The 10 Most Famous Actors Who Never Won Oscars

JUDY GARLAND

That titanic tremolo and vulnerable, outsized personality were such forces of nature that it's easy to miss what a powerful and persuasive actress Judy Garland could be. Several times during her brilliant career she could have won a full-fledged Oscar.

She was nothing if not terrific in Easter Parade, The Clock and Meet Me in St. Louis, but it was easily her comeback performance in 1954's A Star Is Born for which she was most deserving of the gold (Garland hadn't been hired since 1950, when she was fired off Annie Get Your Gun for being unstable). Playing a star on the way up to James Mason's slipping-down movie great, Garland gave what is perhaps the greatest single tour de force ever snubbed by the Oscars (Grace Kelly won instead for The Country Girl). Garland brought to A Star Is Born such unerring dramatic intensity, it's no wonder that shortly after the Oscar ceremony--which Garland did not attend because she had just given birth to son Joey Luft--Groucho Marx sent off a telegram to the star saying, "This is the biggest robbery since Brink's." Today, Kelly's performance looks like high school drama class acting, but Garlands dazzling emoting through the songs "Born in a Trunk" and "The Man That Got Away" look like cinematic benchmarks.

Though Garland was nominated again, for her small role in 1961's ensemble Judgment at Nuremberg (in the Best Supporting Actress category), it was surprising how little love the Academy showed the actress. She seemed destined to get gold one day when in 1939 she received a special miniature Oscar statuette for her "outstanding performance as a screen juvenile in The Wizard of Oz. She certainly paid her dues by often singing during the ceremonies--in 1939 she did "Over the Rainbow," in 1940 "America" and in 1964 a Cole Porter medley. But perhaps the Academy did not want to reward her bad behavior. Oscar voting has always been highly political, and she had burned many bridges with her coworkers due to her sometimes erratic and self-destructive behavior. But just watch her torch her way through "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" to a heartbroken Margaret O'Brien in 1944's Meet Me in St. Louis and try arguing that Garland wasn't Americas greatest singing actress then and now.

BARBARA STANWYCK

In a career that lasted nearly 60 years, Barbara Stanwyck came to epitomize the screen persona known as the tough mama. Joan Crawford, Ann Sheridan and Claire Trevor trod the same territory but, good as they were, Stanwyck was even better. She reigned supreme in the '30s and '40s. With her trim figure and come-hither allure, she gave off sparks as shrewd, sexy, on-the-make, dangerous--in short, an edgy little minx. The husky speaking voice, the accent that betrayed her Brooklyn upbringing, her snappy way with a smart line, all these made upwardly striving audiences identify with her. Some critics gave her short shrift for it, which is a pity. She was greater than they ever knew, clearly one of the best, most reliable and beloved stars that ever hit Hollywood.

Stanwyck was as equally dazzling in romantic comedies (The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire) as she was in tearjerkers (Stella Dallas and Clash by Night), Westerns (Annie Oakley and The Furies) and razor-edged melodramas (Double Indemnity and Sorry, Wrong Number). Too bad she never won from one of her four Best Actress nominations--for playing a working-class mother in 1937's Stella Dallas, for her turn as a nightclub entertainer in 1941's Ball of Fire, for duping dopey insurance agent Fred MacMurray in 1944's Double Indemnity and. for acting the part of a potential murder victim in 1948's Sorry, Wrong Number. Although she worked steadily throughout the '50s and '60s, she rarely found work worthy of her and, silver-haired and flinty almost to the point of self-parody, she drifted into TV successfully with her series, "The Big Valley," and the TV miniseries The Thorn Birds.

Stanwyck eventually saw gold at age 74, when John Travolta presented her with an Honorary Academy Award for her life's work. Some people in the Industry had remarked that Stanwyck didn't care about winning. But she certainly did. When backstage at the 1981 Oscars she told reporters, "Of course I was disappointed those times I was nominated before and lost. Anyone who says they're not is lying."

CAROLE LOMBARD

Blonde, beautiful, breezy, supremely self-confident, with a breathless delivery, it's hard to believe that Carole Lombard never won an Oscar and was only nominated once, for playing a superficial socialite in 1936's mini screwball comedy classic My Man Godfrey. But perhaps if her life hadn't been cut short at age 33 by a plane crash (while she was on a World War II war bond tour), she would have eventually gotten there. She obviously wanted the gold. In 1939, when she accompanied husband Clark Gable to the Academy Awards and he seemed down over not winning for his turn as Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind she said, "Aw, don't be blue, Pappy. I just know we'll bring one home next year." After he replied, "This was it. This was my last chance, I'm never gonna go to one of these things again," she countered, "Not you, you self-centered bastard--I mean me!"

