Oscar often likes to get real
Hollywood has long habit of rewarding portrayals of true-life figures
Voting is underway for the Academy Awards nominations, with the results to be announced on Jan. 15. And while the acting nominees have yet to be decided, you can bet that some nominations, probably most, will be for performers playing real-life figures.
Front-runners this year include Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking; David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr.; Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing; Steve Carell as John du Pont; Timothy Spall playing J.M.W. Turner; Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed in Wild; and Felicity Jones as Hawking’s wife Jane Wilde.
It’s hardly a new trend. Last year’s winners included Matthew McConaughey playing real-life AIDS activist Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club. The year before that, Daniel Day-Lewis was named best actor for his role as Abraham Lincoln; two years earlier, Colin Firth won for playing King George VI.
You would have to reach back to 2010 to find a year in which all nominated actresses exclusively depicted fictional characters. For the men, based on a similar criterion, the last year extends all the way back to 2003. And in both lead-acting categories combined, 1991 was the last time nominated performances didn’t include depictions of historical figures.
Looking back even further, we find that Hollywood has long had a habit of recognizing portrayals of real people on the screen. In the third-ever Academy Awards, handed out in 1930, George Arliss won the best-actor prize for the title role in the biopic Benjamin Disraeli. Six years later, Paul Muni won for playing Louis Pasteur, while Luise Rainer — who died recently aged 104 — won best actress for her role as Anna Held in the biopic The Great Ziegfeld.
Actors who play real-life figures often say some variation on, “I’m not doing an impersonation.” They want it to be clear they are performers, not mimics. Yet, it’s amazing to see how some actors seem to physically melt into the characters they’re playing. Redmayne in The Theory of Everything is the spitting image of the famous physicist, right down to his cheeky, lopsided grin. (Physical similarity, however, is not always a pre-requisite for awards glory. Philip Seymour Hoffman didn’t much resemble the diminutive Truman Capote, but his precise mannerisms in 2005’s Capote won him the Oscar.)
The appeal of the true-life performance is easy to see. We thrill to representations of such larger-than-life figures as Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep in 2012’s The Iron Lady) or Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman, in 2009’s Invictus), and there is an educational value in meeting lesser-known, but charismatic types, such as baseball manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt in 2011’s Moneyball).
This year’s front-runner in the best-actor category is Michael Keaton for his role as Riggan Thomson in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Riggan isn’t a real person, but critics have enjoyed the way the character, a one-time superhero actor, intersects with Keaton, who twice played Batman.
If Keaton wins, the triumph will be in no small part to the fact that some crucial part of Riggan is the real deal.