · Red Buttons (1957) · Burl Ives (1958) · Hugh Griffith (1959) · Peter Ustinov (1960)
1961–1980

George Chakiris (1961) · Ed Begley (1962) · Melvyn Douglas (1963) · Peter Ustinov (1964) · Martin Balsam (1965) · Walter Matthau (1966) · George Kennedy (1967) · Jack Albertson (1968) · Gig Young (1969) · John Mills (1970) · Ben Johnson (1971) · Joel Grey (1972) · John Houseman (1973) · Robert De Niro (1974) · George Burns (1975) · Jason Robards (1976) · Jason Robards (1977) · Christopher Walken (1978) · Melvyn Douglas (1979) · Timothy Hutton (1980)
1981–2000

John Gielgud (1981) · Louis Gossett, Jr. (1982) · Jack Nicholson (1983) · Haing S. Ngor (1984) · Don Ameche (1985) · Michael Caine (1986) · Sean Connery (1987) · Kevin Kline (1988) · Denzel Washington (1989) · Joe Pesci (1990) · Jack Palance (1991) · Gene Hackman (1992) · Tommy Lee Jones (1993) · Martin Landau (1994) · Kevin Spacey (1995) · Cuba Gooding, Jr. (1996) · Robin Williams (1997) · James Coburn (1998) · Michael Caine (1999) · Benicio del Toro (2000)
2001–present

Jim Broadbent (2001) · Chris Cooper (2002) · Tim Robbins (2003) · Morgan Freeman (2004) · George Clooney (2005) · Alan Arkin (2006) · Javier Bardem (2007) · Heath Ledger (2008) · Christoph Waltz (2009)

Complete list ·  · (1941–1960) · (1961–1980) · (1981–2000) · (2001–present)