Aug 22, 2023
It includes the nominees of 2020, 2021, 2022
R: 9
S: 13
T: 8
Total: 30
Occupational Inheritance in Acting Profession
Occupational inheritance refers to the phenomenon where sons and daughters follow in the career paths of their parents. This trend has been documented in engineering, medicine, military, and education, but not in the acting profession.
Over the past 95 years of the Academy Awards (first given in 1929), 84 men have won the Best Actor Oscar (some more than once), and 160 men have been nominated.
In 2020, the five nominees were: Riz Ahmed, Chadwick Boseman (black, posthumous), Anthony Hopkins (winner, second Oscar), Gary Oldman (previous winner) Steven Yeun (Asian).
In 2021, the nominees were: Xavier Bardem, Cumberbatch, Andrew Garfield, Will Smith, Denzel Washington
In 2022, the nominees were all first-timers: Austin Butler, Colin Farrell, Brendan Fraser, Paul Mescal, Bill Nighy
Winners: 84 (males); 96 (roles)
Nominees: 160
Total: 244
Black: 14 out of 244
Winners: 5 out of 84
Nominees: 9 out of 160
Boseman, Chadwick: No
Cheadle, Don (Black): No
Dexter, Gordon
Ejiofor, Chiwetel
Fishburne, Laurence
Foxx, Jamie
Freeman, Morgan
Howard, Terrence
Kaluuya, Daniel
Poitier, Sidney
Smith, Will
Washington, Denzel
Whitaker, Forest
Winfield, Paul
JEWISH
Allen, Woody
Arkin, Alan
Chalamet (half)
Curtis, Tony
Douglas, Kirk
Douglas, Melvin father)
Douglas, Michael
Dreyfuss, Richard
Garfield, Andrew
Garfield, John
Lukas, Paul
Muni, Paul
Newman, Paul
Sellers, Peter
Steiger, Rod
Topol
R (9)
Rea, Stephen
Redford, Robert
Redmayne, Eddie
Redgrave, Michael
Renner, Jeremy (nom, supp)
Robertson, Cliff
Rooney, Mickey (nom, supp)
Rourke, Mickey
Rush, Geoffrey (nom, supp)
S (13)
Scheider, Roy, US: No
Schell, Maximilian
Scofield, Paul (nom, supp)
Scott, George C. (nom, supp)
Sellers, Peter
Sinatra, Frank (winner, supp)
Smith, Will, 2021
Spacey, Kevin (winner of Supp. Actor)
Stallone, Sylvester
Steiger, Rod (nom, supp)
Stewart, James
Stone, Lewis
Strathairn, David, US: No
Scheider, Roy
Orange, NJ
Father: Auto mechanic
Mother: No data
Child athlete
Columbia High School, Maplewood, NJ
Film debut: horror, The Curse of the Living Corpse, 1964
Scheider was born in Orange, New Jersey, the son of Anna (née Crosson) and auto mechanic Roy Bernhard Scheider.
Scheider’s mother was of Irish descent with an Irish Catholic background, while his father was a Protestant German American.
As a child, Scheider was an athlete, participating in organized baseball and boxing competitions, for which he was classed as a welterweight, weighing in at 140 lb. Scheider competed in Diamond Gloves Boxing Tournament in Elizabeth, NJ.
He attended Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, graduating in 1950, and was inducted into the school’s hall of fame in 1985. He traded his boxing gloves for the stage, studying drama at both Rutgers University and Franklin and Marshall College, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
Between 1946 and 1949, Scheider boxed as an amateur in New Jersey. Scheider said in interview in the 1980s that he took up boxing to lose weight. He had no desire to fight, but his trainer, Georgie Ward, encouraged him to compete.
In his second bout, at the 1946 Diamond Gloves Tournament (Golden Gloves), Scheider suffered broken nose and lost by technical knockout in two rounds to Myron Greenberg. He went on to post an 11–1 (six knockouts) record, reversing his defeat by Greenberg in the process.
Scheider served 3 years in the Air Force as a first lieutenant in Air Operations from 1955 to 1958. He then became captain in the Air Force Reserve Command until 1964.
Scheider’s first film role was in the horror, The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964).
On TV, he played running roles on two CBS soap operas, Love of Life and The Secret Storm, and also played character roles in episodes of Camera Three, N.Y.P.D., and Coronet Blue. He was in the TV movie Lamp at Midnight (1966).
In 1968, Scheider appeared with the New York Shakespeare Festival, and won an Obie Award for James Joyce’s play Stephen D, appearing in it 68 times at the East 74th Street Theater.
He appeared in Stiletto (1969), Loving (1970), and Puzzle of a Downfall Child (1970), and on TV in Where the Heart Is and Cannon.
In 1971, he appeared in 2 popular films, Klute (1971), directed by Alan Pakula, and The French Connection (1971), directed by William Friedkin.
