Oscarless Actors, like Oscarless actresses are those that have never won a competitive Oscar or any other award from the Academy. That leaves out the likes of Fred Astaire, Charles Boyer, Charles Chaplin, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, James Earl Jones, Buster Keaton, Gene Kelly, Peter O’Toole, Edward G. Robinson, and Mickey Rooney, all of whom won honorary awards for acting. It also leaves out Harry Belafonte and Jerry Lewis, both of whom won the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for their charitable works.
That baker’s dozen aside, we are still left with a plethora of legendary actors who never won, some of them with multiple nominations behind them. Not counting still living actors who have never won but may still do so, here then are a half dozen of the very best who should have been recognized with either a competitive win or a career achievement award somewhere along the line.
Montgomery Clift (1920-1966) appeared in 13 Broadway productions from 1935-1945, most notably The Skin of Our Teeth and The Searching Wind. His first two films were Howard Hawks’ Red River and Fred Zinnemann’s The Search for which he received a Best Actor Oscar nod. He followed that with William Wyler’s The Heiress for which Olivia de Havilland won an Oscar. He subsequently scored three more Oscar nominations for George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951), From Here to Eternity, and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). His last film of note was John Huston’s Freud (1962).
James Dean (1931-1955) had minor roles in Douglas Sirk’s Has Anybody Seen My Gal</em> (1952) and Michael Curtiz’s Trouble Along the Way (1953) but his claim to fame comes from his starring roles in three films from 1955-1956. His performance in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden was the only one of the three films released prior to his death on September 30, 1955. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause was released several weeks after that. George Stevens’ Giant was released in 1956. He received posthumous Oscar nominations for both East of Eden and Giant, losing to Ernest Borgnine in Marty and Yul Brynner in The King and I.
Albert Finney (1936-2019) gained instant stardom with Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). He received the first of five Oscar nods for Tony Richardson’s Tom Jones (1963). Other hits included Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road (1967), Ronald Neame’s Scrooge, Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974) (his second Oscar nod) , Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon (1982), Peter Yates’ The Dresser (1983) (his third Oscar nod), John Huston’s Under the Volcano (1984) (his fourth Oscar nod), Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (1990), his fifth Oscar nod), and Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003).
Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) received his only Oscar nod early in his career for his supporting role in William A. Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe (1945). He was shockingly overlooked for his classic performances in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), John Huston’s Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960), Fred Zinnemann’s The Sundowners (1960), David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter (1979), Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and TV’s The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988).
William Powell (1892-1984) began his career on the New York stage in 1912 and made his first film in 1924. Nominated for an Oscar three times, his many memorable performances include those in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928), Tay Garnett’s One Way Passage (1932), W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man (1934) (his first Oscar nod), Robert Z. Leonard’s The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) (his second Oscar nod), Michael Curtiz’s Life with Father (1947) (his third Oscar nod), Jean Negulesco’s How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and John Ford and Mervyn LeRoy’s Mister Roberts (1955).
Tyrone Power (1914-1958) was one of the great stars of the mid-20th Century. His list of credits includes such hits as Henry King’s In Old Chicago (1938) and 1939’s Jesse James (1939), Rouben Mamoulian’s The Mark of Zorro (1940) and Blood and Sand (1941), Henry King’s The Black Swan, Edmund Goulding’s The Razor’s Edge (1946) and Nightmare Alley (1947), Henry King’s King of the Khyber Rifles (1953), John Ford’s The Long Gray Line (1955), George Sidney’s The Eddy Duchin Story, Henry King’s The Sun Also Rises, and Billy Wider’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957).
