Research in progress, Sep 23, 2024
Total=17
U
V: 2
W: 14
X
Y: 1
Z
It includes the nominees of 2020, 2021, 2022
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
In 2023, the nominees were: Bradley Cooper, Colman Domingo. Paul Giamatti, Cillian Murphy, Jeffrey Wright
Winners: 85 (males); 96 (roles)
Nominees: 163
Total: 248
====
BLACK:
16 out of 248
Winners: 5 out of 85
Nominees: 11 out of 160
Boseman, Chadwick: No
Cheadle, Don (Black): No
Dexter, Gordon
Domingo, Colman
Ejiofor, Chiwetel
Fishburne, Laurence
Foxx, Jamie
Freeman, Morgan
Howard, Terrence
Kaluuya, Daniel
Poitier, Sidney
Smith, Will
Washington, Denzel
Whitaker, Forest
Winfield, Paul
Wright, Jeffrey
JEWISH
Allen, Woody
Arkin, Alan
Chalamet (half)
Curtis, Tony
Douglas, Kirk
Douglas, Melvin father)
Douglas, Michael
Dreyfuss, Richard
Garfield, Andrew
Garfield, John
Hoffman, Dustin
Hoffman, Ph. S
Lukas, Paul
Muni, Paul
Newman, Paul
Sellers, Peter
Topol
—-
V=2
Voight, Jon= N0
Von Sydow, Max= No
Von Voight=No
Yonkers, New York
Father: Prof. golfer
Archbishop Stepinac High School, White Plains, NY
Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., major art and graduated with a B.A. in 1960
Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre; studied with Sanford Meisner.
Jonathan Vincent Voight was born on December 29, 1938, in Yonkers, New York, to Barbara (née Kamp) and Elmer Voight (né Voytka), a professional golfer. He has two brothers, Barry Voight, former volcanologist at Pennsylvania State University, and James Wesley Voight, as Chip Taylor, a singer-songwriter who wrote “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning.”
Voight’s paternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother’s parents were Slovak immigrants, while his maternal grandfather and his maternal grandmother’s parents were German immigrants. Political activist Joseph P. Kamp was his great-uncle through his mother.
Voight was raised as a Catholic and attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains, New York, where he first took interest in acting, playing the comedic role of Count Pepi Le Loup in the school’s annual musical, The Song of Norway.
After graduation in 1956, he enrolled at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where he majored in art and graduated with a B.A. in 1960.
After graduation, Voight moved to New York City, where he pursued acting career. He graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he studied under Sanford Meisner.
In the early 1960s, Voight found work in TV, appearing in episodes of Gunsmoke, between 1963 and 1968, as well as guest spots on Naked City and The Defenders, both in 1963, and Twelve O’Clock High, in 1966 and Cimarron Strip in 1968.
Voight’s theater career took off in January 1965, playing Rodolfo in Miller’s A View from the Bridge in an Off-Broadway revival.
Voight’s film debut in 1967, in Phillip Kaufman’s crimefighter spoof, Fearless Frank.
He took a small role in 1967’s western, Hour of the Gun, directed by veteran helmer John Sturges.
In 1968 he took a role in director Paul Williams’s Out of It.
In 1968, Voight cast in the groundbreaking Midnight Cowboy, a film that would make his career. He played Joe Buck, a naïve male hustler from Texas, adrift in New York City. He comes under the tutelage of Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo, a tubercular petty thief and con artist. The film explored late 1960s New York and the development of an unlikely, but poignant friendship between the two main characters. Directed by John Schlesinger and based on a novel by James Leo Herlihy, the film struck a chord with critics and audiences. Because of its controversial themes, the film was released with an X rating and would make history by being the only X-rated feature to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Both Voight and co-star Hoffman were nominated for Best Actor, but they lost out to John Wayne in True Grit.
In 1970, Voight appeared in Nichols’ adaptation of Catch-22, and reteamed with director Paul Williams in The Revolutionary, as left-wing college student struggling with his conscience.
Voight in 1972’s Deliverance. Directed by John Boorman, from a script that James Dickey had helped to adapt from his own novel of the same name, it tells the story of a canoe trip in a feral, backwoods America.
Both the film and the performances of Voight and co-star Burt Reynolds received great critical acclaim, and were popular with audiences.
Voight appeared at the Studio Arena Theater, in Buffalo, NY, in A Streetcar Named Desire from 1973 to 1974 as Stanley Kowalski.
Voight played directionless young boxer in 1973’s The All American Boy, then appeared in the 1974 film Conrack, directed by Martin Ritt. Based on Pat Conroy’s autobiographical novel The Water Is Wide, Voight portrayed the title character, an idealistic young schoolteacher sent to teach underprivileged black children on a remote South Carolina Island.
The same year he appeared in The Odessa File, based on Frederick Forsyth’s thriller, as Peter Miller, German journalist who discovers a conspiracy to protect former Nazis still operating within Germany.
