Hollywood Stars Who Refused Their Oscars
by Jeremy Smith · /FilmGetting to appear in or write a major motion picture is difficult enough. Actually making a career in movies requires as much luck as it does talent and hard work. As for earning an Academy Award nomination? That's winning the film industry lottery.
People joke that nobody really means it when they say "It's an honor just to be nominated," but, unless the artist in question is a conceited jerk or perhaps a previous winner, they really mean it. You get to sit in the Dolby Theatre with your peers and cinema legends, and hear your name called from the stage at least once. That's got to be a rush. And if you hear your name a second time, and find yourself walking down the aisle and up onto the stage where, I don't know, Rachel McAdams is waiting to hand you an Oscar, you're a superhero if you can deliver a coherent, let alone eloquent speech (when in doubt, keep it short like Joe Pesci).
There have been winners who've had to miss the ceremony due to work (Michael Caine was famously unavailable to collect his Best Supporting Actor Oscar because he was shooting "Jaws: The Revenge, while four-time winner Woody Allen has never attended the ceremony), but very rarely has anyone outright refused their Oscar. To date, it's only happened three times and for very different reasons. You can decide for yourself if you would've also followed suit.
Dudley Nichols, Best Writing
Dudley Nichols began his writing career as a reporter for the New York Sun, but, like many of his skilled, prolific colleagues, he hightailed it to Hollywood where there was plentiful work. Within two years of hitting Southern California, Nichols had written 12 screenplays, several of which were for John Ford. He quickly developed a reputation as a witty, versatile scribe, which made him popular with such legendary directors as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Elia Kazan, and Jean Renoir.
Nichols has credits on two of the greatest films ever made ("Bringing Up Baby" and "Stagecoach") and earned four Oscar nominations throughout his 30-year career. His only win was in 1935 for Ford's "The Informer," a brilliantly directed, shot, and performed drama about a disgraced member of the Irish Republican Army who compounds his misery by ratting out several of his former colleagues. Star Victor McLaglen, composer Max Steiner, and Ford won Oscars, too, but Nichols stood apart by refusing his Best Writing honor.
Nichols was a member of the Screen Writers Guild, which was locked in a dispute with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The SWG rank-and-file believed AMPAS was not negotiating in good faith, so Nichols felt he could not, in good conscience, accept his Oscar. Nichols eventually became president of the organization and felt satisfied enough with AMPAS' negotiation proposals that he claimed his Oscar at the 1938 ceremony.
George C. Scott, Best Actor
After serving in the United States Marine Corps from 1945 to 1949, George C. Scott went to the University of Missouri on the G.I. Bill to study journalism. It's here he got bit by the acting bug. Nine years later, he won an Obie for three performances at the New York Shakespeare Festival, including what those who were lucky enough to see it apparently considered a bravura turn as the malevolent title character in "Richard III."
Scott was a willing film actor, but he had much more respect for the theater. This doesn't mean he phoned in his movie performances. He received two Academy Awards (for "Anatomy of a Murder" and "The Hustler") before winning Best Actor for his portrayal of the controversial U.S. Army General George S. Patton in "Patton." It was a foregone conclusion coming into the ceremony that Scott would be triumphant, even though, upon being nominated, he informed AMPAS that he would not accept the award for two reasons. The first was that he loathed the idea of performances being treated as a competition. The second was that, in his view, film acting was "not an actor's medium." As he told Time Magazine in 1971, "You shoot scenes in order of convenience, not the way they come in the script, and that's detrimental to a fully developed performance."
55 years later, no one knows where Scott's Oscar is stored. My guess is a warehouse in Van Nuys.
Marlon Brando, Best Actor
Marlon Brando was considered one of the best actors in America before the vast majority of the public had even seen his work. He took Broadway by storm in 1947 as Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire," leaving the rest of the country anxious to see if he could live up to the hype when he starred in the inevitable film adaptation.
Brando was as brilliant as advertised when the film hit theaters in 1951, earning his first Best Actor nomination. A long overdue Humphrey Bogart won for his sensational work in "The African Queen" (this was no career-achievement gift), but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Brando got his. That time came three years later when he took home the Best Actor Oscar for his iconic portrayal of boxer-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront." It's one of the most influential movies of the 1950s. Brando's Method approach to the craft turned him into a rock star for aspiring actors everywhere. Surely, there were more Oscars on the way.
There would be only one more, and it would come in 1972 for his disappearance into the role of Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." Brando had, to put it mildly, become a mercurial sort two decades after his last Oscar win, so it didn't come as a huge shock when he boycotted the ceremony and sent Native American actor/activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place. Littlefeather, whose own ancestry has recently been disputed, conveyed the actor's disgust with the treatment of Native Americans in movies and his support for the Oglala Lakota's occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Brando's protest didn't keep him from getting nominated the next year for "Last Tango in Paris," but he never won another Oscar.