Schell, Maximilian
Austrian-born Swiss actor
Parents were involved in the arts
Mother: actress who ran an acting school
Father: Swiss poet, novelist, playwright and pharmacy owner
One of 4 children; all actors
Parents were Roman Catholic
Austria to Swiss
University of Zurich, a year
Maximilian Schell (December 8, 1930 – 1 February 1, 2014) was an Austrian-born Swiss actor, who also wrote, directed and produced films. He won the Best Actor Oscar for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood.
Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature.
While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood.
Fluent in both English and German, Schell earned top billing in Nazi-era themed films. Two earned him Oscar nominations: The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), for a character with two identities, and Julia (1977), portraying a member of a group resisting Nazism.
His range of portrayals included personalities as diverse as Venezuelan leader Simón Bolívar, Russian emperor Peter the Great, and physicist Albert Einstein. For his role as Vladimir Lenin in the television film Stalin (1992) he won the Golden Globe. Schell also performed in stage plays, including a celebrated performance as Prince Hamlet.
Schell was accomplished pianist and conductor, performing with Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein, and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna. His elder sister was the internationally noted actress Maria Schell; he produced the documentary tribute My Sister Maria in 2002.
Schell was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Margarethe (née Noe von Nordberg), an actress who ran an acting school, and Hermann Ferdinand Schell, a Swiss poet, novelist, playwright and pharmacy owner. His parents were Roman Catholic.
Schell’s father was never enthusiastic about young Maximilian becoming an actor like his mother, feeling that it could not lead to “real happiness”. However, Schell was surrounded by acting in his early youth: “I grew up in a theatre atmosphere and took it for granted. I remember the theatre, as a child, the way most people remember their mother’s cooking. Acting was all around me, and so was poetry. I made my debut in the theatre at the age of three, in Vienna . . .[4]
The Schell family fled from Vienna in 1938 to get “away from Hitler” after the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. They resettled in Zurich, Switzerland.
In Zurich, Schell “grew up reading the classics”, and when he was ten, wrote his first play. Schell recalls that as a child, growing up surrounded by the theatre, he took acting for granted and did not want to become an actor at first: “What I wanted was to become a painter, a musician, or a playwright,” like his father.
Schell later attended the University of Zurich for a year, where he also played soccer and was on the rowing team, along with writing for newspapers as a part-time journalist for income. Following the end of World War II, he moved to Germany where he enrolled in the University of Munich and studied philosophy and art history. During breaks, he would sometimes return home to Zurich or stay at his family’s farm in the country so he could write in seclusion:
My father and my uncle hunt deer there, but I do not like to hunt. I like to walk through the forest by myself. In 1948 and 1949, when I wrote part of my first novel, which I have never shown to anyone, I isolated myself in one of the hunting cabins for three months, without a telephone, without electricity, with heat only from a large open fireplace.
Schell then returned to Zurich, where he served in Swiss Army for a year, after which he attended the sixth form of University College School, London, for one year before re-entering the University of Zurich for another year, and later, the University of Basel for six months. During that period, he acted professionally in small parts, in both classical and modern plays.
He decided that he would devote his life to acting rather than pursue academic studies: “I then decided, either you are a scientist or an artist. . . . To me it is much more important . . . to admire and feel and be stimulated and inspired. . . Art comes out of chaos, not out of a mechanical analyzing. So as soon as I made up my mind, there was no sense any more in continuing to study and in getting a degree. It is like an award; it does not mean anything in itself. . . . A university degree is just a title. I don’t think an artist should have a title. It was time for me to concentrate on acting.
Schell began acting at the Basel Theatre.
His elder sister Maria Schell was also an actor, as were their siblings, Carl (1927–2019) and Immaculata “Immy” Schell (1935–1992).
Schell’s film debut was in the German anti-war film Kinder, Mütter und ein General (Children, Mothers, and a General, 1955. It was the story of five mothers who confronted a German general at the front line, after learning that their sons, some as young as 15, had been “slated to be cannon fodder on behalf of the Third Reich.” The film co-starred Klaus Kinski as an officer, with Schell playing the part of an officer-deserter.[8] The story, which according to one critic, “depicts the insanity of continuing to fight a war that is lost,” would become a “trademark” for many of Schell’s future roles: “Schell’s sensitivity in his portrayal of a young deserter disillusioned with fighting became a trademark of his acting.”[9]
Scofield, Paul: No
Edgbaston, Birmingham, Warwickshire
Father: headmaster, Hurstpierpoint Church of England School
Varndean School at Brighton; discovered Shakespeare at age 12
Scofield left school at 17 and began training, Croydon Repertory Theatre
Paul Scofield was born on January 21, 1922 in Edgbaston, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield.
When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School.
Scofield told his biographer, Garry O’Connor, that his upbringing was divided. His father was an Anglican and his mother a Roman Catholic. Baptised into his mother’s faith, Scofield said, “some days we were little Protestants and, on others, we were all devout little Catholics.” He added, “A lack of direction in spiritual matters is still with me.”
Scofield recalls, “I was a dunce at school. But at the age of 12 I went to Varndean School at Brighton where I discovered Shakespeare. They did one of his plays every year, and I lived just for that.”
