Academy Award For Best Supporting Actress - Superlatives

Superlatives

For the past four Academy Award ceremonies, this category has featured two nominees from the same picture: Doubt (2008), Up in the Air (2009), The Fighter (2010) and The Help (2011). Amy Adams was nominated for both Doubt and The Fighter.

Five women have won both the Best Actress and the Best Supporting Actress awards: Helen Hayes, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Meryl Streep, and Jessica Lange.

The only actresses to have won the Best Supporting Actress award twice are Shelley Winters and Dianne Wiest. Winters won in 1959 and 1965 (she was also nominated in 1972, in addition to being nominated in the Best Actress category in 1951); Wiest won in 1986 and 1994 (she was also nominated in 1989).

Thelma Ritter had six nominations in this category, more than any other actress in this category. As she never won the award, she also holds the record for the number of unsuccessful nominations. Ritter holds the record for the most successive nominations: 1950–1953. Glenn Close was nominated three years consecutively (1982–1984).

Actresses with four nominations in this category are Ethel Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead, Lee Grant, Maureen Stapleton, Geraldine Page, and Maggie Smith. All of Moorehead's and Page's nominations were unsuccessful (but Page did win a Best Actress award, in 1986); each of the others have won (with Smith also having previously won a Best Actress award, in 1970).

Those with three nominations are in this category Amy Adams, Anne Revere, Celeste Holm, Claire Trevor, Angela Lansbury, Shelley Winters, Glenn Close, Diane Ladd, Dianne Wiest, Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Tomei, and Gladys Cooper. Lansbury, Close, Ladd, Cooper, Adams and McDormand have never won a Best Supporting Actress award (but McDormand did win a Best Actress award, in 1997).

Hattie McDaniel was the first black winner, Miyoshi Umeki the first Asian winner, and Rita Moreno the first Hispanic winner.

Five black actresses have won the award, all African American: Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Hudson, Mo'Nique, and most recently, Octavia Spencer.

Hispanic actresses who have been nominated for Best Supporting Actress are: Mexican actress Katy Jurado (1954), Mexican-American actress Susan Kohner (1959), Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno (1961, West Side Story), Argentine actress Norma Aleandro (1988), Puerto Rican-American actress Rosie Perez (1993), Mexican actress Adriana Barraza (2006), Spanish actress Penélope Cruz (2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona), and Argentine actress Bérénice Bejo (2011).

Brenda Fricker was the first (and only) Irish winner, Anna Paquin the first New Zealander winner, Juliette Binoche the first (and only) French winner, Catherine Zeta-Jones the first (and only) Welsh winner, Cate Blanchett the first (and only) Australian winner, Penélope Cruz the first (and only) Spanish winner, and Shohreh Aghdashloo the first (and only) Iranian nominee of Best Supporting Actress.

Hermione Baddeley's performance as a supporting actress in Room at the Top (1959), with two minutes and 20 seconds of screen time, is the shortest role to be nominated for an acting Academy Award.

Beatrice Straight's supporting role in Network (1976), at five minutes and 40 seconds, is the shortest performance to ever win an Academy Award.

The only actor to win an Oscar for playing a real-life Oscar winner is Cate Blanchett. She won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2004 for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator.

There have been no posthumous nominations for this award.