10 actors who went from winning an Oscar to the bargain bin in record time
Winning Academy Awards is no guarantee of a lifelong career in Hollywood.
As much as they might want to deny it, there isn’t a single actor in the industry who hasn’t dreamed of having their name called at the Academy Awards. Even for those who reject the idea of an awards ceremony because they feel that it is antithetical to the notion of art, there is something profound about being awarded by a community of peers. Regardless of whether they do nothing of note for the rest of their careers, their names can still be prompted by the phrase ‘Academy Award-winner’ whenever they appear in an additional project.
Given the increased interest that the Oscars have earned in the past few years, specifically because of how many precursor awards there are, winning a prize can be a goal that takes up a much more significant amount of time. Actors will pour their hearts and souls out on the campaign trail, but by the time that the season ends, people might be sick of them. There are various reasons why an actor’s career may plummet in the aftermath of an Oscar win: they may have been perceived to be an unjust winner, have gained a haughty sense of ego, or typecast themselves in a certain role that is impossible to replicate.
There are certainly cases when an actor receives an Oscar that feels like a career achievement award and effectively ends up retiring in the immediate aftermath, but there are also cases in which winning the historic prize feels more like a burden than it does an honour.
0 Oscar winners who faded fast after their big moment:
Adrien Brody
Adrien Brody made history when he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in The Pianist, becoming the youngest person to ever do so, but the film had been both emotionally and physically taxing, making it challenging for him to find work that was compelling in the immediate aftermath.
He was also rocked by a few unfortunate scandals; in addition to being banned from Saturday Night Live for giving an impromptu impression that Lorne Michael didn’t approve of, Brody’s performance as a mentally-challenged character in M Night Shyamalan’s The Village was rightly considered to be offensive.
By the late 2010s, Brody had mostly been starring in direct-to-VOD genre films and smaller shows on lesser-known streaming services, which made his surprising performance and subsequent Oscar win for The Brutalist feel like the ultimate comeback after a particularly tough stretch of time.
Geena Davis
Geena Davis won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her performance in The Accidental Tourist, which her co-star William Hurt described as “genius”, and considering how notoriously difficult Hurt was known for being, this was certainly a high compliment. Davis actually managed to sustain her buzz when she appeared in Thelma & Louise three years later, earning another Oscar nomination, but it all came crashing down when she appeared in the all-time box office flop Cutthroat Island.
The pirate adventure film was directed by Renny Harlin, her husband at the time, and performed so poorly that Carloco Pictures went out of business. When The Long Kiss Goodnight underperformed the following year, Davis essentially took an extended hiatus from acting, with her only real performances of note being the supporting role she played in all three instalments of the Stuart Little series of family films.
Roberto Benigni
The Academy Awards rarely award actors who give performances that aren’t in the English language, but Roberto Benigni managed to pull off a shocking victory when he directed himself to a ‘Best Actor’ win for Life is Beautiful. While most people were okay with him picking up the ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ award, his obnoxious ‘Best Actor’ speech rubbed many the wrong way, especially since it was at the cost of overdue veterans like Nick Nolte, Edward Norton, and Ian McKellen.
Benigni has a very particular type of exaggerated acting that can be divisive, and he managed to crater any goodwill he had earned from Life is Beautiful‘s success just a few years later when his Pinocchio film became a ghastly failure that suggested that his one good performance must have been simply a fluke.
Mira Sorvino
The 1990s were a fairly strange period of time for the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category, as the winners would often go to performances in films that didn’t win elsewhere. Even though Woody Allen had a fairly good track record of getting his actors nominated, Mira Sorvino’s win for Mighty Aphrodite was rather odd; not only was it not one of his most acclaimed films, but Sorvino’s performance as a prostitute was considered to be divisive.
Sorvino’s only significant role in the aftermath was Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, a film that survived thanks to the cult fandom for it. Unfortunately, she was also the target of blacklisting from Harvey Weinstein, who had retaliated against her after he had harassed her, as the producer blocked her from potentially appearing as the elf Arwen in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings.