In 1961, Scofield wrote, “I don’t have psychological approach to acting; fundamentally, I have an intuitive approach. For me, the totally intellectual approach is never satisfactory. What matters to me is whether I like the play, for one thing, and, for another, whether I can recognize and identify myself with the character I’m to play.”
In 1939, Scofield left school at the age of 17 and began training at the Croydon Repertory Theatre. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Scofield arrived for a physical examination and was ruled unfit for service in the British Army. He later recalled, “They found I had crossed toes. I was unable to wear boots. I was deeply ashamed.”[10]
Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with debut performance in American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier.
He played at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck’s 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.[11]
In 1948, Scofield appeared as Hamlet at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford alongside a then unknown Claire Bloom as Ophelia. Scofield’s performance was so highly praised that it caused him to be dubbed, “The Hamlet of his generation.”[12] He was also Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice with Bloom as an Attendee.
J.C. Trewin commented, “He is simply a timeless Hamlet… None could forget Scofield’s pathos, the face folded in grief, at, ‘When you are desirous to be blessed, I’ll blessing beg of you.’ We have known many correct, almost formal Hamlet’s, aloof from Elsinore. Scofield was ever a prisoner within its bounds: the world had many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.”
John Harrison recalled of Scofield’s Hamlet, “‘Get thee to a nunnery,’ so often delivered with rage or scorn, he says so gently. You have visions of quiet and prayer. A future for Ophelia.”[14]
In her later book, Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir, Claire Bloom recalls that during the production she had a very serious crush on Scofield. As Scofield, “was happily married and the father of a son”, Bloom hoped only “to be flirted with and taken some notice of.” But Scofield never so much as glanced at Bloom or any of the other pretty actresses in the cast.[14]
The production had two Hamlets: Scofield and Robert Helpmann took turns playing the title role and Bloom later recalled, “I could never make up my mind which of my two Hamlets I found the more devastating: the openly homosexual, charismatic Helpmann, or the charming, shy young man from Sussex.”
T (8)
Thornton, Billy Bob (nom, supp)
Tibbett, Lawrence
Todd, Richard
Tone, Franchot
Topol
Tracy, Spencer
Travolta, John
Troisi, Massimo
Strathairn, David
San Francisco, California
Upper-Middle class
Father: physician
Mother: Nurse
second of 3 children
Educated: Redwood High School in Larkspur, California; Williams College in Williamstown, MA; 1970
Traiing
Debut:
David Russell Strathairn (born January 26, 1949) is an American actor. Known for his leading roles on stage and screen, he has often portrayed historical figures such as Edward R. Murrow, J. Robert Oppenheimer, William H. Seward, and John Dos Passos.
He has received accolades including an Independent Spirit Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and a Volpi Cup, and has been nominated for an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and four Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Strathairn made his acting debut in his fellow Williams College graduate John Sayles’ Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980).
He continued acting in films such as Matewan (1987), Eight Men Out (1988), City of Hope (1991), A League of Their Own (1992), Sneakers (1992), Passion Fish (1992), The Firm (1993), The River Wild (1995), L.A. Confidential (1997), and Limbo (1999).
Strathairn gained prominence for his portrayal as journalist Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), for which he was nominated for Best Actor Oscar.
He is also recognized for his role as CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and The Bourne Legacy (2012). He appeared in Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020), and del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021).
Also known for his lengthy work on TV, he made his debut in the soap opera Search for Tomorrow in 1984. He portrayed Robert Wegler in the acclaimed HBO drama series The Sopranos (2004).
He received a Primetime Emmy Award win and Golden Globe Award nomination for his performance in the HBO television film Temple Grandin (2010). He portrayed John Dos Passos in the HBO film Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012). He’s had recurring roles in the Syfy series Alphas (2011–2012), the NBC series The Blacklist (2015–2016), the Showtime series Billions (2017–2019), and the SyFy, then Amazon Prime Video, series The Expanse (2018–2019).
Strathairn was born in San Francisco, California, the second of three children of Thomas Scott Strathairn, Jr., a physician, and Mary Frances (née Frazier), a nurse.
He is of Scottish descent through his paternal grandfather, Thomas Scott Strathairn, a native of Crieff, and of Native Hawaiian ancestry through his paternal grandmother, Josephine Lei Victoria Alana.
Strathairn attended Redwood High School in Larkspur, California, and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1970. At Williams, he met fellow actor Gordon Clapp and director John Sayles, with whom he has collaborated on a number of projects.
He studied clowning at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Florida, and briefly worked as clown in traveling circus.
Strathairn was Oscar nominated for his stirring portrayal of CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow in the 2005 biopic Good Night, and Good Luck. The film explored Murrow’s clash with Senator Joseph McCarthy over McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts in the 1950s. Strathairn also received Best Actor Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) nominations for his performance.
In 2010, he won Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie for his portrayal of Dr. Carlock in the HBO TV film Temple Grandin. For that role, he also won the Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actor, and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.
