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A n Oscar is supposed to be the ultimate accolade. If you have one next to your name, you’re “made” for life. That is why speeches are so emotional.
When Gwyneth Paltrow gushes or Roberto Benigni clambers over the backs of the audience to reach the stage, or Sally Field seems so overcome that people actually like her, it is because they realise the significance of what they have achieved.
“When I look down at this golden statue, may it remind me and every little child, that no matter where you're from, your dreams are valid,” Lupita Nyong’o famously declared after winning her Academy Award for 12 Years a Slave.
New roles will become available for actors who have the statuette on their mantlepiece. Producers whose pictures have won Oscars will find it that much easier to secure financing for future projects. The awards don’t just help you get bookings in popular restaurants. They provide opportunities for careers to blossom.
That, at least, is the theory. Look back at Oscar history, though, and you’ll see a surprising number of examples of former winners who’ve either faded into anonymity or seen their careers wobble and unwind.
Show all 10 1 /10Forgotten Oscar winners Forgotten Oscar winners Luise Rainer Until comparatively recently, if you went to the Chelsea Arts Club on a Sunday afternoon, you might catch a glimpse of an extremely tiny, extremely elegant and elfin old lady having lunch with her friends. She lived to be 104 and few seemed to realise she had once been one of the world’s most famous movie stars. Rainer (1910-2014) won Best Actress Oscars in consecutive years for The Great Ziegfield (1936) and The Good Earth (1937). She was under contract at MGM but, by the late 1930s, was fed up with Hollywood. She didn’t get on with studio boss Louis B Mayer. After the war, she moved to Europe and disappeared from the public eye. It was only when she died that the obituary writers realised quite how startling her achievements on screen had been.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Mike Van Diem When young Dutch film director Mike van Diem, won the Best Foreign Language Oscar for period drama Character (1997) in 1998, a glittering Hollywood career seemed to beckon. He had already won a student Oscar. Van Diem was lured over to the US to direct Robert Redford and Brad Pitt in a huge-budget espionage thriller called Spy Game. He argued with his producers and left the project, which was directed by Tony Scott instead and was a resounding failure. Van Diem returned to the Netherlands and quietly pursued his career there as if he had never left. He has made a few more films, including the romantic comedy The Surprise, but his Oscar-winning success is long forgotten.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Paul Haggis When Paul Haggis won his Oscar for Crash in 2006, the natural assumption was that he would soon establish himself as one of Hollywood’s leading writer-directors. Haggis had already scripted Million Dollar Baby for Clint Eastwood. He went to write further screenplays for Eastwood (Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima). He also worked on Bond movies and wrote and directed In the Valley of Elah (2007), one of the best films about the human consequences of the Iraq war. However, there was already a sense that Hollywood was shunning him. His poorly received 2013 romantic drama Third Person was made with Belgian tax shelter funding. By then, as has been well reported, Haggis had fallen out badly with the Church of Scientology. When that happens, not even an Oscar is effective as an amulet to protect your career.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Dollar Bottom/James Kennaway The brilliant Perthshire-born writer James Kennaway isn’t very well remembered today. Not even posthumously being part of an Oscar-winning Scottish success has kept him in the public mind. Kennaway, who died aged 40 in a car crash in 1968, was a prodigiously talented novelist and screenwriter. His first book, Tunes of Glory, was made into a film which provided Alec Guinness with one of his very best roles as the martinet but very neurotic military officer. He scripted Basil Dearden’s juvenile delinquency drama, Violent Playground, and was one of the writers on The Battle of Britain. Thirteen years after his death, his short story, The Dollar Bottom (1981), about a business savvy Scottish schoolboy who sets up an insurance scheme for his fellow pupils against getting caned, won the Oscar for Best Short, but the film is rarely revived today. Few remember the that Kennaway played in a rare Scottish Oscar success.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Mira Sorvino Mira Sorvino isn’t exactly forgotten but she is one of those whose career suffered as a result of her toxic entanglement with Harvey Weinstein. She won an Oscar with Weinstein’s company Miramax for Mighty Aphrodite (1995), but almost immediately her career began to falter. She was still working regularly but wasn’t getting the plum roles that you’d expect to be offered to an A-list star with a freshly minted Academy award. She later told The New Yorker that she felt that she was being ignored because she had resisted Weinstein’s advances. “There may have been other factors, but I definitely felt iced out and that my rejection of Harvey had something to do with it,” she commented.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Thomas Mitchell Look at the list of supporting actor Oscar nominees over the years and you can’t help but notice a significant change in their profiles. In the 1930s and 1940s, the winners tended to be character actors rather than stars. Mention classic western Stagecoach (1937) and movie fans will think of director John Ford and John Wayne and Claire Trevor. In fact, the only member of the cast to win an Oscar was Thomas Mitchell, playing the alcoholic doctor. Mitchell has many other striking roles in his filmography. Fans knew his films and recognised his face but not even the Oscar helped them to remember his name.
Alamy
Forgotten Oscar winners Haing S Ngor Haing S Ngor lived in Cambodia during the nightmarish years of suffering under the Khmer Rouge. He won his Oscar for playing Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran in The Killing Fields (1984). He wasn’t a trained actor (he had studied medicine) but he brought an authenticity that couldn’t ever have been found in such a gruelling role in a performance from even the most seasoned Hollywood star. After The Killing Fields, he continued to appear in movies but none had the same impact. He died in tragic circumstances, shot dead on the streets of LA in 1996. He was the first Asian man to win an Oscar and remains an inspirational figure in Cambodia but the Academy award didn’t translate into a glittering screen career.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Eileen Heckart Comedy-drama Butterflies are Free is remembered as one of the string of very successful, very kooky comedies Goldie Hawn starred in during the early 1970s. Few recall, though, that it was seasoned character actress Eileen Heckart who won the Oscar for her performance as the doting mother of the young, blind man who falls in love with Hawn.
Forgotten Oscar winners Hilary Swank Like Luise Rainer, Hilary Swank has two Best Actress awards (for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby). Swank (whose new film I am Mother recently screened at Sundance) hasn’t disappeared, but nor is she nearly as prominent in contemporary Hollywood as you would expect. She has had her share of flops and was heavily criticised for attending the birthday celebrations of Chechen hard-man ruler Ramzan Kadyrov. It is still a mystery, though, as to why her twin Oscar successes haven’t translated into greater stardom.
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Forgotten Oscar winners Neil Paterson Scottish author Neil Paterson, 1915-1995, was once dubbed “the best storyteller Scotland has produced since Stevenson”. A novelist and a former footballer as well as a screenwriter, he spent his retirement (as his obituary in the Independent pointed out) playing golf, salmon fishing and sitting on the boards of various quangos. His Oscar came for Best Adapted Screenplay for Room at the Top (1959) but Paterson didn’t make a big fuss about it. One of his sons reportedly used it as a bathroom door stop.
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