Kim Basinger
LA Confidential was instantly heralded as one of the best crime movies of its generation, as the historical cop thriller took a nostalgic look at Los Angeles and offered a trio of dynamic performances from Guy Pearce, Kevin Spacey, and Russell Crowe. Kim Basinger’s win for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in the film was still considered to be fairly strange, given that she wasn’t one of the most memorable aspects.
Basinger admitted to being very picky in the aftermath after facing some financial troubles and receiving a lot of bad scripts that she wasn’t interested in. Unfortunately, the few projects that Basinger did sign on to didn’t go her way; between commercial disasters like People I Know, Bless the Child, and I Dreamed of Africa, she had essentially made herself unemployable, and has taken little action since to revive her career.
Robin Williams
Robin Williams had to wait until his fourth Academy Award nomination to finally take home the award, and his win for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ in Good Will Hunting is considered to be one of the decade’s most deserving victories. However, his being honoured for a more serious role meant that he began to take on more dramatic parts in the aftermath, leading to disastrous films like Death to Smoochy, What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams, and Jakob the Liar.
When Williams eventually tried to break back into more comedic parts, films like RV, House of D, Man of the Year, and License to Wed suggested that he had lost touch with his lighter sensibilities altogether. His films began being released direct-to-VOD and in very few theatres by the time of his tragic death in 2014, with his only mainstream roles being supporting parts in family or animated films.
F Murray Abraham
Mozart may have ended up getting the last laugh when F Murray Abraham won the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ for playing his rival, Salieri, in the biopic Amadeus, only to face a sharp career decline. Although some had argued that Tom Hulce was more deserving of the win for the same film, as he had also been nominated for ‘Best Actor’ for playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Abraham developed a reputation for being difficult, which led him to make a series of terrible films.
The actor briefly flirted with a potential comeback when he began appearing in Wes Anderson films and landed a memorable role as a villain on a season of 24, but a series of allegations of sexual harassment against him cost him his job on the Apple TV comedy Mythic Quest, and essentially ended his career for good.
Halle Berry
Halle Berry made history when she became the first African-American actor to ever win the ‘Best Actress’ prize at the Academy Awards, but her series of subsequent roles may have left the Oscar voters immediately questioning their choices. If her reviled performance in the controversial hacking drama Swordfish wasn’t enough, Berry wasted her attempt to be a Bond girl in Die Another Day (perhaps the worst film in the franchise) and delivered a laughably terrible accent when she was cast to play the mutant Storm in the X-Men films.
Her subsequent career has included many more misses, with Catwoman in particular being singled out as one of the worst Hollywood films ever made. Although she delivered one of her best performances in decades earlier this year in the crime thriller Crime 101, the film did not perform well enough financially to signify that she would be making any sort of comeback.
Cuba Gooding Jr
Cameron Crowe had created such a massive hit with Jerry Maguire that the film seemed destined to win something, but the Oscars chose to hand ‘Best Supporting Actor’ to Cuba Gooding Jr because his character was so beloved. While it was immediately seen as ridiculous that Gooding won over William H Macy’s all-time great performance in Fargo, it became clear within the years after that they just hadn’t picked someone interested in making good films.
Gooding opted to make lazy comedies like Snow Dogs, Chill Factor, Boat Trip, and Daddy Day Care instead of anything remotely prestigious, and even though he played the titular role in the acclaimed, Emmy-winning FX miniseries American Crime Story: The People vs OJ Simpson, his performance wasn’t nearly as acclaimed as that of Sterling K Brown, Sarah Paulson, or Courtney B Vance, with his career currently in the midst of a standstill due to the sexual assault allegations against him.
Ariana DeBose
The part of Maria in West Side Story is one of only three characters that have inspired two Oscar-winning performances, alongside Don Vito Corleone and the Joker. It was 50 years after Rita Moreno won the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ prize for her amazing performance in the original West Side Story that Ariana DeBose picked up the same award for her role in Steven Spielberg’s remake.
Unfortunately, her subsequent work has been so bad that it almost seems like her agent has a vendetta against her. Between the terrible superhero spinoff Kraven the Hunter, the cringe-inducing spy comedy Argylle, the revived action comedy Love Hurts, and Wish, perhaps the worst film that Disney Animation has ever made, DeBose has seemingly only been able to participate in projects that are extremely embarrassing. She needs to reunite with Spielberg before it is too late.
