Oldest Living Oscar Nominees

With the passing of Olivia de Havilland earlier this week, obviously we lost a film legend.  We also lost the answer to a lot of longevity questions when it comes to the Oscars.  De Havilland got her first nomination in 1939 for Best Supporting Actress (for Gone with the Wind), her first Best Actress nomination in 1941 for Hold Back the Dawn, and her first win for Best Actress in 1946 for To Each His Own.  This meant that de Havilland was the earliest (not to be confused with oldest, though she was that too) living Best Supporting Actress nominee, Best Actress nominee, and Best Actress winner.  With her death, I honestly didn't know the answer to who was next in line for these three titles (though I had a correct guess for Supporting Actress), and so I figured it was time to do some research, cause I don't let Oscar trivia questions go unanswered.  Below you will find for the directing and four acting categories who are chronologically the earliest (again, not oldest) living nominees and winners.

Best Actress

Nominee: Leslie Caron (1953) for Lili
--Runner-Up: Carroll Baker (1956) for Baby Doll
Winner: Joanne Woodward (1957) for The Three Faces of Eve
--Runner-Up: Sophia Loren (1961) for Two Women

As you can tell, de Havilland's death truly put an end to the 1940's in terms of Best Actress, as there were no nominees after her that are still with us until 1953 with Leslie Caron, who was nominated twice but never won (I feel like considering her place in especially Golden Age musicals, possibly alongside Mitzi Gaynor the only real figure left from that era's biggest films, that she should get an Honorary Oscar, and post-haste as she's 89).  Baker, who was just 25 when she was cited for Baby Doll, is next up, though you have to go to 1957 for a living winner with Joanne Woodward (who has been very ill health for quite some time now), and then Sophia Loren (who has another movie coming out later this year).

Best Actor

Nominee: Sidney Poitier (1958) for The Defiant Ones
--Runner-Up: Michael Caine (1966) for Alfie
Winner: Sidney Poitier (1963) for Lilies of the Field
--Runner-Up: Gene Hackman (1971) for The French Connection

Best Actor winners tend to be older than the other three categories, so it's not shocking to me that we have to go back further to find living recent winners here.  Technically Poitier is actually his own runner-up for Lilies of the Field, but I figured that wasn't fun to track so we're going with Michael Caine three years after Poitier's landmark win.  Unlike the Best Actress field, all of these men already have Oscars, though Caine is the only one that still works in film.

Best Supporting Actress

Nominee: Angela Lansbury (1944) for Gaslight
--Runner-Up: Ann Blyth (1945) for Mildred Pierce
Winner: Eva Marie Saint (1954) for On the Waterfront
--Runner-Up: Shirley Jones (1960) for Elmer Gantry

Scratch the above comment-Shirley Jones is also living and obviously in the same league as Caron & Gaynor in terms of classic Hollywood musicals (truly random aside, but I remember many years ago seeing an interview with Jones & her husband Marty Ingels where he let strangers that were there for a yard sale of some sort hold Shirley's Oscar-I can't have imagined this, but have never found the interview...any ideas internet?). Blyth actually ties Angela Lansbury for runner-up as Lansbury was nominated in 1945 for The Picture of Dorian Gray.  Up until quite recently Joan Lorring who was nominated that year for The Corn is Green was also alive (she died in 2014) and the other two women nominated that year both lived into the 1990's, so this field might have a record for longevity at the Oscars.

Best Supporting Actor

Nominee: Don Murray (1956) for Bus Stop
--Runner-Up: Russ Tamblyn (1957) for Peyton Place
Winner: George Chakiris (1961) for West Side Story
--Runner-Up: Joel Grey (1972) for Cabaret

There are no provisos here for runners-up.  Don Murray is not only one of the longest-lived Supporting Actors ever, he's also one of the rare ones to have been nominated for his screen debut.  Also, with Tamblyn alive, maybe I should stop pointing out a lack of classic actors from major Hollywood musicals not being alive, but that we should still consider Caron for an Honorary Oscar-who wouldn't want to watch her thank Fred and Gene in the same speech?  Looking ahead here, it's weird to think that just eight years behind Joel Grey is Timothy Hutton, who was so young when he won for Ordinary People that he's not even sixty yet.

