The only actor to have won two Oscars for the same performance
Only three times in the history of the Oscars have two actors won trophies for playing the same character, but just once has anyone managed to go home with a pair of Academy Awards for a single performance.
Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro doubled down on Vito Corleone’s status as an Oscar-winning icon in The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, before The Dark Knight‘s Heath Ledger and Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix saw Batman’s arch-nemesis repeat the feat, prior to Ariana DeBose joining Rita Moreno in winning ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for bringing Anita to life in West Side Story.
That’s an exceedingly rare achievement, but none of the aforementioned trio have got a thing on Harold Russell, made all the more impressive by the fact he wasn’t even an actor. An army instructor who was teaching demolition work, Russell became the subject of the military-sponsored film Diary of a Sergeant about veteran rehabilitation following an accident that cost him both of his hands.
When legendary director William Wyler saw Diary of a Sergeant, he went out of his way to cast Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives, his 1946 drama about a trio of soldiers who struggled to acclimate back into civilian life after returning from World War II, with Russell’s Homer Parrish attempting to adjust to his life-changing injuries altering his personal live and relationships.
As an untrained and inexperienced actor, the Academy didn’t think he’d be in with a shot at winning the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ despite the strength of his performance, with stiff competition coming from The Green Years‘ Charles Coburn, The Jolson Story‘s William Demarest, Notorious‘ Claude Rains, and The Razor’s Edge‘s Clifton Webb.
The organisation wanted to reward him anyway, so Russell was bestowed with an honorary Oscar for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures”. However, when the time came for the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ winner to be announced, he returned to the podium for a second time to make history as the first – and still only – person to win two of the industry’s most prestigious statues for the same role.
Even though he’d achieved such remarkable success in his acting debut, Russell didn’t appear in another motion picture until 1980’s Inside Moves, revealing to the Los Angeles Times that Wyler had encouraged him to further his education, which he did after securing a business degree from Boston University.
“Wyler told me I should go back to college because there wasn’t much call for a guy with no hands in the motion picture industry. I figured he was right,” he explained. “I always play a disabled veteran. And this is what Wyler said, ‘After a while they’re going to run out of ideas’, and he was absolutely right. How many times can you play the same role?” Acting didn’t become his full-time occupation, then, but history was made nonetheless.