This film first teamed him with actor-director Maximilian Schell, who acted out a character named and based on the “Butcher of Riga” Eduard Roschmann, and for whom Voight would appear in 1976’s End of the Game, psychological thriller based on a story by Swiss novelist and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
Voight was Spielberg’s first choice for the role of Matt Hooper in the 1975 film Jaws, but he turned down the role, which was ultimately played by Richard Dreyfuss.
In 1978, Voight portrayed the paraplegic Vietnam veteran Luke Martin in Hal Ashby’s film Coming Home, and was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, for his portrait of a cynical, yet noble paraplegic, reportedly based on real-life Vietnam veteran-turned-antiwar-activist Ron Kovic, with whom Jane Fonda’s character falls in love. The film included a much-talked-about love scene between the two. Fonda won her second Best Actress award for her role, and Voight won for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the Oscars.
In 1979, Voight once again put on boxing gloves, starring in 1979’s remake of the 1931 Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper vehicle The Champ, with Voight playing the part of an alcoholic ex-heavyweight and a young Ricky Schroder playing the role of his adoring son. The film was an international success, but less popular with American audiences.
Max von Sydow, Swedish= No
Lund, Sweden
Father: ethnologist and professor of folkloristics, Lund University.
Mother: schoolteacher
Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929 in Lund, Sweden.
His father, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, was an ethnologist and professor of folkloristics at Lund University.
His mother, Baroness Maria Margareta Rappe, was schoolteacher.
Sydow was of part-German ancestry. A paternal ancestor, David Sydow (“von” or “Von” was added later to the family name), emigrated from Pomerania to the Kalmar region in 1724. His mother was also of part-Pomeranian descent. Sydow was raised as a Lutheran, but became an agnostic in the 1970s.
Sydow attended Lund Cathedral School, where he learned English at an early age. Originally expected to pursue career in law, he became interested in acting after seeing a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream during a class trip to Malmö, which prompted him to establish an amateur theatrical group along with friends back at school.
Sydow served for two years in the Swedish Army with the Army Quartermaster Corps, where he adopted the name “Max” from the star performer of a flea circus he saw.
After completing his service, Sydow studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm where he trained between 1948 and 1951.
During his time at the Dramaten, he helped start theatre group, of which actress Ingrid Thulin was a member. He made his stage debut in a small part in the Goethe play Egmont, which he considered “almost a disaster,” but received good reviews.
While at the Dramaten, Sydow made his screen debuts in Alf Sjöberg’s films Only a Mother (Bara en mor, 1949) and Miss Julie (Fröken Julie, 1951).
In 1951, Sydow joined the Norrköping-Linköping Municipal Theatre, appearing in nine plays including Peer Gynt.
In 1953, he moved on to the City Theatre in Hälsingborg, playing eleven parts in a two-year stint, including Prospero in The Tempest and the titular role of the Pirandello play Henry IV.
Sydow’s theatrical work won him critical recognition, and in 1954 he received the Royal Foundation of Sweden’s Cultural Award, a grant to young, promising actors.
In 1955, Sydow moved to Malmö and joined the Malmö City Theatre, whose chief director at the time was Ingmar Bergman.
Sydow had previously sought to play a small part in Bergman’s Prison (Fängelse, 1949), but the director rejected the proposition.
Bergman and Sydow’s first film was The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957), in which Sydow portrayed Antonius Block, a disillusioned 14th-century knight returning from the Crusades to a plague-stricken Sweden. The scene of his character playing a game of chess with Death has come to be regarded as an iconic moment in cinema.
Sydow went on to appear in a total of 11 Bergman films
In The Magician (Ansiktet, 1958), Sydow starred as Vogler, a 19th-century traveling illusionist who remains silent for most of the film.[19][14] In The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960), he played a medieval landowner who plots vengeance on the men who raped and murdered his daughter.[3] In Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel, 1961), he portrayed the husband of a schizophrenic woman, played by Harriet Andersson.
During this period, he had roles in films including Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957), Brink of Life (Nära livet, 1958) and Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963).
Films starring Sydow were submitted by Sweden for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 5 out of six years between 1957 and 1962.
Under Bergman, Sydow also continued his stage career, playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Peer in Peer Gynt, Alceste in The Misanthrope and Faust in Urfaust. In his company were Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson and Gunnel Lindblom, all frequent collaborators of Bergman on screen.
Despite his rising profile, Sydow limited his work exclusively to Sweden early in his career, constantly refusing offers to work outside the country.
He was first approached at the 1959 Cannes Film Fest to act in U.S. films, but refused the proposition, saying he was “content in Sweden” and “had no intention of starting an international career”.
He also refused the opportunity to play the titular role for Dr. No (1962) and Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965).
In 1965, Sydow finally accepted George Stevens’s offer and made his international debut, playing Christ in the epic The Greatest Story Ever Told.
He accepted the part against the advice of Bergman, spent six months at the University of California, Los Angeles, preparing for the role, and adopted a Mid-Atlantic accent. The film introduced Sydow to a wider audience, but ultimately performed below expectations at the box office.
He went on to play a crop-dusting pilot in The Reward (1965) and a fanatic missionary in Hawaii (1966). For his performance in Hawaii, Sydow received his first Golden Globe nomination.
