Each year come awards season we see hundreds of frozen grins and hear hundreds of ever so slight variations on that autopilot soundbyte "I'm just so honored to be ______." But how do the losing stars and snubbees really feel? One of my favorite things about celebrity biographies is that they have to dig a little deeper when it comes to the discussion of The Oscars; you can't fill whole books with soundbytes.
I was recently flipping through the new biography "Steve McQueen" by Marc Eliot and came across this passage on the Oscars. McQueen thought his sole nomination (The Sand Pebbles, 1966) was long overdue and eagerly participated in press events. He bought himself a burgundy Ferrari to reward himself for the nomination.
Yet on Oscar night, Paul Scofield won Best Actor...
The audience erupted in applause, even though Scofield was one of the many who did not show up. His co-star Wendy Hiller, accepted for him. She stepped to the microphone and said, "There is something very special in being recognized in a country other than one's own!"
And for Steve, there was something very unspecial about not being recognized in his own. After the ceremonies, Neile told a reporter that she was happy her husband had lost. "If he'd won, he'd have been impossible to live with," she chirped. "Not because of a big head but because he'd be worrying how to top himself next. I prayed he wouldn't win."
Steve McQueen in "The Sand Pebbles"
Steve said nothing to anybody that night. Several years later he was still bitter about the loss of the only Oscar nomination he would ever receive and took a jab at Marlon Brando, who won an Oscar in 1973 for his role in The Godfather; who not only didn't show up but had warned the Academy he wouldn't accept the award if he won it... Not long after Steve told Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, "Perhaps if I had announced that I wouldn't accept the Oscar, I might have won."
Following Oscar night, still having trouble finding his Sand Pebbles follow-up, he spent his nights drinking and womanizing and his days on an extended workout regimen.
pictorial evidence of his workout success after the jump...
That's his first wife (to the right) who was glad he lost the Oscar ;)
In most pictures, actors have to take their shirts off, or even strip down to shorts. If you look like John Milquetoast, John Public says goodbye."
-Steve McQueen
He makes it sound like he was shy about showing it off. LOL.
Those photos aren't from the book (though the book has your standard multi-page gallery inset) but there's plenty of stripped down anecdotes. Just after that Oscar passage there's a juicy bit about Steve McQueen's intense rivalry with Paul Newman. He even turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because he wouldn't share top billing with Newman; they even offered to split the world in two with each of them getting top billing in half of the Globe! Clearly, I need to read this whole book.
I wonder how that Jeremy Renner as Steve McQueen biopic is coming along? I suppose a lot rests on what happens with Renner's multiple frachise gigs: The Avengers, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol.