From 1950 to 1955, only one performer won the Best Actress Oscar from an original screenplay rather than a stage-to-screen adaptation. She was Audrey Hepburn, who took the prize for 1953's ROMAN HOLIDAY, at the 26th Academy Awards.
While most of the world was rebuilding from the brink of ruin, the USA, whose territories the war barely touched, transitioned from WWII into a period of booming prosperity. As discussed in my last alternative Oscar history post, this led to a rise in conservatism and the dreaded Blacklist. But as the 50s dawned on Hollywood, another existential threat rose to challenge the big screen. I’m, of course, talking about TV, that essential symbol of midcentury domesticity. If in 1950 the appliance was still a novelty, things changed quickly. Five years later, nearly 60% of American households held court around those all-too-tempting goggle-boxes. For the film industry, this was catastrophic, as it posed unprecedented competition.
People could now get what they used to get from cinemas from the comfort of their own homes. It’s not unlike the crisis caused by the rise of streaming platforms in our day and age. Only, back then, the American movie industry responded through an arms race for new forms of spectacle, technological innovations that the television’s small screen couldn’t hope to replicate. CinemaScope and other versions of widescreen filmmaking became standardized over the square-ish-ness of the Academy ratio. Genres like the Biblical epic surged in popularity, as did other marks of lavish opulence, musicals and the like. But also films that tested the Code’s limits, from Tennessee Williams’ adaptations to the gamine-lite (dis)pleasures of The Moon Is Blue.
But how did this reflect on the Best Actress race, both that of our actual Oscar History and the one dictated by my personal preference? And what about the rest of the world? Believe it or not, Hollywood isn’t the end-all-be-all of cinema…
Though she won the Oscar for BORN YESTERDAY, Judy Holliday's best performance of the decade might have been her March 1952 HUAC testimony. Sometimes, it's good to be underestimated as a dumb blonde.
First, let’s talk about the actual Best Actress races from 1950 to 1955. The decade started with a doozy, an all-timer lineup that saw Bette Davis valiantly battle Gloria Swanson for what would be the former’s third victory and the latter’s vindication against an industry that had long abandoned her. In the end, an up-and-coming starlet from the New York theater scene got the gold by playing a dumb blonde people were very keen on believing was the performer’s actual personality. For leftist-leaning Judy Holiday, those unfair assumptions proved useful. She won the Oscar, sure, but she also managed to weaponize this public persona of hers to escape the HUAC’s scrutiny.
The following season saw the return of Vivien Leigh from across the Atlantic to snag another little golden man by playing an iconic southern belle. She was the only replacement from the original Broadway cast of A Streetcar Named Desire, but Jessica Tandy would get her time in the sun, some four decades later. More interestingly, perhaps, is how Katharine Hepburn got nominated for one of her perpetual matrons in The African Queen, signaling the start of another phase in the Academy’s favorite thespian’s career. Next came Shirley Booth’s coronation, another mark of a strong moment in American theater and the pipeline from the Broadway stage to the Oscar podium.
At the 26th Academy Awards, Best Actress felt like a litigation of desire politics, as reflected in 1953 media. You had a bouquet of gamines – the chaste and romantic (Hepburn), the scandalous and wittless (McNamara), the wide-eyed and childish (Caron). Ava Gardner delivered the best performance of the lot in Mogambo, but the nomination was the prize for the sexpot trying to become a respected actress. And then there was Deborah Kerr, cast against type in a role defined by sexual indiscretion in From Here to Eternity. Maybe she should have competed in supporting, but who cares about a little reverse category fraud? Oh, and Grace Kelly had arrived. Hollywood, whose studio system had begun to crumble after Paramount and Olivia de Havilland court cases shook the status quo, took notice of this old-fashioned success story.
Some consider Grace Kelly's victory for THE COUNTRY GIRL one of the first cases of an actress "de-glam-ing" her way to Oscar gold. One wonders of this star turn would have a better reputation had it not won the big prize.
She got a measly Supporting Actress nomination in 1953, but 1954 saw her claim a Best Actress trophy for another stage-to-screen adaptation after conquering the year’s box office with that critically acclaimed The Country Girl and a pair of Hitchcockian arsenic-laced delicacies in Rear Window and Dial M for Murder. Honestly, though, Judy Garland losing for A Star Is Born was the biggest robbery since Brink’s, or so said Groucho Marx, a Kelly victory was inevitable. Looking back, it feels historically sound, if not artistically justifiable. In 1955, Anna Magnani took on another hallowed stage role by Tennessee Williams and won. Turns out that she only needed to act in English for AMPAS to give a damn about her genius.
Amidst all this, much else happened that’s worth pointing out in the Best Actress race. Consider Dorothy Dandridge’s historical nomination for Carmen Jones, when she became the first Black performer to score the honor. The next such moment came in 1972, to give you a sense of how little opportunity Black actresses had in Hollywood then, and how little interest AMPAS had in spotlighting the few who managed to thrive against the odds. Indeed, this show of potential progressivism on Academy’s part in 1954 is almost immediately contradicted by Jennifer Jones’ 1955 nomination for her yellow face in Love is a Many-Splendored Thing. Ah, Hollywood, a land of contrasts and absurdities. Even the industry took notice.
During this time, you started to see a flood of movies about the movie business, with stars cannibalizing their own personas to feed the camera’s voracious appetite. We weren’t yet in the era of hagsploitation, but the inklings of that nonsense were already present in Bette Davis’ The Star turn, in which she used one of her own Academy Awards as a prop and was tacitly parodying Joan Crawford’s public image. That putative rival of hers proved savvier than Davis, embracing the rise of new genres like noir and the western’s second coming, melodramas of desperate suburban housewives, and other such hallmarks of 1950s American cinema. She was even nominated for one of these turns, the horror-adjacent paranoia thrills of Sudden Fear.
Though Marilyn Monroe only started attending he Actors Studio in 1955, you can already see her striving for "the Method" in 1952's DON'T BOTHER TO KNOCK noir melodrama.
But, of course, there was more actressing going on than just the achievements the Academy saw fit to celebrate. Marilyn Monroe wasn’t taken seriously, but she marks the start of a Hollywood invasion of new theater methodologies, twisted from Russian teachings into American experimentation. In contrast, you had someone like Elizabeth Taylor, who was as traditional Old Hollywood as they came in terms of technique and her early-career submissiveness to the studio’s promotional machine. The Oscar queens of the past kept churning good work, too, even if middle age had robbed them of their shine in the voters’ eyes. Consider Fontaine’s wild swings from psychological drama to period comedy or Barbara Stanwyck’s… everything.
Consider Ingrid Bergman’s Italian period, expiating for the sin of adultery in the eyes of the American public and a paradoxically sex-obsessed and sex-hating culture. For fans of the actress, this is a golden age of sorts, culminating in six wondrous collaborations with Roberto Rossellini that expanded cinema's horizons and set the path from Neorealism into Modernist big-screen art. And speaking of Bergmans, Ingmar was becoming more and more confident in his craft, bringing the best out of his many muses and dominating Swedish cinema’s image abroad. Oddly enough, the American distributor's promotion of Summer with Monika as a lurid blue movie was how he first found a foothold with the American public. But those films were only eligible in the second half of the decade.
Japan struggled under occupation, but its cineastes thrived within the limitations imposed on them, finding nifty ways to comment on current politics and societal maladies through genre fare and the historical obfuscation of period dramas, the famed "jidaigeki." Kurosawa proved especially popular in the West, though I’d argue Mizoguchi and Ozu and Naruse directed films of similar brilliance that just had the bad luck of not instantly capturing international audiences’ favor. Their industry also had its own Ida Lupino, when the great Kinuyo Tanaka sacrificed her personal and professional relationship with Mizoguchi to try her hand at directing. Turns out, she was a natural and became one of the first women to compete for the Palme d’Or. Up North, Soviet Cinema was booming, often in aesthetic and ideological opposition to what the rest of the world produced.
How can one regard Simone Signoret's tear-streaked face in CASQUE D'OR and not understand how she became one of the great stars of midcentury French cinema? This was a woman with a visage made to be immortalized by movie cameras.
Back in Western Europe, the French were split between the vanguard and those who made the “cinéma de qualité” that so disgusted the forward-thinking brats writing for Cahiers. That publication’s influence on how we perceive French cinema from this period can be detrimental, for it might justly shine a light on the genius of Cocteau, Melville, and Ophüls, among others. Still, it is also prone to erasure by snobbish dismissals of directors whose classicist style didn’t align with what those youngsters saw as the form’s future. Jacqueline Audry was severely underrated and almost forgotten until some recent restoration efforts brought well-earned attention to the transgressions she hid within convention.
Her Collette adaptations give us films like Minne, where Danièle Delorme spends an entire narrative looking for a man to give her satisfying orgasms, or the unabashed lesbianism of Olivia and the power struggle between Edwige Feuillère and Simone Simon. Amid these divided factions and fashions, Simone Signoret emerged as a star for midcentury tastes, earthy and full of carnal suggestion, yet weary, marked by the cynicism the war wrought, with eyes that always looked haunted, even when performing half-lidded seductions. In Italy, new stars were also rising, and they often mixed those same ingredients of glamorous sexuality with a bottomless pit of emotional depth hiding in plain sight. Think Sophia Loren or Silvana Mangano or Fellini’s wife and ultimate muse, Giulietta Masina.
Then again, most of their films were only available to American audiences and Oscar voters in the back half of the decade, so we’ll discuss them further next time. For now, let’s ponder those years when Darrieux solidified her legend, and Rita Hayworth started seeing the end of her glory days coming at her fast and furious. Those years of frothy movie musical acting contrasted with growing realisms elsewhere, the popularity of pulp and comedy in Britain, and the continuous influence of the stage on screen notions of what good acting could be. And let’s not forget the political landscape. Third Cinema was still a dream nobody had properly articulated, but its first sprouts were already blossoming from the earth.
As ever, refer to previous posts if you’re confused about what Honorable Mentions or Ineligible or On the Watchlist mean. Please share your own lineups and recommendations in the comments. I watch a lot of old movies, but even I have blind spots, and your suggestions often point me to them.
;)
1950
Ingrid Bergman, STROMBOLI
Bette Davis, ALL ABOUT EVE ☆
Yvonne de Bray, THE STORM WITHIN
Gloria Grahame, IN A LONELY PLACE
Gloria Swanson, SUNSET BLVD. *winner* ☆
Honorable Mentions: Peggy Cummins in GUN CRAZY, Joan Fontaine in BORN TO BE BAD, Judy Holliday in BORN YESTERDAY ☆, Barbara Stanwyck in NO MAN OF HER OWN and THE FURIES.
Ineligible: Michiyo Kogure in PORTRAIT OF MADAME YUKI, Natasha Parry in DANCE HALL, Janette Scott in NO PLACE FOR JENNIFER.
On the Watchlist: Leyla Badirbayli in ARSHIN TAKES A WIFE, Claudette Colbert in THREE CAME HOME, Columbina Domínguez in PUEBLERINA, Silvana Mangano in BITTER RICE, Lana Turner in A LIFE OF HER OWN.
;)
1951
Danièle Delorme, MINNE
Vivien Leigh, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE *winner* ☆
Anna Magnani, L’AMORE
Patricia Neal, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL
Shelley Winters, HE RAN ALL THE WAY
Honorable Mentions: Evelyn Keyes in THE PROWLER, Thelma Ritter in THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER, Jan Sterling in ACE IN THE HOLE, Elizabeth Taylor and Shelley Winters ☆ in A PLACE IN THE SUN, Jane Wyman in THE BLUE VEIL ☆.
Ineligible: Setsuko Hara in EARLY SUMMER, Kinuyo Tanaka in MISS OYU.
On the Watchlist: Cécile Aubry in MANON, Danielle Darrieux in KEEP AN EYE ON AMELIA, Anna Magnani in ANGELINA and THE BANDIT, Simone Signoret in THE CHEAT.
;)
1952
Joan Fontaine, SOMETHING TO LIVE FOR
Rita Hayworth, AFFAIR IN TRINIDAD
Machiko Kyô, RASHOMON
Barbara Stanwyck, CLASH BY NIGHT
Ethel Waters, THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING *winner*
Honorable Mentions: Joan Crawford in SUDDEN FEAR ☆, Danielle Darrieux in FIVE FINGERS, Dorothy McGuire in INVITATION, Marilyn Monroe in DON’T BOTHER TO KNOCK, Debbie Reynolds in SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN.
