Why these 3 Oscar winners turned down their Academy Awards
Winning an Oscar is considered the biggest honor an actor, writer, producer or director can receive. Why would anyone turn that down?
And yet three people in the history of the awards have done just that. The reasons vary: Some wanted to draw attention to a cause, others felt strongly the annual glamour fest was an embarrassment to the profession.
The Oscars got their start back in 1929 at a rather sedate hotel dinner for 270 stars and Hollywood denizens. The next year, the ceremony was broadcast on radio. From there, the race was on.
The awards show soon picked up a catchy nickname, and quickly became the industry's ne plus ultra event broadcast around the world. Last year, some 19.5 million tuned in to see Cillian Murphy ("Oppenheimer") and Emma Stone ("Poor Things") happily make the walk to the stage to accept the coveted trophy.
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While a number of famous stars have elected to skip the ceremony, despite numerous nominations and wins (Katharine Hepburn and Woody Allen come to mind), only a trio so far have actively snubbed Oscar.
Dudley Nichols
Who is Dudley Nichols? In his day, a fairly big deal, a screenwriter who eventually became president of the powerful Writers Guild of America. So what's his Oscar story?
Nichols penned the screenplay for "The Informer," a book-based drama centered on Ireland's 1922 War of Independence and a traitor within its ranks. The movie was a hit at the box office and a stout contender at the 1936 Academy Awards, going head to head with "Mutiny on the Bounty" across six major categories. While "Mutiny" took best picture, "The Informer" won best actor, director, score and screenplay for Nichols.
Nichols decided to decline his award because Hollywood workers were pushing to unionize. The industry had organized in the wake of the Great Depression of the early 1930s in an effort to secure better pay. He finally did accept his award in 1938 with the formation of the then-named Screen Writers Guild, which eventually morphed into the WGA.
George C. Scott
Actor George C. Scott turned in a towering, glowering performance as World War II general George S. Patton in 1970's "Patton," which won Scott best actor and signaled the arrival of a hot new Hollywood talent in best screenwriter winner Francis Ford Coppola.
But Scott was a no-show at the awards a year later. In fact, when he heard of his nomination for best actor, Scott sent a telegram to the Academy saying he had no intention of accepting the award if he won, and in fact would prefer not to be nominated at all. Why? Scott didn't like the idea of being in competition with fellow actors, but what's more, he held little regard for movies, which he felt were beneath the craft of acting in plays.
“Film is not an actor’s medium,” Scott told Time magazine before that year's awards, in a blitz of publicity that caused Academy members to take sides: The old guard were furious, while young actors admired his principles. “You shoot scenes in order of convenience, not the way they come in the script, and that’s detrimental to a fully developed performance.”
Where is his Oscar? History is unclear, but one of the movie's seven Oscars now rests at the library of the Virginia Military Institute, which educated Patton. The best picture statue was donated by "Patton" producer Frank McCarthy, a graduate of the institute.
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando was a once-in-a-generation actor who literally re-wrote the acting book with his powerful Method performances on both stage and screen. His 1973 best actor win was all but expected given the tremendous success of 1972's "The Godfather," in which Brando played Don Vito Corleone.
Interestingly, Brando had been out of favor with the Hollywood system by the early 1970s, after a series of movies that ran over budget and failed to score big at the box office. He was considered a high-risk hire, and "Godfather" director Coppola had to fight to cast Brando.
So perhaps it wasn't a surprise when instead of accepting the award, he stunned the well-heeled crowd by sending in Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the Oscar proffered by Roger Moore. Instead, she gave a statement (abridging a 15-page speech Brando had written for the occasion) in support of Brando's latest political cause: the plight of Native Americans, specifically the occupation of a town called Wounded Knee.
No one knows where that famous Oscar is now.