For the last 70 years, winning an Oscar has been Hollywood’s ultimate prize, the heaviest accolade for anyone who helps make the movies, an honor no amount of cynicism (or reality) can really bury or obscure.
And of the hundreds of Oscar winners over that span, beginning with the 1927-28 winners (who received their awards from Douglas Fairbanks Sr. at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel on May 16, 1929), a fair number have come from Chicago. Of course, we have to use the term “ex-Chicagoan” loosely. Some of the winners, like directors Robert Zemeckis and William Friedkin, are Chicagoans born and bred–though now they live out West. Others, like Walt Disney, were born here; or, like Orson Welles, were raised here; or, like Mike Nichols and Janusz Kaminski, went to school here; or, like Ben Hecht, worked here. A few, like Marlon Brando, lived in the ‘burbs.
There is another list we could assemble: ex-Chicagoans who haven’t (yet) won an Oscar: “B” Western master Budd Boetticher; “The Fugitive’s” director Andrew Davis and star Harrison Ford; virtuoso playwright-screenwriter David Mamet; and Steppenwolf alumni Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, Joan Allen, Laurie Metcalf, John Mahoney, et al.
Do all these Windy City filmmakers have any more in common than accidental proximity, or is there more? In many cases, this group suggests the common links of other groups of moviemaking Midwesterners: Wisconsin’s Spencer Tracy, Fredric March, Nick Ray, Joseph Losey and Gena Rowlands; Nebraska’s Fred Astaire and Henry Fonda; Ohio’s Paul Newman; Minnesota’s Judy Garland and Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel; Indiana’s Howard Hawks and James Dean; Kansas’ Dennis Hopper; Missouri’s Robert Altman; Gene Hackman of Danville and Richard Pryor of Peoria. They all share either a heartland optimism and sturdiness or, in some cases, a romanticism bordering on self-destruction.
What our list of 20 below definitely all have in common is a connection to Chicago–and one or more Oscars. Here’s how they got them.
1. Walt Disney (34 Oscars, various categories)
Born Dec. 5, 1901, in humble circumstances in Chicago, Disney became history’s most prodigious Oscar winner, and probably the American movie industry’s single most powerful cultural influence. (In many ways, he remains so.) Disney won for short and feature cartoons, including a special Oscar for “Snow White” (1937). Toward the end of his life, he came close to winning a best picture Oscar for 1964’s “Mary Poppins.” Through the years his messages remained consistent: The small and plucky would defeat the mighty and evil; hard work and faith pay off; and the world of childhood is a lost magical kingdom.
2. Ben Hecht (1927-28: best original story screenplay, “Underworld”; 1935, co-winner, best original story, “The Scoundrel”)
One of Chicago’s most famous journalists, Hecht–along with his partner Charles MacArthur–penned the classic portrait of Windy City news in the play “The Front Page.” Then this one-time concert violinist and circus acrobat went on to become, in the opinion of many, the best Hollywood screenwriter of the studios’ Golden Age (“Scarface,” “Notorious,” “Wuthering Heights”) and its best script doctor as well. (Among movies Hecht rescued anonymously: “Gone With the Wind.”)
3. Preston Sturges (1940: best original screenplay, “The Great McGinty”)
The son of Chicago’s ultra-wealthy Solomon Sturges, Hollywood’s best comedy scriptwriter first worked as a WWI ambulance driver, cosmetics factory manager and inventor. (One of his inventions: kiss-proof lipstick.) Bored with business, he conquered Broadway with his risque 1929 hit “Strictly Dishonorable,” moved successfully to Hollywood, then blazed the trail for other writer-directors by persuading Paramount to let him direct his own wildly sarcastic comedy of crooked politicians, “The Great McGinty.” Sturges’ career essentially was over by 1948. Yet the rapid-fire, hilarious, urbane dialogue of films such as “The Lady Eve,” “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” remains the standard by which all others are judged.
