Showbiz History: Faye's win, Winona's debut, Gaga's birth, and Angelina's first nuptials
Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 9:33AM 7 random things to celebrate on this day in showbiz history...
And the winner is... Faye Dunaway in Network
1920 Silent superstars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford marry. Their marriage last only 16 years but their only child together is still going strong: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! We kid sort of. They were the two most famous of the 36 founding members of the Academy, originally the brainchild of producer Louis B Mayer though the Oscars were not initially the main idea of the group...
1948 Two time Oscar winner Dianne Weist born in Kansas City
1977 Network and All the President's Men win the most trophies at the 1976 Oscars, four each (which was full of great lineups in multiple categories) but Rocky takes home Best Picture.
the very first shot of Winona Ryder on movie screens
1986 Stefani Germanotta born in New York City. Later reborn as Lady Gaga. And then A Star is Born as "Ally" just last year for her Oscar win.
On this very same day in 1986 a star is born in movie theaters as Winona Ryder walks toward the camera for the very first time and captures little Nathaniel's heart (and then the hearts of millions two years later in Beetlejuice)
1996 Angelina Jolie marries Johnny Lee Miller. Remember them as a couple? Scorching hot in Angie's initially volatile celebrity years
2019... and right about now this morning Nathaniel is off to a screening of something called Charlie Says (directed by American Psycho's Mary Harron!) which is playing at Tribeca soon and then hits movie theaters in May. It's about the Manson murders so that's apparently going around on movie screens this year. See also: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, just teased.
Reader Comments (27)
I miss wild, untamed Angelina!.... Never thought she would become so neutered.
I love how unaware of the cameras they were in the 70s
I loved how pissed off Talia Shire looked when Faye Dunaway was named the winner.
Awww, I love Lucas.
And while I'm happy he's had steady work on Elementary, I wish Johnny Lee Miller would've had a bigger film career. Very talented - and still scorching hot.
Louise Fletcher looks so glamorous!
I know better, but it's still hard to believe that Sick Boy, Eli Stone, and network Sherlock Holmes are the same person, and that person was once married to Angelina Jolie.
Jonny Lee Miller has had a busy career, before and after Trainspotting. He has done two versions of Mansfield Park, once as a child and once as an adult.
I wonder what it would be like if the Internet existed in the 1970s, # oscarsowhite and everything.
Doodie - weird decade to choose, as the 70s contains (depressingly still) the only Best Actress line-up in history with two black actresses... people must have thought genuine change was happening. Until it didn't.
David - strange, isn't it?
Brevity & ScottC-- he's so underrated!
Doodie - I often think about what the internet would have ben like for movies earliers than the itnernet existed too. As for that particular issue though. People have griped about the Oscars for as long as they've existed but movie culture was far more unified decades earlier since there were fewer movies made, no streaming content, and no home viewing really (until the 80s essentially when cable and vhs and all that began in force) so it was only going to the movies or home watching tv shows. I think today's audiences have a skewed perception of Oscars of Yore because of the "Oscars so White" thing. Until diverse actors are getting roles, you can't nominate them. (this is why i had issues with the target of that movement because it placed the blame squarely on the Academy rather than the industry itself which is the only thing the Academy can vote on!).
But it seemed like when a major non-white actors got one of the rare good roles in earlier decades (in mainstream films, I mean) they were nominated. The numbers started budging as soon as casting got more diverse... The numbres had been moving steadily up in most categories as opportunities became more frequent. The improvement didn't wait for #OscarssoWhite though that definitely helped awareness of systemic problems in the industry in terms of who gets opportunities.
(I'm including Latin American nominees in these lists though I'm aware people are always arguing about whether or not this or that person from South America is "white" or not but that's a subject to thorny for the purposes of this quick overview)
ACTRESS
1930s - 1 (oberon... though she was hiding her Asian heritage)
1940s - none
1950s - 1 (dandridge)
1960s - none
1970s - 3 (carroll, ross, tyson)
1980s - 1 (goldberg)
1990s - 2 (bassett, montenegro)
2000s - 5 (berry, sidibe, hayek, moreno, castle-hughes)
2010s - 4 (davis, wallis, negga, aparicio)
ACTORS
1930s - none
1940s - none
1950s - 2 (poitier, quinn)
1960s - 2 (poitier, quinn)
1970s - 2 (jones, winfield)
1980s - 3 (gordon, freeman, kingsley)
1990s - 4 (washington x 2, fishburne, freeman)
2000s -9 (washington, smith x 2, foxx, cheadle, howard, whitaker, freeman, kingsley)
2010s - 7 (washington x 3, ejiofor, kaluuya, bichir, malek)
SUPPORTING ACTRESSES
1930s - 1 (mcdaniel)
1940s - 1 (waters)
1950s - 4 (moore, umeki, jurado, kohner)
1960s - 3 (richards, moreno, lagarde)
1970s - none
1980s -5 (woodard, avery, winfrey, tilly, aleandro)
1990s -4 (goldberg, jean-baptiste, tilly, perez)
2000s - 10 (latifah, okonedo, hudson, dee, davis, henson, monique, agdashloo, barazza, kikuchi)
2010s -10 (spencer x 3, nyongo, davis, harris, blige, king, steinfeld, de tavira)
SUPPORTING ACTORS
1930s - none
1940s - 1 (ferrer)
1950s - 3 (hayakawa, quinn x 2)
1960s - 3 (iwamatsu, crosse, shariff)
1970s - none
1980s -8 (morita, ngor, gosssett jr, caesar, freman, rollins, washington x2)
1990s -6 (kingsley, garcia, davidson, jackson, gooding jr, duncan)
2000s -9 (kingsley, watanabe, del toro x 2, hounsou x 2, freeman, foxx, murphy)
2010s -4 (patel, abdi, ali x 2)
Nathaniel R: Good list though you are missing Adriana Barraza (Babel) and Susan Kohner (Imitation of Life) from Best Supporting Actress. (Kohner's mother was Mexican-American actress Lupita Tovar). And maybe add in Rami Malek (Bohemian Travesty) and Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia) since both are of Egyptian descent.
Steinfeld? She’s not white
Nathaniel - You're also forgetting Thomas Gomez nominated 1947 for Ride the Pink Horse (playing a very ethnic role).
...and howzabout Carol Channing for Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)?
Also interesting to note: Vivien Leigh and Julie Christie were both born in India, and Vivien Leigh's mother may have even been part Indian (she was born in India, but her heritage is unclear)
Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine and Liv Ullmann were all born in Tokyo.
I also forgot Jocelyn LaGarde in Hawaii (1966)
Oops, I forgot to add Harold Rollins from Ragtime (Best Supporting Actor) to my last comment.
Not to mention Keisha Castle-Hughes, whose mother (like Merle Oberon’s) is of Māori ancestry.
Michael Troutman -- one of her parents is filipinno if i recall correctly
Ken -- yes, but they're totally white. Their parents were just stationed there. And Thomas Gomez's parents were Spanish, so White European.
everyone -- i added the others i missed though. Thanks for the catches.
My comment about the "Asian" actresses was meant humorously (except for Vivien Leigh). It's just that I see trivia questions that ask who is the first Asian Actress winner/nominee and depending on how it's worded "Vivien Leigh" may be the correct answer.
And you're right about Hailee Steinfeld. According to Wikipedia her mother is half Filipina/half African-American.
And Peter Ustinov claimed partial Ethiopian ancestry on both sides of his family!
So from those lists (if you include the generous reading of 'people of colo'r since there are always disputes about how people are classified -- -and that will only get more confusing going forward since there are more and more people every year that aren't easily defined, you have the following stats of non-white people in the acting categories
1930s - something like 1.5% were people of color (2 of 130 nominees - strange number of nominees due to wildly fluctuating oscars lists while before they fully settled on 4 categories and 5 nominees in each)
1940s - 1% of all actors nominated were people of color
1950s - 5% of all actors nominated were people of color
1960s - 4% of all actors nominatd were people of color
1970s - 2.5% of all actors nominated were people of color
1980s - 8.5% of all actors nominated were people of color
1990s - 8% of all actors nominated were people of color
2000s - 16.5% of all actors nominated were people of color
2010s - about 14% so far but we have another year to get through
This was a strange detour today but we love oscar stats of all kinds.
I'm loving those genuine honest reaction shots,Faye releived,Talia dismayed,Liv pissed,Sissy knowing,Marie happy.
Very good work, Nathaniel. Your computer must be amazing.
If Talia had gone Supporting, she probably would have won. She was just coming off that nomination for Godfather 2
Fernanda Montenegro is miles away of being black. In Brazil, this would sound insane, once we have a huge black community. I can`t picture your concept of "white". It sounds like: you're white if you were born in the US or in rich europeans countries.
Joao -- i never ever said she was black. In American "person of color" is a very broad term meaning non-white (it could be anything Latina, Asian, Black, Middle-Eastern, First-Nations, etcetera. There seems to be much dispute about the term "people of color" from country to country, (everytime this comes up here at TFE I notice people from outside the US think it's a racist term but everyone in the US uses it including most people of color that I know!
but these definitions change from community to community (I know the Latino community keeps changing how they want to be called and disagreeing with each other -- from what I can gather as an outsider. I believe the new preferred phrase is Latinx but some people hate that). In many ways all the divisions are silly and hopefully we can at some point just be one human race without so many racial hangups -- particularly since people are largely getting more and more multiracial with each generation. But -- EXTREMELY GENERALLY SPEAKING -- South America is largely though of in one way whereas Spain is considered European and European is considered white. I don't make these things up. I'm just talking about stats and census reports and stuff like that. (though even those definitions change every few years making the conversations confusing. Census reports, from my memory working in HR used to have far fewer categories than they do now and "hispanic" in general has expanded greatly into lots of subcategories on such reports.
Fascinating stuff ... I think you should write a book - Nathaniel - (coffee table style) - Oscar trivia, stats & sins of omissions and all .... movies will always influence, connect and divide us ... if it's cleverly done (like most things here) it could be something you want to have on your table ;-)
Actually i did not imply your remark was racist. I just can`t make sense out of it: so everybody who were born in South America or Africa are "non white"? What about Charlize Theron? Here in Brazil we have jew communities, italian communities, german communities and it`s just unreal considered them all non white. Fernanda Monetengro, by the way, has portugueses ascendence so... It just does`t make sense at all. It sounds a bit eurocentric or US-centric or flat out crazy, because those people (Montenegro, Del Toro, Sebastian Lelio, Paulina Garcia, Charlize, etc.) are obviously white. If someone assumes Montenegro is non white in Brazil, it would be like a war, because she has never ever faced any kind of trouble because of the color of her skin.
Joao -- it was not my intention to cause offense. I admitted int he list that it was imperfect and I was doing it in the simplest most broadest terms for ease of compilation. Feel free to ignore.
Peace, my friend. I love your blog.