Lombard had already appeared in dozens of feature films by the time she died. Four of those movies--_Twentieth Century, My Man Godfrey, Nothing Sacred To Be or Not to Be_--are comedy classics which alone should have been sufficient to proclaim her Oscar-worthiness once and forever. Although Lombard starred successfully in dramas and tearjerkers, too, it was in comedies that the actress, dubbed by the press as "the Daffy Duse of Screen Comedy," so reigned supreme. Though Lombard knew she excelled in this category--she was one of the highest paid actresses in the '30s because her comedies nearly guaranteed audiences--she had an inkling comedic performances would not bring her gold. When she was not even nominated for her brilliant timing in 1937's Nothing Sacred she simply told reporters, "They don't give awards to comedy performances," and she was half right.

Lombard's runaway freight train delivery--which simultaneously suggested smarts and ditziness--her charm and her unfussy allure has for decades been emulated. She remains the standard by which such successors as Meg Ryan and Cameron Diaz are compared and measured. She was one of a kind.

CHARLIE CHAPLIN

One can go almost nowhere in the world where the face and form of Charlie Chaplin as "The Little Tramp" go unrecognized. Beginning in 1914 and continuing into the '30s, Chaplin's most famed character--a spunky, melancholy, pugnacious, courtly, put-upon, often sentimental Everyman--charmed and entertained audiences globally.

A complicated and controversial soul, Chaplin the artist was a formidable actor, mime, dancer and world-class charmer who also wrote and directed many of his most memorable and beloved movies, including The Gold Rush, The Circus, City Lights, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. In those films and his shorts, audiences identified fiercely with Chaplin's character in his loneliness and his up-against-the-world sense of oppression. Universally, he seemed to represent the Little People, the ones who'd been kicked around.

In the 1920s, Chaplin was one of the most respected actors in Hollywood, so it was little surprise when he was nominated for Best Actor and Best Comedy Direction for the silent film The Circus in the 1927-1928 Oscars. He didn't win in either category, but he was given a special award for his "versatility and genius in writing, acting, directing and producing The Circus" (this was the first year they held the Academy Awards so they were making up the rules as they went along). He wasn't nominated again until 1940 for The Great Dictator. The film was labeled by critics as "important" and Chaplin showed range with his dual roles--as a Jewish barber and as Adolf Hitler, renamed Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania--but he didn't win in any of the categories he was nominated for, which included not just acting, but writing and producing.

Chaplin showed himself to be an even greater artist than he'd been given credit for in 1947's black comedy Monsieur Verdoux, in which he played a woman-hating killer. The film led to a writing nomination for Chaplin, but he lost to Sidney Sheldon's script for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. When he was barred from returning to America in 1952, after he was stung by charges of his being sympathetic to Communist ideals, Chaplin embraced exile, bitterness and regret. He clearly deserved an acting Oscar, not merely the honorary award he was given in the 1971 ceremony when America had forgiven him (he received two standing ovations during his acceptance speech) or the Best Score Oscar he shared with two others in 1973 for Limelight (the 1952 film was not released in L.A. until 1972). Perhaps Oscars had been denied him before because some considered him "too" everything--too controversial in his affairs with young women, too egotistical and self-reflexive, too difficult to control. In any event, his legacy as a film giant is secure.

LILLIAN GISH

Lillian Gish looms large on the short list of the most exquisitely passionate, emotionally accessible actresses who ever graced the screen. Her stardom began with the birth of cinema--in silent films, especially in some of director D.W. Griffith's most famous, such as Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, Orphans of the Storm and Way Down East. She was even better in films Griffith had no part in, like The Scarlet Letter and The Wind.

Fragile-looking, eyes intense with ferocious intelligence and resilience, Gish in her best work packs the punch of genius. Born to play serene saints, volatile hysterics and women possessed, Gish dedicated herself to the physical and emotional demands of her projects long before Robert De Niro packed on the pounds for Raging Bull or Tom Hanks reduced himself to skin and bones for Cast Away. She fasted to the point of appearing as terminally ill as the tragic heroine in the silent version of La Bohème. Her escape from a waterfall over the ice floes of a frozen river in Way Down East was nearly as real as it looked on film. And she braved merciless shooting conditions to star in the prairie drama The Wind.

Surprisingly, Gish didn't receive her first Oscar nomination until she costarred with Lionel Barrymore and Gregory Peck in 1946's Duel in the Sun. When she picked up an Honorary Oscar in 1970, she showed no signs of discontent with the Academy over being snubbed for decades. "Oh, all the charming ghosts I feel around me who should share this," she said during a touching speech. After making several TV movies throughout the '70s and '80s, Gish received standout reviews for her role in 1987's The Whales of August. So when costar Ann Sothern was nominated instead of Gish, insiders were stunned. When Sothern called the legend to convey her regrets that she too was not nominated, Gish laughed it off and said, "Now I won't have to go and lose to Cher [for Moonstruck]."

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