4. Orson Welles (1941: co-winner, best original screenplay, “Citizen Kane”; 1970: honorary Oscar, life achievement)
In the opinion of many, the greatest filmmaker of the century–and, in the opinion of a majority, the maker of the greatest single film, “Citizen Kane”–Welles was a Chicagoan away at school as a youth. His family lived in the Water Tower area from the time he was 3 until he left Woodstock’s Todd School as a teenager for Ireland.
After that, he belonged to the world.
5. Don Siegel (1945: best short subject, “Star in the Night”; and best documentary short subject, “Hitler Lives”)
Born in Chicago to a mandolin virtuoso, educated at Cambridge and at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Siegel was Warner Brothers’ house master of montage sequences in the 1940s. (The entire Paris scene in “Casablanca” is Siegel’s.) In the ’50s, he became a master of the “B” crime and action movie (“Riot in Cell Block 11” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”). In the ’60s, he met Clint Eastwood (“Coogan’s Bluff,” “Dirty Harry”) and later encouraged his buddy to try directing. Sam Peckinpah, who started as Siegel’s assistant and dialogue writer, always called him “the padrone.”
6. Mercedes McCambridge (1949: best supporting actress, “All the King’s Men”)
A Joliet girl and Mundelein College alumna, McCambridge appeared in numerous radio plays in the ’30s and ’40s and, afterward, in only a few films, though always unforgettably. She won an Oscar her first time out, as the savvy reporter in “All the King’s Men.” Her impact was indelible–whether she was the hysterical lynch mob queen in “Johnny Guitar,” Jimmy Dean’s ranch patroness in “Giant” or (unseen and uncredited) the devil’s voice in “The Exorcist.” No slouch on radio himself, Orson Welles once called her “the world’s greatest living radio actress.”
7. Vincente Minnelli (1958: best director, “Gigi.” He also directed two best pictures, “An American in Paris,” 1951, and “Gigi”)
Chicagoan Minnelli was a musical performer, painter and designer before becoming art director of Radio City Music Hall at 23. Later, he worked as a Broadway director specializing in musicals. Joining MGM in 1940, he soon became, along with Stanley Donen, one of the two greatest directors of the classic Hollywood musical–as well as Judy Garland’s second husband and Liza Minnelli’s dad. Working best as part of a large, studio company, Minnelli made masterpieces that include “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “The Band Wagon” as well as his two Oscar winners.
8. Karl Malden (1951: best supporting actor, “A Streetcar Named Desire”)
The son of Yugoslavian immigrants, hard-working young Mladen Sekulovich was a basketball star who won an athletic scholarship to Arkansas State Teachers’ College. (His famous bulbous, broken nose comes from injuries in his second sport, football.) But when his coach forbade him to try out for a school play, he quit the team, later enrolling at the Goodman Theatre school. By the 1940s, the renamed Karl Malden was one of Broadway’s finest players, appearing with Marlon Brando in the 1947 production of Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” His role: Mitch, the clumsy, good-natured work buddy of Stanley Kowalski and suitor of doomed Blanche DuBois. When director Elia Kazan recast Malden in the 1951 movie, the Oscar and a long, honored stage, screen and TV career were his.
9. Marlon Brando (1954: best actor, “On the Waterfront.” 1972: best actor, “The Godfather”)
His ancestors are French (“Brandeau”). And many of the people who knew young dropout Buddy Brando in Evanston and Libertyville thought he was a drum-playing goof-off. Nevertheless, in 1946, at 22, his performance on Broadway in “Truckline Cafe” stopped the show. A year later, his Stanley Kowalski sparked a theatrical revolution. Beginning in 1950, his film work began to have extraordinary impact, which now has become world-wide. Director Kazan has called his 1954 performance as a longshoreman in “On the Waterfront” the best in movie history. Since then, Brando has been the actor whose work all young American actors sought to match–though his later films suggest he was both a natural and someone who sometimes didn’t give a damn.
10. Dorothy Malone (1956: best supporting actress, “Written on the Wind”)
Her real name is Dorothy Maloney; her school was Highland Park High; and she has a pug nose and knowing smile that can rev your motors or break your heart. As a brunette, Malone was the bookstore clerk who seduced private eye Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) in “The Big Sleep.” As a blond, she cavorted with Martin and Lewis in “Scared Stiff” and “Artists and Models.” Then director Douglas Sirk cast her in a dynamic role in the great soap opera “Written on the Wind,” as the nymphomaniac daughter of a wealthy Texas oil family.
