When Actors Direct Themselves and Win Oscars

Now that Bradley Cooper and A Star is Born are coming close, if not already, to being seen as this year’s Oscar frontrunners, we might take a look back at Oscar history. How many actors have directed themselves and won Oscars, either for Acting, Directing, Writing or Picture.

We already know the answer to one of those questions. Only two in all of history have won Best Actor directing themselves. That would be Lawrence Olivier for Hamlet and Roberto Benigni for Life is Beautiful.

A few prominent directors of the silent era began their film careers as actors — notably D.W.Griffith and Charlie Chaplin — but they fall outside the parameters of this survey because they did not win a competitive Oscar.

Chaplin had been nominated as Best Actor in 1929 for The Circus, but his name was removed from the list of nominees when the Academy chose instead to award him an honorary Oscar that officially embraced him “for versatility and genius in acting, writing, directing and producing.”

With his chiseled good looks in the 1920s, Frank Borzage had a successful acting career, but when he got a bit jowly he moved on to direct and became the Oscars’ very first Best Director for Seventh Heaven in 1927.

William Wellman was also matinée-idol handsome, but “Wild Bill” felt that acting was not a “manly” endeavor. So he only appeared in a handful of silent film before going on to direct Oscars’ first Best Picture winner, Wings in ’27, and an illustrious string of manly gangster films and westerns after that. Well worth noting: William Wellman was nominated for writing and directing a classic tale of rise-and-fall Hollywood stardom, and he won the Oscar for “Best Writing, Original Story” for that movie in 1938. It was called [checking my notes] A Star Is Born.

Was Orson Welles an actor before he became a director? Yes, but only on the stage and only for 4 or 5 years. Welles pretty much emerged from the womb as a hyphenate actor-writer-director, and that’s how he arrived in Hollywood. Welles was nominated for actor, directing, and writer for Citizen Kane in 1941, but he went home with nothing more than a shared Oscar for Best Screenplay. (And Dolores del Río. Orson went home with her too, since she was recently divorced from Cedric Gibbons, who won another one of his 11 Oscars that night in 1941. In case you think there was any lack of off-screen social media drama in those days.)

But the first year where actors truly came to the forefront as directors, as far as I can tell (please correct me if I’m wrong) was in 1948. Two actor-turned-directors who up for Best Picture:

Lawrence Olivier for directing Hamlet, which won Best Actor and Best Picture.

John Huston, who won writing and directing for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (it must be said, a far superior film in every way and one of the greatest of all time).

I don’t know if you can technically call Huston an actor-turned-director. Sure, he acted briefly before becoming a director but they were bit parts. We all sort of know him as an actor, most notably in Chinatown, but I think he was known, more or less, as a director primarily. There is no question about Olivier, considered in his time the all time best actor. It shows how popular he was that Hamlet beat Sierra Madre — it was a shock at the time because it wasn’t birthed from the five families, the big studios that had a chokehold on the Oscars.

First, it’s important to note that it wasn’t all that common for actors to become directors. They were considered different talents way back when, particularly where the Oscars were concerned. Best Picture was and remains about the producers and, in the early days, the studios. Best Director is, more or less, the driving creative force. And ego. Actors had power, and still do, when it comes to a film’s popularity with the public and thus, back then anyway, the Academy voters.

Actors-turned-Directors who won but didn’t star in their films

As far as I can tell, we don’t really get to another actor-turned-director until 1967, when Mike Nichols directed The Graduate. Nichols was a comedian, not really an actor particularly, but The Graduate was only his second movie after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. But Nichols did not star in The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman did. He did win Best Director, however, in a split year with In the Heat of the Night taking Best Picture. I bring it up to note that an impressive debut by an actor might be a good bet for Best Director, even more than Best Picture.

John Schlesinger in 1969 won for Best Director and Best Picture for Midnight Cowboy. He was an actor-turned-director but did not star in Midnight Cowboy.

Bob Fosse, who was a dancer and had bit parts before becoming a director and winning Best Director for Cabaret, which lost Best Picture to The Godfather in 1972.

Milos Foreman, who acted a bit before becoming a prominent film director and eventually winning Best Director and Best Picture twice – once for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975 and again for Amadeus in 1984.

Robert Redford, a famous actor and heartthrob made good and directed Ordinary People in 1980, which won Best Picture.