Best Director

Nominee: Claude Lelouch (1966) for A Man and a Woman
--Runner-Up: Norman Jewison (1967) for In the Heat of the Night
Winner: William Friedkin (1971) for The French Connection
--Runner-Up: Francis Ford Coppola (1974) for The Godfather, Part II

Admit it-when I typed Coppola for Godfather II, at least half of you said "wait, what about the first one?" before you remembered Bob Fosse won that year for Cabaret.  Looking at this list, I had never put together that Lelouch was so young when he made A Man and a Woman (I loved this movie, and will surely have to see it again before we do the 1966 OVP, but when I saw it in college I found it intoxicating), being not even 30 when he was nominated for an Oscar for the film.  With the exception of Jewison (whose last film was 2003's The Statement with Michael Caine & Tilda Swinton), all three of these men have made movies in the past five years, though Coppola has threatened frequently to retire.

The Good, The Bad, & the Ugly From Oscar Night

Well, it's been a busy couple of days.  I normally take the day off after the Oscars, but I just started a new job and needed to head to the office yesterday, so you're getting this a day late, but hopefully you're not Oscar-ed out quite yet as I have few thoughts to share on Hollywood's Biggest Night.

The Good

The show didn't distinguish itself too fully this year-this is not an Oscars that we'll talk about a decade from now.  Honestly, it was a fine show, if not really a particularly exciting one-there wasn't a lot of drama (more on that in a minute), and while I heard the ratings were low, I don't know that you can blame that on anything other than Hollywood didn't have the best year for film, and as we saw in 2016, it's hard for America to take a civics lesson seriously, even when you're getting that civics lesson from the most beautiful people on earth.  On a night where it was clearly going to be politically-charged (which I'm all for-I love me some political awards shows), it's easy to see why people who are politics-ed out in the era of Trump just stayed home.

That said, the best part of the night for me was arguably a snooze for other people, and that was the multiple Hollywood legends coming out on-stage.  Easily the best moments of the night were Eva Marie Saint, Rita Moreno, Christopher Walken, Jane Fonda, and yes, of course Faye Dunaway & Warren Beatty joining the stage for a standing ovation and the occasional bit of Old Hollywood glamour.  They need to do this more; I know it sometimes seems a bit cruel (the jokes poor Kim Novak had to endure a few years back when "OMG-she got older!"), but this is what the Oscars are about-watching Hollywood history come alive.  Hearing Eva Marie Saint refer to Alfred Hitchcock as "Fred"...who doesn't want that?  More of this in the future please.

There were a few pairs of presenters that were terrific during the night, particularly Tiffany Haddish & Maya Rudolph and Kumail Nanjiani & Lupita Nyong'o.  Haddish was having a blast, and had what may be the best "Meryl Moment" in a night glittered with them.  The show was relatively brisk, even if people always complain about the length (Rant Time: The Oscars are long.  You know what else is long-the fucking Super Bowl.  It lasts twelve hours, but you never hear anyone complain about cutting the half-time show, so if you don't like it, don't watch, and let the rest of us enjoy our Oscars in peace).

Lastly, Jimmy Kimmel was good.  He's a solid middle-of-the-road choice, even if some of his politics turns off a portion of America that quite frankly doesn't watch the Oscars anyway (and if they do, it's just to hate on the "liberals" and wonder why Adam Sandler hasn't won yet).  You don't need a controversial host, as it makes everyone uncomfortable and makes it about something other than the movies (looking at Ricky Gervais there), so I hope they keep him on in a similar fashion to Bob Hope, as he's had two solid shows in a row.  He let us see Luke Skywalker meet Wonder Woman, after all-if he doesn't deserve a third go-around after that, who does?