11. Burl Ives (1958: best supporting actor, “The Big Country”)
We think of Hunt Township’s burly guitar strummer as a country type, but looks are deceptive. He became famous as a Weavers-era folk singer, before Disney hired him in 1948 for “So Dear to My Heart.” Then Kazan moved him up several notches, casting him as the sheriff in “East of Eden” and as roaring Southern patriarch Big Daddy in Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” a role Ives reprised for the sanitized 1958 movie. MGM, producers of “Cat,” submitted Ives in the best actor category, costing him a sure supporting actor nomination and almost certain win. He made the 1958 cut anyway, and the voters, remembering Big Daddy, gave Ives that year’s nod for his role in William Wyler’s big Western, “The Big Country.” Sadly, he was never again so ambitious–or so good.
12. Charlton Heston (1959: best actor, “Ben-Hur”)
Evanston-born Northwestern University grad Charlton Heston (aka Charles Carter) has a hawklike countenance that moved one French critic to proclaim, “Heston is an axiom . . . instant heroism.” In the 1950s, thanks to his sonorous voice, classical training and his role in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 “The Ten Commandments,” Heston was in the midst of a long run as the king of historical, biblical and toga roles: Moses, El Cid, Michelangelo, Andrew Jackson (twice) and John the Baptist. Ben-Hur is his best role, center of the most Oscared film in history (11 wins): a remake of MGM’s 1926 epic, with a great chariot race. Director Wyler, mightily impressed with his star’s cowboy villain role in “The Big Country,” cast him here–and it’s as Moses and Ben-Hur that we best remember Heston.
13. Haskell Wexler (1966: best cinematography, black-and-white, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”; 1976: best cinematography, “Bound for Glory”)
The last cinematographer to win Oscars for both black-and-white and color cinematography, Wexler is, by common consent, one of the most brilliant in his profession. Yet he makes films selectively, usually choosing projects that match his left-wing sympathies (“Days of Heaven,” “Coming Home,” “Matewan”). He began in industrial films and made his first impression in 1963, with his work on Kazan’s “America, America.” As occasional writer-director. Wexler is best known for his exciting 1969 agitprop drama “Medium Cool,” the story of a Chicago TV cameraman (Robert Forster) in the late ’60s.
14. Mike Nichols (1967: best director, “The Graduate”)
Berlin-born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, whose Jewish parents fled Hitler when he was 7, was working his way through the University of Chicago when he walked up to a stranger, a female student, named Elaine Berlin. Peschkowsky introduced himself by improvising a comedy scene; Berlin picked it up instantly. That was the beginning of the comedy team Mike Nichols and Elaine May. May became a playwright-director, and Nichols the most successful U.S. stage director of the 1960s. He made his film directing debut on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and, a year later, directed a little sex comedy about a WASP California college student who is seduced by one of his affluent parents’ married friends, Mrs. Robinson. This role went to L.A. native Dustin Hoffman, who seems all wrong but plays it right. “The Graduate” won Nichols the Oscar. An erratic career followed, but Nichols’ film work has picked up markedly on his last three movies, all scripted by his old friend: Elaine May.
15. William Friedkin (1971: best director, “The French Connection”)
Of all directors who have been at Chicago’s WGN-TV, local boy William Friedkin was the ranking prodigy. Starting in the mail room in 1954 at 16, he was a director at the station within a year, creating numerous shows until 1967, when he made his feature film directorial debut. Four years later, Friedkin drew on his TV documentary experience to make a cop movie. The material was fact-based: the story of real-life narcotics detectives renamed Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) and their cracking of a Marseilles-to-New York heroin smuggling ring. The showpiece scene was a car chase under elevated tracks. Though hundreds of movies and TV shows have raced the same terrain since, “French Connection” and Friedkin got there first.
