The Golden Era Files

Six Academy Award nominations across twenty years, every one of them a loss - then two on a single night, and finally the statue.

Her entire first film performance was dubbed over by Glenn Close; five years later she won an Independent Spirit Award for sex, lies, and videotape.

He was a television comedian when he was cast as John McClane, which is precisely why the character worked.

In 1971 he played Dirty Harry and directed his first film in the same year - and it was the directing that turned out to matter.

A replicant in 1982 and a mermaid in 1984, after which she spent most of a decade trying to be cast as a person.

She was the highest-paid actress alive in 1996 and holding a Golden Raspberry by the following spring - then won a Golden Globe for the same problem thirty years later.

He was the best thing in The Right Stuff in 1983 and it somehow failed to make him a major star, so he went and won two Independent Spirit Awards instead.

Two Academy Awards twelve years apart, nine acting nominations and a Tony - all of it after six seasons on a hospital drama.

In one year she played the conscience of The Godfather's world and invented a look that a whole generation copied.

She wrote the song, sang the song, starred in the film, and then watched it top the pop chart - all inside a decade.

An Oscar for The Accidental Tourist and a Best Actress nomination for Thelma & Louise, then two expensive flops directed by her own husband.

Voted least likely to succeed at drama school in 1956, he had two Academy Awards and five nominations by 1993.

Eight Academy Award nominations and no competitive win - until the Academy announced in 2026 that it would hand her one anyway.

She won an Oscar for her third film and did not turn up to collect it - then spent a decade proving the giggle was an act.

Ten thousand dollars for Star Wars. Four years later he was the biggest box-office draw on the planet.

Twelve Academy Award nominations, more than any other man has managed, spread across five decades and converted three times.

Two Best Actress Oscars in seven years - then she walked out of cinema entirely and invented an industry.

Written off after the King Kong remake, she came back to win Best Supporting Actress and be nominated for Best Actress at the same ceremony.

She was nominated for an Academy Award at fourteen for Taxi Driver, and had two Best Actress statuettes before she turned thirty.

A $14 million romantic comedy in 1990 made her the biggest star in America - and twelve years later she was the first actress ever paid $20 million for a film.

Her first film was Body Heat, and the hardest thing she did afterwards was convince people she was funny.

She originated two landmark stage roles in the eighties and lost both film versions to other actresses - then won Best Actress in 1991 for Misery.

He went from a time-travelling stoner comedy in 1989 to the film the next decade of action cinema copied wholesale - and then managed the trick a second time.

He spent his credit on a three-hour Western with subtitled Lakota, directed it himself, and it won seven Academy Awards.

Two Tony Awards before he had made a single film, an Academy Award for a farce, and a third Tony thirty-nine years after the first.

She bought most of a town in Georgia, lost it in bankruptcy, and won an Academy Award four years after that.

A ten-year Disney contract, a minor-league baseball career and five films with John Carpenter - the unlikeliest route to leading man in 1980s Hollywood.

One scene in a New York delicatessen in 1989 rewrote her career, and then three Nora Ephron films made her the most bankable comic actress of the decade.

From a low-budget Australian car film in 1979 to five Academy Awards for Braveheart in March 1996, two of which he collected himself.

Tippi Hedren's daughter spent thirteen years in supporting parts before Working Girl won her a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.

Film debut in 1977, an Oscar by 1980, and then a decade of being nominated almost annually - usually in an accent that was not hers.

He produced a Best Picture winner in 1975, before anyone would let him carry a film, then released both Fatal Attraction and Wall Street in the same twelve months.

From a widely mocked musical sequel to three Oscar nominations in five years - the decade Michelle Pfeiffer became untouchable.

He was fifty when his first Academy Award nomination arrived, and had spent much of the previous decade teaching children to read on public television.

A Joffrey-trained dancer who spent the early eighties being cast for his physique, until one small film about a summer resort found a use for the training.

She did not appear in a film until she was thirty-five, then spent the 1990s playing women the scripts treated as equals.

Never once nominated for an Academy Award, and he still got American Gigolo, Pretty Woman and a Golden Globe for singing in Chicago.

He learned Sicilian for one Oscar and put on sixty pounds for the other, and the two are six years apart.

She spent the sixties playing a surfer and then a flying nun, and won two Best Actress Oscars in the five years after that.

He defined James Bond, spent twenty years trying to escape him, and then won the Oscar anyway at fifty-seven.

Twelve years of small parts, then one thriller in 1992 made her unavoidable - and three years later Scorsese proved she could act.

She made Academy history in a single evening in 1989 - and she got there through a science fiction film nobody expected to be taken seriously.

Her first Oscar nomination came in 1982 and the win came fourteen years later, at forty-nine, for playing a nun advising a man on death row.

He wrote Rocky in a matter of days and refused to sell the script unless he could play the part - the film then won Best Picture.

Twenty-one when Risky Business opened, and by twenty-seven he had a Golden Globe and the first of three acting Oscar nominations.

An All-Ivy offensive guard at Harvard who roomed with Al Gore, then an Emmy in 1983 and an Academy Award eleven years later for chasing Harrison Ford.

Two Oscar nominations before she turned twenty-four, a decade out of the industry, and then a Netflix show handed her the nineties back.