At 21, Susan Kohner received her first (and only) Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, in which she played a black girl passing as a white one.
Upon nomination, she said: “Objectively speaking, I was very good, because the role was so unlikely my own character.”
Later, after losing the award to Shelley Winters (The Diary of Anne Frank), Kohner said, “It’s better this way. It was too much too soon.”