16. Jason Robards Jr. (1976: best supporting actor, “All the President’s Men”; 1977: best supporting actor, “Julia”)
Jason Robards Sr. was a prolific stage and screen actor whose credits include D. W. Griffith’s “Abraham Lincoln.” His Chicago-born son struggled to establish himself on Broadway, before making a breakthrough in 1956 and 1957 with performances in two Eugene O’Neill plays, “The Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” Re-creating his stage role in the 1962 movie of “Long Day’s Journey,” Robards delivered one of the most electrifying drunk scenes in movie history. Yet the academy didn’t nominate him. And when “Iceman Cometh” was filmed in 1973, Robards, the finest O’Neill actor of our time, wasn’t even cast in his greatest role: barroom king Hickey. Perhaps the two mid-’70s Oscars he won for smaller performances, as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in “All the President’s Men” and hard-boiled novelist Dashiell Hammett in “Julia,” partially compensated for those mistakes.
17. John Avildsen (1976: best director, “Rocky”)
Oak Park’s John Avildsen worked as production manager, assistant director and cinematographer, before the 1970s low-budget “Joe”–a look at bigotry in the Vietnam War years–put him, Peter Boyle and Susan Sarandon on the map. But it was 1976’s “Rocky”–writer-star Sylvester Stallone’s Cinderella story of a failed Philadelphia boxer who gets a shot at the heavyweight title–that won Avildsen a surprise 1976 Oscar. The win was another Cinderella story. The four 1976 nominees Avildsen beat were: Sidney Lumet (“Network”), Alan Pakula (“All the President’s Men”), Lina Wertmuller (“Seven Beauties”) and Ingmar Bergman (“Face to Face”).
18. Robert Zemeckis (1994: best director, “Forrest Gump”)
Zemeckis, from Chicago and Northern Illinois University, graduated from the University of Southern California School of Cinema after Vietnam’s fall in 1973. But it took another five years before he and USC writing partner Bob Gale put together “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” a comedy about the teen frenzy during the Beatles’ first American tour. Six years later, Zemeckis’ third picture, “Romancing the Stone,” moved him into Hollywood’s big leagues, where he stayed through three “Back to the Future” movies and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” In his next film, Zemeckis kept his flair for spectacle and humor and a theme of ordinary people plunged into extraordinary events. Working with Winston Groom’s novel about a blunt Southern football player, he added a vein of yearning sentiment and a melancholy/optimistic view of the Vietnam War era and its aftermath that won the mass movie audience’s hearts. The politics of “Forrest Gump” have been debated. But, for most, it was another story of the small defeating the mighty and a lost magic kingdom.
19. Janusz Kaminski (1993: best cinematography, “Schindler’s List”)
As Eastern European communist regimes crumbled in the 1980s, many young active or would-be filmmakers came to the U.S., including Poland’s Janusz Kaminski, who went through the film program at Columbia College. Then he departed for Hollywood.
Noticing his work, Spielberg took Kaminski back to Poland for the stark black-and-white vistas of “Schindler’s List.” Since “Schindler,” Kaminski has become Holly Hunter’s husband and Spielberg’s regular cinematographer.
20. Quincy Jones (1994: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award)
Quincy Jones was 10 when his family left Chicago for Seattle, and 15 when he hooked up with the young man who would become his mentor: 17-year-old soul, rhythm-and-blues genius Ray Charles. Still only a teenager, Jones started playing trumpet and arranging for Lionel Hampton. After gigs with Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie bands and finally his own, Jones launched a music-producing career that saw him win 25 Grammies. He then started a third career as a striking, jazzy movie composer for movies ranging from “The Pawnbroker” and “In the Heat of the Night” (with Charles wailing the Jones-written theme song) to “In Cold Blood” and “The Color Purple.” To date, Jones has been nominated for (and not won) seven Oscars. When he finally won one, it was for his non-musical and non-moviemaking efforts as philanthropist and humanitarian: the storied Jean Hersholt Award. And, when Ray Charles’ old protege faced the 1994 Academy Award audience, he insisted: “I’d much rather get an Oscar for what I am rather than what I do.”