The Bad

I'm more asking this as a question, but are we all fine that Meryl Streep has become the new Jack Nicholson?  Every year we have to have our Meryl Moments, with literally every presenter chatting away with Meryl and an increasingly grumpy looking Don wondering when they can go home, and she has to do her flailing Meryl gesture of "who me, you're not exhausted by me?" moments.  Listen, I love Meryl, but the jokes are tired at this point, so I just wanted to ask the question.  If this is just Jack in His Sunglasses for a new generation, then at least play around with it.  Have Meryl at the bar or in the back row or something one year just to mess with people's heads

And listen, I'm all for having Wes Studi presenting at the Oscars (if reports are correct, he's the first Native American to present at the show which seems WAY overdue), but did anyone else feel like his montage was a direct counter to select audience members (at home) who groaned during the diversity conversation so now we had to have a clip show for Red America?  That's almost completely how it came across, particularly considering that we'd had films like Platoon and Wings already represented in that 90th Anniversary Clip Show (which I liked, but needed some sort of introduction).  This felt glib and pandering, in my opinion, and it would have been nicer to have had Studi just introduce the anniversary clip rather than have a separate "Republican" clip, which was obviously what the producers were going for even though military appreciation is a non-partisan affair.

The Ugly

Okay, Oscar-we need to talk.  This was easily the most predictable Oscars of my lifetime, in an era where the Oscars have become almost comically predictable.  My personal score was 21/24, but that was only because I missed Documentary Feature and two of the shorts categories, which are notoriously hard to pin down and three of the categories with the least amount of precursors, so they don't have as much momentum headed into the night.  The reality is that Sam Rockwell, Frances McDormand, Allison Janney, and Gary Oldman all won everything this year.  Literally every televised awards show picked the same four people, providing zilch drama.  These are all fine actors, and with the exception of Rockwell, all gave good performances, but there's no doubt in my mind that other performers gave equal (or, quite frankly, better) performances than all of them this year.  The Oscars need to find a way to fix this as quite frankly we have really only had one "surprise" acting win in the past five years (Mark Rylance), and the ratings are going to continue to falter if the show is boring.  I think it's time to relook at how you disperse ballots, maybe forcing people to see all of the movies again or only letting certain branches vote for the winners in their categories (or a grab bag ballot where you only get to vote in five random categories).  Something has to give, though, as Oscar will become less important if everything is decided in advance.  No one should get every traditional, feature-length category right simply by picking the frontrunner in each field, including me (even if it meant I blasted through my personal contest).

Also, it has to be said-we decided to honor Kobe Bryant on the same night as the #TimesUp movement?  This looks bad, Academy, and like you only care about the victims of these crimes if they're on Good Morning America or happen to be movie stars, and not if they're normal people being victimized by a powerful man who is still "publicly acceptable."  I'll leave Gary Oldman out of this for a second (though he should be included too), but Bryant is well-known for his involvement in a sexual assault case, and it feels disingenuous to, say, disinvite Casey Affleck to the ceremony but invite Bryant to the club.  I haven't seen Dear Basketball, so I can't say with certainty whether he actually deserved the trophy or not, but it feels like picking-and-choosing, and if you're going to call yourself principled that's not an option.

The 8 Living Women (and 2 Men) Who Have Starred in an Alfred Hitchcock Movie

In the past month, while prepping for NaNoWriMo, I was thinking a lot about my relationship with classic film, and in particular how few links we still have to the Golden Age of Hollywood.  It feels like at this point it's more of a scrounge to find living actors from this era rather than the multitudes that were still alive even only twenty years ago, and in the process, I began to wonder how many of Alfred Hitchcock's leading ladies were still alive.

Focusing on Hitchcock in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein allegations feels a bit seedy, considering that he had famously complicated relationships with his leading ladies, including allegedly sexually assaulting Tippi Hedren and exerting enormous control over women like Grace Kelly.  However, this isn't celebrating Hitch, but the women who made his films special, and specifically the eight leading ladies in his movies that are still with us.  Without further adieu (I'm imagining you're trying to guess in your head who they are anyway), here are the eight living women who have headlined an Alfred Hitchcock picture (listed chronologically by film):

Editor's Note: Since the publication of this Barbara Harris passed away on August 21, 2018.  I've maintained Ms. Harris's profile below, however.

Shirley MacLaine

Film: The Trouble with Harry (1955)

Age: 83 (Born April 24, 1934)

Career: This was actually MacLaine's screen debut, though she's not really known for her work with Hitchcock.  She'd get a Golden Globe nomination for Best Newcomer in the film, and would be an Oscar nominee three years later for Some Came Running (and soon a screen legend).