Ineligible: Nobuko Otowa in CHILDREN OF HIROSHIMA, Kinuyo Tanaka in THE LIFE OF OHARU.
On the Watchlist: Ava Gardner in PANDORA AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN, Katharine Hepburn in PAT AND MIKE, Judy Holliday in THE MARRYING KIND, Ida Lupino in ON DANGEROUS GROUND, Anna Magnani in ASSUNTA SPINA.
;)
1953
Anna Magnani, BELLISSIMA *winner*
Jane Russell, GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES
Barbara Stanwyck, ALL I DESIRE
Theresa Wright, THE ACTRESS
Diana Wynyard, GASLIGHT
Honorable Mentions: Jean Kent in THE WOMAN IN QUESTION, Marilyn Monroe in GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES and NIAGARA, Geraldine Page in HONDO ☆, Simone Signoret in CASQUE D’OR, Jean Simmons in ANGEL FACE.
Ineligible: Chieko Higashiyama in TOKYO STORY, Michiyo Kogure and Ayako Wakao in A GEISHA, Yoshiko Kuga in LOVE LETTER.
On the Watchlist: Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons in YOUNG BESS, Silvana Mangano in ANNA, Ethel Merman in CALL ME MADAM, Barbara Stanwyck in BLOWING WILD, Anne Vernon in EDWARD AND CAROLINE.
;)
1954
Ingrid Bergman, EUROPE ‘51
Danielle Darrieux, THE EARRINGS OF MADAME DE…
Edwig Feuillère, OLIVIA
Judy Garland, A STAR IS BORN *winner* ☆
Akemi Negishi, ANATAHAN
Honorable Mentions: Brigitte Fossey in FORBIDDEN GAMES, Grace Kelly in DIAL M FOR MURDER and REAR WINDOW, Anna Magnani in THE GOLDEN COACH, Rosaura Revueltas in SALT OF THE EARTH.
Ineligible: Ingrid Bergman in JOAN OF ARC AT THE STAKE, Irasema Dilián in WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Setsuko Hara in SOUND OF THE MOUNTAIN, Kyōko Kagawa in THE CRUCIFIED LOVERS, Yoshiko Kuga and Kinuyo Tanaka in THE WOMAN IN THE RUMOR.
On the Watchlist: Lucille Ball in THE LONG, LONG TRAILER, Gloria Grahame in HUMAN DESIRE, Hildegard Knef in DIE SÜNDERIN, Ulla Jacobsson in ONE SUMMER OF HAPPINESS, Barbara Stanwyck in WITNESS TO MURDER.
;)
1955
Doris Day, LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME
Julie Harris, I AM A CAMERA
Katharine Hepburn, SUMMERTIME *winner* ☆
Vivien Leigh, THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Anna Magnani, THE ROSE TATTOO ☆
Honorable Mentions: Ingrid Bergman in JOURNEY TO ITALY, Susan Hayward in I’LL CRY TOMORROW ☆, Judy Holliday in PHFFFT, Silvana Mangano in ULYSSES, Jane Wyman in ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS.
Ineligible: Silvia Monfort in LA POINTE COURTE, Romy Schneider in SISSI, Hideko Takamine in FLOATING CLOUDS.
On the Watchlist: Joan Crawford in FEMALE ON THE BEACH, Edwige Feuillère in THE GAME OF LOVE, Vera Kuznetsova in A BIG FAMILY, Ida Lupino in THE BIG KNIFE, Yvonne Sanson in TORMENTO.
☆ = Oscar nominated that season
Next time, Andersson, Dahlbeck, Masina, and other international stars get their time to shine as their early-50s films finally become eligible for Oscar gold. On the real Oscars side of things, the studio system of old begins collapsing into itself, bringing about the rise of Elizabeth Taylor as an obstinate Oscar darling even amid her many scandals, Ingrid Bergman is welcomed back into the fold, Deborah Kerr keeps getting nominated for the wrong pictures and more!