Richard Attenborough, a well respected actor and director by the time Ghandi won Best Picture in 1982. Attenborough has two Oscar nominations and won both for Ghandi.

Sydney Pollack in 1985 acted quite a bit before becoming a director. He won for Out of Africa (Director and Producer) and was nominated three times as a director, and four times as a producer.

Barry Levinson had bit parts, and even has a bit part in the film he won for, Rain Man, though for our purposes he didn’t STAR in it. He came up mainly as a writer before turning to directing. He won in 1988.

Ron Howard in 2001, came up as an actor but when he became a director he did not direct himself when he won Best Picture and Best Director for A Beautiful Mind.

Tom McCarthy in 2015 came up as an actor but did not direct himself when Spotlight won Best Picture. McCarthy was awarded for Screenplay only, not Picture or Director.

How many have won Best Picture in films they directed themselves in?

The first of these is Olivier, mentioned above, in 1948.

Then flash forward all the way to 1976, when Woody Allen really became the first modern day do it all writer/actor/director to win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay and was nominated for Best Actor. Here is your first real comparison to what Bradley Cooper has done with A Star is Born. Annie Hall sprang from Woody’s imagination, with Diane Keaton as his muse – A Star is Born is a remake of a familiar Hollywood fable. Still, it’s worth noting that Annie Hall, A Star is Born, is a bittersweet love story where the woman rises as the man, more or less, falls.

Warren Beatty in 1981, coming in just a year after Robert Redford won for Ordinary People, with Reds – his political love story epic that was supposed to win Best Picture until Chariots of Fire won. It was a weird year because competing with Reds for the actor vote was On Golden Pond. Those split, which allowed Chariots of Fire to triumph. Beatty was nominated for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Producer, Best Screenplay. In the end it won Best Director, Best Supporting Actress and Best Cinematography. Chariots of Fire beat in Screenplay.

Kevin Costner in 1990 starred in Dances with Wolves. He was nominated for three Oscars – Picture, Director and Actor. He won Picture and Director, but not actor. Costner was mocked for directing himself because he showed his naked ass. As good as he was, there was that thing that often afflicts directors directing themselves – and that’s ego, or narcissism. Do they spend too much time luxuriating in their own good looks? Jeremy Irons beat Costner that year for Best Actor for Reversal of Fortune. Dances with Wolves, famously, beat Goodfellas.

Clint Eastwood directed himself in both Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004), the two films he won Picture and Director for. He was rumored to be winning Best Actor in both. For Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby he, like Costner before him, was nominated for Picture, Director and Actor but only won the first two.

Mel Gibson, in 1995, following in the footsteps of Beatty and Costner won for Braveheart (he was up against another actor-turned-director, Ron Howard, who would win later for A Beautiful Mind). Gibson got a bit of that mocking, too, as Costner and Beatty had. He was nominated for Picture and Director, won both.

Finally, Ben Affleck in 2012 is the last Actor-turned-director who directed himself and won Best Picture for Argo. Affleck would have won Director too, had he been nominated. Affleck was not nominated for Best Director or Best Actor. He was nominated only as a producer but still won.

Other notable successes from actors-turned-directors include Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper co-writing Easy Rider, Sly Stallone writing Rocky, Emma Thompson winning for adapting Sense and Sensibility, and also starring, Bill Bob Thornton winning for writing Sling Blade and also starring, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon winning screenplay for Good Will Hunting, George Clooney making good with Good Night, and Good Luck, Sofia Coppola making good with Lost in Translation (winning Screenplay), Sarah Polley writing Away from Her, Taylor Sheridan with Hell or High Water, Greta Gerwig with Lady Bird.

If Bradley Cooper wins Picture, Director, Actor and Adapted Screenplay, as you can see from the above, it will be the first time in Oscar history that anyone did that. If he wins Picture and Actor and nothing else he will be following in the footsteps of Lawrence Olivier. If he wins only Director, he’ll be in Warren Beatty in Reds territory.

Most likely, given what we’ve seen in the past, he’d be winning Picture and Director – as Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson have done, maybe also screenplay – as Woody Allen did. But very likely not Actor. It’s possible, of course, because anything is possible. But Academy members, especially now, like to spread the wealth whenever possible. We just don’t see sweeps much anymore.

Given how popular A Star is Born is, and how popular Bradley Cooper is, I would expect, at the very least, it will win at least one Oscar. There is no way it will go home empty handed.