by Nathaniel R
Tommy Lee Jones in JFKLet's discuss Oscar hiearchies, again. This one is ultra specific but we're doing it for balance since we did the supporting actresses last week. Who are Oscar's 10 favorite supporting actors of all time? We'll work the ranking like so: Supporting nominations count most, with wins acting like half a nomination to help determine rank. The tiebreaker is the spread of time of nominations which can denote either long term fandom on the Academy's part or shortlived enthusiasms.
In contrast to supporting actress where the leaders were clear and the nomination counts higher but among fewer people, very narrow statistics separated all of the runners up from the top ten. Though if you must know, the unlucky #11 was Tommy Lee Jones, who would have ranked 5th on the top ten had he won the Oscar for Lincoln AS HE SHOULD HAVE. But we'll discuss Tommy and the 7 other working actors who almost made the list after the top ten under "who's next?". But for now a shout out to the departed. They left behind great performances and almost made this list:
- Gig Young (1951, 1958, 1969*)
- Martin Landau (1988, 1989, 1994*)
- Charles Coburn (1941, 1943*, 1946)
- Melvyn Douglas (1963*, 1979*)
- Philip Seymour Hoffman (2007, 2008, 2012)
- Charles Bickford (1943, 1947, 1948)
- Anthony Quinn (1952*, 1956*)
okay on to the top ten list...
The Ten Most Oscar-Lauded Supporting Men
(for the purposes of this ultra niche list, leading acting stats are not included)
10 GENE HACKMAN (3 nominations, 1 win, 35 year span)
He's 88 years old and long-since retired. Sadly, no director has been able to coax him out of retirement.
09 JACK PALANCE (3 nominations, 1 win, 40 year span)
This giant of an actor (he was 6'4") died in 2006 after a long long career that took him from terrorizing Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (an absolute must-see!) through doing one armed pushups on the Oscar stage after winning the Oscar for City Slickers.
08 JASON ROBARDS (3 nominations, 2 wins, 5 year span)
Oscar's infatuation was so deep that they gave him a second consecutive win for a movie he's barely in! (Julia in 1977). Robards died a year after famously playing a dying man in his last feature film, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999).
07 CLAUDE RAINS (4 nominations, 8 year span)
Oscar's favorite supporting actor of the 1940s. How Oscar never gave this witty British actor a statue (not even an Honorary!) is beyond our comprehension. So many worthy performances. Four nominations without a win feels stingy given his high quality filmography.
06 ARTHUR KENNEDY (4 nominations, 9 year span)
Oscar's favorite supporting actor of the 1950s. Sadly he also never won. He was nominated once for Best Leading Actor, too, which means he's one of those rare thespians with 5 or more acting nominations never to win competitively. That group is very small and encompasses only 7 other stars: Amy Adams (5/0), Albert Finney (5/0), Glenn Close (6/0), Deborah Kerr (6/0), Thelma Ritter (6/0), Richard Burton (7/0), and Peter O'Toole (8/0).
05 PETER USTINOV (3 nominations, 2 wins, 14 year span)
Two of Ustinov's three nominations (Spartacus and Quo Vadis) are for epics set in Ancient Rome. His final nomination, which he won, was for Topkapi.
THREE interesting bits of trivia on Ustinov.
- Unrelated to this list he's also one of four Oscar-winning actors who were nominated for their writing talent as well (the others being Ruth Gordon, George Clooney, and Emma Thompson. The Tony awards recognized him for the same two talents with nominations for Best Play and Best Actor but he never won a Tony
- He had the exact same three acting nominations at the Golden Globes but the outcome was reversed, winning for Quo Vadis and losing for the two roles he won Oscars for.
- He wasn't famous until 1951 but all during the 1940s he was Angela Lansbury's brother-in-law.
04 ROBERT DUVALL (4 nominations, 42 year span)
He's 87 years old and still working. Two of his supporting nominations are for immortal classics (The Godfather and Apocalypse Now) and the other two for films that are or will be forgotten (A Civil Action and The Judge) so it's a hit and miss situation. He won his Oscar in the leading category though for Tender Mercies.
03 JEFF BRIDGES (4 nominations, 45 year span)
Jeff Bridges was that rare male actor that Oscar liked a lot while they were still very young. He received his first two nominations when he was 22 and 25 years of age. Though he graduated to leading roles quickly, he maintained an actor's actor cred and kept right on showing up for supporting roles, too, all throughout his career. He's 68 years old and still in demand for roles of all sizes. I could see him winning a supporting Oscar in the future to go with his leading trophy, couldn't you?
02 JACK NICHOLSON (4 nominations, 1 win, across a 23 year span)
For many years Nicholson and Meryl Streep were in tight competition for Oscar's favorite actor ever (barring Katharine Hepburn), but then Nicholson slowed down and Meryl Streep caught her second and third and fourth career wind and she's long since outdistanced him. That said he reigns on the all time best actor chart and she reigns on the all time best actress chart and then they both show up at #2 of the supporting charts too because they're greedy like that! Nicholson is 81 years old and will supposedly come out of retirement for the American remake of Toni Erdmann (a leading role) but we'll see.
01 WALTER BRENNAN (4 nominations, 3 wins, across a 6 year span)
The very first winner of the Best Supporting Actor category... and also the third winner and also the fifth winner. He was just hogging the category in its first six years! Though he was a prolific actor and kept right on acting in features through his death in 1974, perhaps Oscar felt they'd over-rewarded him at the beginning as he was never nominated again after 1941's Sergeant York, the only time he lost an Oscar race.
Who will join the list next? That's a good question and actually tough to predict. Here are the 8 living actors that were closest to making this list. Because the statistics are all so close, one more nomination would immediately vault most of them into the upper echelons of that top ten just listed. They are in descending order of how close they came to making the list
- Tommy Lee Jones (3 noms, 1 win, 22 year span) -One more nomination would vault him to 2nd place of all time!
- Christopher Plummer (3 noms, 1 win, 9 year span) -One more nomination and he'd rank 3rd of all time for supporting men but he's 88 years old and already holds the record for oldest acting nominee AND oldest acting winner of all time! He's in the history books no matter what.
- Willem Dafoe (3 noms, 31 year span) -One more nominations and he'd rank around 5th... as would most of the other men below...
- Al Pacino (3 noms, 21 year span) - One more nomination and he'd rank 3rd due to an extraordinary span of years. He hasn't been nominated in 26 years now. Next up are the ensembles of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
- Michael Caine (2 noms, 2 wins, 14 year span). Next up a retired criminals heist movie The King of Thieves with other beloved older thespians like Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon, and Jim Broadbent.
- Ed Harris (3 noms, 8 year span) For a good decade he looked like 'next most likely to Oscar' but it never came to pass. He's up for an Emmy currently for Westworld
- Mark Ruffalo (3 noms, 6 year span) -If he ever escapes superhero movies, he feels likely to return.
- Christoph Waltz (2 noms, 2 wins, 4 year span) -A flash in the pan or will Oscar love him yet again?
Do you think any of those 8 men will move into the top ten or are their Oscar runs (in supporting at least) over? Working actors with 2 nominations that could conceivably move up into the top ten if the next 10-15 years are very fruitful with supporting parts include but are not limited to: Christian Bale, Michael Shannon, Edward Norton, Jonah Hill, and Woody Harrelson.