Women of a Certain Age and the Best Actress Race
Thursday, October 22, 2020 at 1:30PM
NATHANIEL R in Best Actress, Oscar Trivia, Oscars (00s), Oscars (10s), Oscars (20)

This list/trivia article is revamped from a 2014 article...

 

With Sophia Loren (86), Meryl Streep (71 if she campaigns in lead), Frances McDormand (63), Michelle Pfeiffer (62), Viola Davis (55), Amy Adams (46), and Kate Winslet (45) all looking like viable discussion points for the upcoming Best Actress race, it's time to look at one of our favourite research areas: Age and Oscar Trivia. If any combo of five from those seven women make it (unlikely of course) we'll have our oldest Best Actress lineup of all time by a big margin. If only three or four of them make it we're still likely to have the oldest line up of all time though younger contenders like Andra Day, Vanessa Kirby, Elisabeth Moss, Jennifer Hudson, and Carey Mulligan (all in their 30s) are surely hoping to spoil this 'most mature' trivia party. 

Good news: The Academy is getting less ageist. We know because we've researched this for years. In fact as you can see in the "top ten most mature Best Actress lineups" after the jump, a good deal of the top ten is from recent years. When this first started happening we chalked it up to an anomaly due to Meryl Streep, but she's hardly the only senior citizen actress that they've nominated in the last 20 years. Ready for the list? 

The Top Ten Most Mature Best Actress Shortlists

A funny thing occurred while researching this: the years I thought of as elderly weren't. I immediately thought of 1950, for example, with those grande dame performances by All About Eve's Bette Davis and Sunset Boulevard's Gloria Swanson (two of the best performances to ever lose the Oscar) but both of those women were barely 50 (Grande Dame used to start young!) and the rest of the category was young, younger and youngest. I was also wrong about these years which average a touch or a lot younger than I remembered or was expecting: 1960, 1962, 1974, 1990 and 1992. 

RUNNER UP: (TIE) 1985 AND 2000
average age 43.4

 

If it hadn't been for the obscenely overdue status of Geraldine Page, a living legend who died just a year after the ceremony, another kind of history might have been made in 1985 with a win for Whoopi (but not because she was the youngest nominee). The youngest nominee often wins, actually. Case in point, Julia Roberts in 2000; Ellen Burstyn didn't have Geraldine Page's advantage of being overdue for a win. 

10. 2017
average age 43.8 

If only they'd given Saoirse this when she deserved it Frances could have been an easy winner this year for a better performance!

09. 2001 
average age 44


Two years in a row at the turn of the century the major Oscar battle was between a peaking beauty /star playing a struggling poor woman versus a legendary Oscar winner in a grim deadly drama. In both cases the former won.

08. 2018
average age 44.2

Glenn Close was the frontrunner but Olivia Colman was the critical favourite having a grand year but the writing was probably on the table all along. Only two women over 63 years of age have ever won Best Actress ... and those were Oscar's all time favourite Katharine Hepburn (her fourth win) and Jessica Tandy both of whom had their films nominated or winning Best Picture which is always a considerable advantage.

07. 2016
average age 45.6

The youngest contender won again. Fact: 29 is the most common age to win Best Actress but Emma was even a year shy of that.

06. 1931/1932
average age 46.6


It seems impossible to imagine it now but Marie Dressler, a fabulous actress, was a box office giant in her sixties way back at the dawn of the talkies. She had just won the Oscar the year before for Min & Bill 

05. 1989 

average age 46.8


1989: also known as "The Year That Scarred Young Nathaniel Forever". In a somewhat atypical move, Oscar decided to go with the old lady -- Jessica Tandy was the most senior acting winner of all time until Christopher Plummer's Beginners stole that trivia answer -- when they could've had a young superstar goddess during her ascension at the peak of her beauty. A look through Oscar history will show you that this almost never happens but 1989 was a weird year with Oscar having a very conservative moment, and bristling against or trying to resist any of the sizzling contemporary stuff (see also the shunning of Do The Right Thing and that year's critical darling / indie sensation sex, lies and videotape) and La Pfeiff was sizzling contemporary stuff.

04. 1978 
average age 47.6


I don't have much to say about this lineup other than "isn't it fab?" Not only is it full of sensational actresses, it's also very womanly in its thematic concerns. Geraldine Page as "Ivy" in Interiors is everything and gets my personal vote but Jane Fonda, the winner, is pretty damn terrific at charting her sexual entanglement with a disabled vet.

03. 1967 
average age 48.2


It's funny to think of Anne Bancroft as the original "cougar" since she was only 36 when The Graduate premiered, just six years older than the "young" man she was seducing, and the second youngest of the Best Actress nominees that year. Katharine Hepburn was giving the least interesting performance in the batch so of course she won. But what can you do? 

02. 2006
average age 50.6


AKA "The Year when Dame Helen Mirren Inexplicably Steamrolled and No One Raised a Fuss About It Even Though She'd Been Better Before and Most Of Her CoStars Were Doing Their (Arguable) Best Work Ever." Whew. I know that's an unwieldly title for any Best Actress year but this is a fun annual to talk about. We do it often.

01. 2013
average age 55


This lineup was so historic, age-wise, I was able to write about it for Vanity Fair at the time. It obliterated the previous oldest Best Actress lineup record. Do you think 2013 loses its record to 2020? We'll find out in March 2021.

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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