Has a director ever won a ‘Best Director’ Oscar for the only movie they made?
Creating a masterpiece on your first attempt is incredibly tough to achieve. The world of film is particularly difficult, as actors and directors will likely attest to. Then again, ‘difficult’ does not necessarily mean impossible.
Since its inception back in 1929, the Academy Awards has been hailed as a metric for success in Hollywood, much to the chagrin of independent filmmakers and those who do not have the vast swathes of disposable income necessary to create that famous ‘Oscar buzz’ atmosphere around their work. Within the realm of the Academy, the ‘Best Director’ award is among the most coveted and, as a result, one of the hardest categories to break into, especially as a first-timer.
Looking back across the extensive history of the ‘Best Director’ category, it is fair to say that it has never been the most diverse of awards. In nearly 100 years of the awards, only nine nominees for ‘Best Director’ have been female, for example – and out of those nine, only three have taken home a little gold statue at the end of the night. Meanwhile, only six Black directors have been nominated over the years, and none have ever come out victorious.
As it turns out, though, the ‘Best Director’ category is not only resistant to women and people of colour, but also to newcomers to the industry. Throughout the history of the Oscars, only six directors have won the award for their directorial debut, the first being Delbert Mann all the way back in 1955 for the drama film Marty, and Sam Mendes being the most recent example, for 1999’s American Beauty.
Inevitably, those winning directors’ careers were heavily spurred on by their early Oscar wins, setting them on a path of Hollywood stardom which would see them create a litany of further films, many of which were honoured by the Academy in later years. There is one outlier in all of this, though, and that is Jerome Robbins. The only person to win the ‘Best Director’ award for their only directorial effort.
Robbins, for the uninitiated, was not a film director by trade. Entering the world of showbusiness back in the 1930s, the New York native was best-known as a dancer, and the bulk of his career was spent working as a dancer and choreographer for stage and screen, most notably on a plethora of Broadway productions stretching from the 1930s all the way until the late 1980s. At one pivotal point in the dancer’s career, in 1960, he was drafted into the film production of West Side Story, sharing director duties with veteran filmmaker Robert Wise.
The production itself was fairly disastrous, and Robbins ended up being relieved of his directing role after the film fell behind schedule. However, when the film was eventually released, it was an instant hit. Raking in colossal box office figures, and earning the respect of critics, the film was an obvious shoe-in for the Oscars, and when Robert Wise took home ‘Best Director’ at the 1961 awards, it was shared with Jerome Robbins.
Robbins never went on to direct any further films, perhaps scarred from his experiences on West Side Story, but his co-directing duties made him the only film director to win an Oscar for the only film they ever directed.
