![]() ![]() 1962 Academy Awards® Winners and History |
Introduction, 1927/8-39, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s Academy Awards Summaries |
"Best Picture" Oscar®, "Best Director" Oscar®, "Best Actor" Oscar®, "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar®, "Best Actress" Oscar®, "Best Supporting Actress" Oscar®, "Best Screenplay/Writer" Oscar® |
1962
Actor:
The 1962 Best Picture winner's seven awards included Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Musical Score. Naturally, one of its Oscars was for the photography of its magnificent locale - the desert. It remains the only Best Picture winner to have credited roles for actors of only one gender. There was not a single female speaking role - except for a camel named Gladys! It was Spiegel's third Oscar for Best
Picture (earlier wins for the producer were for The other Best Picture nominees included:
Three of the five Best Picture nominees - Warner Bros.' The Music Man, MGM's Mutiny on the Bounty, and Fox's The Longest Day - were not nominated in the Writing, Directing, or Acting categories. There were five strong Best Actor nominees, with
the winner being a sentimental, long-overdue favorite - Gregory
Peck won for his role as a thoughtful, soft-spoken, ethical
small-town Alabama lawyer/widower of 1932 named Atticus Finch
who defends a wrongly-accused black man of rape in director-nominated
Robert Mulligan's Another Best Actor nominee was the critically-favored
Best Picture's main star, Irish-born stage actor Peter O'Toole
as British military hero T. E. Lawrence, the mysterious, complex
and often remote leader of Arab troops/Bedouins on the Allied
side against the Turks, who helped British Gen. Allenby destroy
the infamous Ottoman Empire. [It was O'Toole's first major
film and first nomination out of a total of eight Oscar
nominations. His seven other nominations include Becket
(1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), Goodbye, Mr.
Chips (1969), The Ruling Class (1972), The Stunt
Man (1980), My Favorite Year (1982), and Venus
(2006). Coincidentally. O'Toole also has the distinctive
record of being nominated twice for the same role as King Henry
II in Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968).
O'Toole's long string of losses was also experienced by actor
Richard Burton (who was nominated and lost seven times for
his roles in My Cousin Rachel (1952), The Robe (1953), Becket
(1964), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), Anne
of the Thousand Days (1969), Equus (1977), and Other Best Actor nominees included:
Four of the Best Actress nominees were in non-sober
roles as either alcoholics or drug addicts. The winner in the
Best Actress category was Anne Bancroft, who re-created her
stage role as wild and rebellious seven year-old Helen Keller's
half-blind teacher/mentor Annie Sullivan in Arthur Penn's film The
Miracle Worker (with five nominations and two wins - Best
Actress and Best Supporting Actress). It was generally acknowledged
that the most gripping scene in the film was when Bancroft
finally had young Patty Duke as Helen Keller utter the word
'water.' [This would prove to be Bancroft's sole Oscar
win out of five nominations for roles in the following films: The
Pumpkin Eater (1964), The other Best Actress nominees included:
The Best Supporting Actor award was denied to
favored front-runner Egyptian-born Omar Sharif (with his sole
career nomination, in a debut appearance in his first English-language
film) as Lawrence's handsome Arab friend Sherif Ali in
Anne Bancroft's 16 year-old co-star from The
Miracle Worker, Patty Duke (with her sole career nomination
in her first film) was nominated and won the Best
Supporting Actress Oscar for her believable rendering of
the undisciplined, deaf/dumb/blind child Helen Keller. Both
Bancroft and Duke were repeating their roles from the Broadway
production. [Until 10 year-old Tatum O'Neal's win in Paper
Moon (1973) as Addie Loggins, Duke was the youngest person
to win a competitive Oscar award. Nonetheless, Duke was the first minor
(under age 18) to win a competitive Oscar.] She defeated
another child actress - and sister of Hollywood director
John Badham - nine year-old Mary Badham (with her sole career
nomination) as tomboy Scout, Peck's daughter in Other Best Supporting Actress nominees included:
Oscar Snubs and Omissions: Other potential Best Picture nominees which were nudged out, without nominations, included Jules and Jim, one of director John Ford's last Westerns - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (with only one nomination for Edith Head's costume design), and John Frankenheimer's excellent political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (with two unsuccessful nominations for Best Supporting Actress and Film Editing). And while The Miracle Worker was not nominated as Best Picture it probably should have been to be consistent - it received nominations for director Arthur Penn, and the major female acting awards went to its two stars Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Stanley Kubrick's audacious film Lolita was entirely neglected by the Academy - its director and actors (James Mason, teenage Sue Lyon, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers) were denied well-deserved nominations. Its sole unsuccessful nomination was for Best Screenplay (Vladimir Nabokov). What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (with five nominations and one win for Best Costume Design) was also denied a Best Picture nomination, as was Sweet Bird of Youth (with three significant acting nominations, and one win in the Best Supporting Actor category). Bette Davis' bitter rival in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, Joan Crawford, was un-nominated. The psychological drama David and Lisa received only two nominations: Best Adapted Screenplay (Eleanor Perry) and Best Director (Frank Perry), and went un-nominated as Best Picture. Although Through a Glass Darkly (Sw.) brought Ingmar Bergman his second Best Foreign Film Oscar win the previous year, it was missing from the Best Picture nominees this year, and received only one nomination: Best Writing, Story and Screenplay - Written Directly for the Screen. One of Sam Peckinpah's greatest films - Ride the High Country - was nomination-less, with veteran actors Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in farewell roles as two former lawmen. And Sidney Lumet's filmed version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night was ignored in the Best Director category and nominee Katharine Hepburn's three co-stars - Jason Robards (as alcoholic James Tyrone, Jr.,), Ralph Richardson, and Dean Stockwell, weren't nominated for their compelling acting performances. Robert Preston's remarkable portrayal of charismatic con-man Professor Harold Hill (a recreation of his own Broadway stage performance) who encouraged the townsfolk to invest in a children's marching band in Best Picture-nominated The Music Man was not nominated in the Best Actor category. [Preston's sole career Oscar nomination would come 20 years later with a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Victor/Victoria (1982).] Co-star Paul Ford was also denied a supporting nomination as Mayor Shinn in The Music Man. Kirk Douglas was also not among the actor nominees for his performance as out-of-sync cowboy Jack Burns in writer Dalton Trumbo's Lonely Are the Brave. Lee Marvin (as Liberty Valance - a caricature that preceded his similar Oscar-winning role in Cat Ballou (1965)), Andy Devine (as Marshal Link Appleyard), John Wayne (as rancher Tom Doniphon), and James Stewart (as novice lawyer and Senator Ransom Stoddard) were ignored in Ford's much-praised The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Other roles without nominations included Robert
Duvall in |