Oscar Performances with Shortest Screen Time

Cillian Murphy’s Oscar-winning Best Actor turn in Oppenheimer is incredible, and incredibly long.

In contrast, Anthony Hopkins earned his first Best Actor Oscar, for The Silence of the Lambs, with 20 minutes of screen time.

Jodie Foster’s turn as FBI rookie Clarice Starling anchors the movie, but whenever she shares the screen with Hopkins, he steals the show.

Hopkins’ performance is full of rich details that make it extra captivating. He forces the audience to look into the hollow eyes of a heartless mass murderer.

Then there’s the anomaly of the Supporting Acting categories.

Usually, the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress awards go to performers who are given so much screen time that they’re practically a lead.

For example, Mahershala Ali won his second Best Supporting Actor for Green Book, despite having over an hour of screen time, and essentially co-starring with the designated lead, Viggo Morenstern.

But some actors have clinched those awards with 15 minutes on-screen.

And, as noted, it’s even more astounding when an actor wins a leading-role Oscar with that amount of screen time.

David Niven in Separate Tables: 15 Minutes

David Niven won his only Best Actor for his turn in the 1958 drama Separate Tables, in which he has just 15 minutes of screen time.

Niven’s scarce runtime is due to the story’s sprawling structure. Based on Terence Rattigan’s one-act plays, Separate Tables centers on half a dozen characters staying at a seaside hotel in Bournemouth.

Niven had made a career playing the kind of suave, debonair gentleman that his role in Separate Tables as Major Pollock, accused of sexual molestation, was a departure from the norm, which caught the voters attention.

**Anne Hathaway, Les Misérables: 15 Minutess**

Anne Hathaway won Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn as Fantine, a struggling factory employee who resorts to prostitution in order to provide for her daughter, in Tom Hooper’s 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables.

Hathaway earned the award with just 15 minutes of screen time, in a movie whose runtime is over two-and-a-half hours.

Hathaway cut her hair for Les Misérables, indicating serious commitment to the role. While Russell Crowe was criticized for shaky singing, Hathaway’s singing was praised, and her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” was a showstopper.

It also helped that she was a known quantity to Oscar voters, having been nominated for the 2009 Best Actress in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.

Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona: 15 Minutes

Penelope Cruz won both the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn in Woody Allen’s 2008 romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Cruz was singled out for acclaim in most of the film’s positive reviews. While she plays neither Vicky nor Cristina, she managed to upstage the two title stars, Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson, who play two American tourists spending the summer in Barcelona.

They meet a handsome artist, played by Javier Bardem, who falls for both of them. The love triangle gets even more complicated when his emotionally unstable ex-wife María Elena, played by Cruz, shows up and turns it into a love quadrangle. The story is well underway by the time Cruz shows up, but she steals the whole movie with 15 minutes of acting.

Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine: 14 Minutes

Alan Arkin was nominated for Best Actor twice in the late 1960s — for The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming in 1967 and for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1969 — but he didn’t win an Oscar until 2007, 40 years after his first nomination.

Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for his turn as the grumpy grandpa, Edwin Hoover, in the tragicomic road movie Little Miss Sunshine. While Edwin is a miserable curmudgeon to most people, he’s sweet and loving to his granddaughter, Olive.

Arkin only has 14 minutes of screen time, but he made a strong impression. Playing a sympathetic grandpa in Arkin’s Little Miss Sunshine character, he’s grumpy on the outside, but deep down, he’s really a softie.

His monologue about winners and losers is the most touching scene in the movie.

Gloria Grahame, The Bad and The Beautiful, 9 Minutes

Gloria Grahame won the Best Supporting Actress for her turn as Rosemary, the vapid Southern belle wife of Dick Powell’s James Lee Bartlow, in the 1952 melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful.

Rosemary doesn’t show up until about two-thirds of the way through the movie and appears on-screen for just over nine minutes.

My Biography of Minnelli

At the time, this was the shortest Oscar-winning performance of all time, and Grahame held onto that record for more than two decades before a five-minute performance won in Network, in 1977.

The film won Best Screenplay (before it was split into two separate categories) and Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design in the black-and-white categories.

Anthony Quinn in Lust For Life: 8 Minutes

Anthony Quinn won the Best Supporting Actor for playing Vincent van Gogh’s friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin in Minnelli’s 1956 biopic, Lust for Life.

Not only did Quinn manage to draw attention away from van Gogh in his own life story; he did so with just eight minutes of screen time.

My biography of Minnelli

Quinn had previously won Best Supporting Actor for 1952’s Viva Zapata!, and later received Best Actor nods for Wild is the Wind and Zorba the Greek.

Judi Dench, Shakespeare In Love: 8 Mins

Thanks to an aggressive awards campaign by producer Harvey Weinstein, Shakespeare in Love swept the Oscars in 1999. It controversially beat Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan to Best Picture, and also won Best Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow, Best Original Screenplay for Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, and Best Original Score for Stephen Warbeck.

The film’s 7 Oscar wins included Best Supporting Actress for Judi Dench’s turn as Queen Elizabeth I.

Much like Quinn in Lust for Life, Dench had just eight minutes of screen time in her Oscar-winning performance. The Academy shows love when an actor brings an iconic historical figure to life, especially when that actor is a revered screen legend like Dench. Dench’s screen time might be brief, but she lives and breathes Elizabeth I whenever she’s on-screen.

Beatrice Straight in Network: 5 Minutes

The record for shortest Oscar-winning performance in history has been held by Beatrice Straight for almost 50 years.

Straight won the Best Supporting Actress with just five minutes of screen time as Louise Schumacher in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satirical drama, Network.

Straight is one of three Oscar winners in the cast of Network; Faye Dunaway won Best Actress and Peter Finch posthumously won Best Actor.

Four of those minutes are taken up by an emotional monologue upon learning that her husband is having an affair with a much younger woman. Straight’s delivery of the mixed emotions in is so powerful that that monologue alone earned her the covted Oscar.