Welcome, Eddie Redmayne: Since Rain Man, majority of Best Actor Oscar winners played sick or d
Ryan Gosling: If you really are contemplating playing Oscar Pistorius in a film about the double-amputee Olympian and convicted killer, you might want to take that role.
Why? Since Dustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar playing “Rain Man,” a majority of Best Actor Oscars were taken home by men playing the sick or handicapped. Eddie Redmayne’s win on Sunday for playing Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” made it official: 14 of 27 Best Actors tackled characters facing significant mental or physical barriers to what many consider normal life.
[Related: For some, Sean Penn’s ‘green card’ moment served as confirmation of #OscarsSoWhite]
Of course, one can quibble over the definition of the word “barrier.” Hawking has ALS, a profound disability; King George VI, played by Colin Firth in “The King’s Speech,” had a stutter. In “Shine,” David Helfgott, the pianist played by Geoffrey Rush, had an ambiguously defined mental illness — what one critic lambasted as ” ‘movie madness,’ a celluloid amalgam of schizophrenia, manic-depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and idiot savant.” And Nicolas Cage’s alcoholism in “Leaving Las Vegas” was way more debilitating than Jeff Bridges’s in “Crazy Heart.”
Advertisement
Moreover, it’s hard to say what percentage of main characters in film — or theater and literature, for that matter — are mentally or physically afflicted. Isn’t any nuanced lead damaged in some way? Hamlet had no diagnosis, but struggled as much as the hunchbacked Richard III.
Yet, in the past few decades, playing the sick or handicapped seems a clear path to Oscar gold. Heck, Tom Hanks — playing Andrew Beckett, the gay lawyer with AIDS in “Philadelphia,” and the mentally challenged Forrest Gump — did it twice in two years.
For some, the bevy of Academy Awards won by able actors transforming themselves to appear otherwise isn’t a cause for celebration.
“The ultimate ambition of David Oyelowo’s performance as Martin Luther King, Jr. is to express the reality of black life and black history in a way that resonates with those within the black community and educates those outside it,” Scott Jordan Harris, a disabled author, wrote in Slate. “The ultimate ambition of Eddie Redmayne’s performance as Stephen Hawking is to contort his body convincingly enough to make other able-bodied people think ‘Wow! By the end I really believed he was a cripple!’ Our attitudes to disability should have evolved past the stage when this mimicry is considered worthy of our most famous award for acting.”
Whether a good or bad thing, here’s who won what when:
Advertisement
Dustin Hoffman
“Rain Man”
Malady: Autism
Daniel Day-Lewis
“My Left Foot”
Malady: Cerebral palsy
Anthony Hopkins
“The Silence of the Lambs”
Malady: Psychosis
“Scent of a Woman”
Malady: Blindness
“Philadelphia”
Malady: AIDS
Share this articleShare“Forrest Gump”
Malady: Non-specific learning disability
Nicolas Cage
“Leaving Las Vegas”
Malady: Alcoholism
Geoffrey Rush
“Shine”
Malady: Non-specific mental illness
Jack Nicholson
“As Good as It Gets”
Malady: Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Jamie Foxx
Malady: Blindness
Jeff Bridges
“Crazy Heart”
Malady: Alcoholism
Colin Firth
“The King’s Speech”
Malady: Stutter
Matthew McConaughey
“Dallas Buyers Club”
Malady: AIDS
Eddie Redmayne
“The Theory of Everything”
Malady: ALS
Read more from the Morning Mix
For some, Sean Penn’s ‘green card’ moment served as confirmation of #OscarsSoWhite
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLumw9JopKiqnp67qHnMoq9or6Bkf3F9lGhna2diaHy0tc2cnGaqkZ67brnAp2SmmZqkv6rA2Gamn2WSmsC1ecCcq6iqXay2r7rEq6pmqJyWxqawjKygnKNdpL9usMismJuklZl8