To his own frustration, however, Sydow would become frequently cast in villainous roles, such as a neo-Nazi aristocrat in The Quiller Memorandum (1966), a Russian colonel in The Kremlin Letter (1970), meticulous and elegant international assassin in Three Days of the Condor (1975), Emperor Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon (1980) and James Bond’s nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Never Say Never Again (1983).
W=13
Washington, Denzel
Waterston, Sam
Wayne, John
Webb, Clifton
Welles, Orson
Werner, Oskar
Whitaker, Forest
Whitman, Stuart
Whitmore, James
Wilde, Cornell
Wilkinson, Tom
Williams, Robin
Winfield, Paul
Woods, James:
Wooley, Monty
Woods, James
Wooley, Monty
Late Bloomer
New York City, Manhattan
Parents: Occup. no data
Grew up in the highest social circles
Education: Yale; MA, Yale and Harvard
Assistant professor of English, drama coach, Yale
Debut: began acting, 1936, after leaving academic career; age 48
Edgar Montilion “Monty” Woolle (August 17, 1888 – May 6, 1963) was an American film and theater actor. At the age of 50, he achieved stardom for his role in the 1939 stage play The Man Who Came to Dinner and its 1942 film adaptation. His white beard was his trademark and he was affectionately known as “The Beard.”
Woolley was born in New York City’s Manhattan to William Edgar Woolley (1845-1927) and Jessie née Arms (1857-1927) and grew up in the highest social circles.
Woolley received a bachelor’s degree at Yale University, where Cole Porter was intimate friend and classmate, and master’s degrees from Yale and Harvard Universities.
He eventually became an assistant professor of English and drama coach at Yale. Thornton Wilder and Stephen Vincent Benét were among his students.
He served in WWI in the US Army as a first lieutenant assigned to the general staff in Paris.
Woolley began directing on Broadway in 1929 with Fifty Million Frenchmen, and began acting in 1936 after leaving academic career.
In 1939 he starred in the Kaufman and Hart comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner for 783 performances. It was for this well-reviewed role he was typecast as the wasp-tongued, supercilious sophisticate.
Woolley signed with Fox in the 1940s and appeared in films through the mid-1950s. His most famous film role, a reprise of his Broadway role, was in 1942’s The Man Who Came To Dinner in which he plays a cranky radio wag restricted to a wheelchair because of a seemingly injured hip, a caricature of the legendary pundit Alexander Woollcott.
He played himself in Warner fictionalized biopic of Cole Porter, Night and Day (1946), and the role of Professor Wutheridge in The Bishop’s Wife (1947).
In the comedy As Young as You Feel (1951) he played a printer who, fired routinely from his job at 65 years old, poses as an executive to get his job back.
Y: 1
Yeun, Steven, No
Yeun, Steven, No
South Korea
Father was an architect; later beauty shop owner
Mother
Moving his family in 1988 to Canada
Troy High School, Michigan, 2001
Kalamazoo College, BA psychology, 2005.
Kalamazoo, first acting class, followed teacher to Chicago
TV: Walking Dead, 2010; left show 2016 after season 7
Yeun was born in Seoul on December 21, 1983, to Je and June Yeun. His father was an architect in South Korea before moving his family in 1988 to Canada, Regina, Saskatchewan.
In Regina, he attended Ruth M. Buck Elementary School. He has a younger brother named Brian.
The family later moved to the U.S. and settled in Taylor, Michigan, and then Troy, Michigan, where Yeun lived until he graduated from Troy High School in 2001.
Growing up, Yeun’s family spoke Korean at home.
Yeun was raised in a Christian household. His parents, who owned beauty-supply stores in Detroit, began calling him “Steven” after meeting a doctor by that name.
He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology with a concentration in neuroscience from Kalamazoo College in 2005.
At Kalamazoo, he befriended the sister of comedian Jordan Klepper and she took him to see Klepper’s improv show, which inspired him to take his first acting class and later follow Klepper to Chicago, where they joined The Second City.
Yeun revealed to his parents that he planned to pursue an improv career in Chicago instead of enrolling in law school or medical school. His parents were unhappy with the decision, but supported him nonetheless and gave him 2 years to pursue acting.
He moved to Chicago in 2005, living in the city’s Lincoln Square with his brother. Shortly after graduation, he joined Stir Friday Night!, a Chicago-based Asian American sketch comedy troupe.
Other alumni of the group include Danny Pudi, known for his role in Community. He joined The Second City in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles in October 2009.
Yeun’s breakout role was the starring role of Glenn Rhee on The Walking Dead, an AMC TV horror drama based on the comic book series of the same name. The series, which began in 2010, involves a group of characters who fight to survive in a violent apocalyptic world infested with flesh-eating zombies. The Walking Dead became the highest-rated series in cable TV history, and seasons 3 to 6 of the show garnered the most 18 to 49-year-old viewers of any cable or broadcast television series.
The series has received mostly positive reviews from professional television critics.
Yeun was “a major part” of the show’s success; his character developed “from a plucky young member of the show’s central group to a bona fide action hero and sex symbol”
Yeun left the show in 2016 after the season 7 premiere.