Doris Day

Film: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Age: 95 (Born April 3, 1922)

Career: Day was enjoying the "dramatic" period of her film career when she partnered with Hitchcock (an odd pairing in hindsight, though her iconic "Que Sera, Sera" would become a signature tune).  She'd be getting her sole Oscar nomination a few years later when she made Pillow Talk and kicked off the most successful period of her career.

Vera Miles

Film: The Wrong Man (1956)

Age: 88 (Born August 23, 1929)

Career: Miles is a strange case of an actress that made a lot of classic films in a brief period of time (she also starred in the John Ford classic The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), who is best remembered by modern audiences for her supporting work in Psycho.  She was originally intended to be Hitch's leading lady in Vertigo, but due to a pregnancy he had to replace her with...

Kim Novak

Film: Vertigo (1958)

Age: 84 (Born February 13, 1933)

Career: Novak's eternally known as Madeline in Vertigo, her most iconic role, but the reality is that the film was a turning point in her career, and not in the right direction.  Though considered today to be one of the greatest films ever made, Vertigo was a box office disappointment at the time, and Novak (coming off of hits like Picnic, Pal Joey, and Bell, Book, and Candle) watched her career dissipate after this, with her brief period as a leading woman soon over.

Eva Marie Saint

Film: North by Northwest (1959)

Age: 93 (Born July 4, 1924)

Career: Saint had made a name for herself at this point in her career playing downtrodden women in black-and-white dramas (winning an Oscar for On the Waterfront), so this was a very atypical movie for the actress, and one that sort of would signal the end of her short career as a leading woman.  Saint made surprisingly few pictures in her very long career, and would soon be playing third fiddle to Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor in The Sandpiper.

Tippi Hedren

Film: The Birds (1963) and Marnie (1964)

Age: 87 (Born January 19, 1930)

Career: Hedren has the distinction on this list of being the only woman to headline two Hitchcock films (while Miles starred in multiple Hitch projects, she only got top billing in one).  Hedren's career  was, well, bizarre after Hitchcock with her most notable film being the troubled production Roar, and she famously hated her filming experiences on Hitch's pictures, but it cannot be denied that these aren't an iconic legacy for her as an actress.

Julie Andrews

Film: Torn Curtain (1966)

Age: 82 (Born October 1, 1935)

Career: Andrews had just two years earlier made her screen debut, but at this point was a major leading lady in Hollywood, and was enjoying what would be the biggest period of success in her career with back-to-back mammoth hits that scored her Oscar nominations (and her one win).  Still, she's hardly what you'd consider an obvious choice to headline a Hitchcock picture considering her well-noted warm and kind characters.

Barbara Harris

Film: Family Plot (1976)

Age: 82 (Born July 25, 1935)

Career: Despite being a decade after Andrews, she's slightly older than the Torn Curtain star, and appeared in the lead of Hitch's last picture.  She was enjoying a peak moment in her career at this point, having just been a part of the classic Nahsville and would receive TWO Golden Globe nominations this year, for her work here as well as in Freaky Friday (she'd lose to Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born).

Initially I thought that I'd do a sequel with the leading men of Hitchcock's career, but unfortunately only two of Hitch's leading men are still with us, so let's also list them right now...

Sean Connery

Film: Marnie (1964)

Age: 87 (August 25, 1930)

Career: Connery at this point had found his most iconic role at this point in his career, James Bond, and would later this same year give his best 007 performance in Goldfinger.  Still, Connery's debonair charm and sex appeal seem like a natural fit for a Hitchcockian film, and I'm surprised he didn't end up starring with him again later in his career.

Bruce Dern

Film: Family Plot (1976)

Age: 81 (June 4, 1936)

Career: Dern is the youngest-living person to have headlined an Alfred Hitchcock movie.  At this point in his career he'd been a character actor for over a decade, and had actually appeared in a small part in Marnie, but was most well-known for his villainous work in The Cowboys opposite John Wayne.  Two years after this he'd win his first of two Academy Award nominations for Coming Home.

There you have it-the eight women (and two men) who are still with us who have headlined a Hitchcock picture.  Share your favorite memories of these women and which of these nine performances are your favorites?