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When an Oscar has led to career death
For some it’s downhill all the way after winning an Oscar. Here are a few famous casualties
Roberto Benigni: Life Is Beautiful (1998)
One can make a very good living in Italy by talking fast and having a funny face, and until La Vita e Bella this is what Roberto Benigni had been content to do. But that film’s combination of subtitles, Nazis and a cute kid proved too much for the Academy, and suddenly Benigni found his film in the running for seven statuettes at the Oscars, including three for him personally, as best actor, director and writer of an original screenplay. In the end, it won three — music, foreign language film and actor.
Since then, Benigni has made two films as an actor — Asterix and Obelix Take on Caesar and Pinocchio — in which he played a cartoon character and a puppet. Both were expensive stinkers. Asterix was the most expensive film ever made by a French studio — and was suggested by some also to be the worst, with Benigni in particular catching a lot of flak as the horribly unfunny Roman centurion, Detritus. Pinocchio, on the other hand, was actually scary, with 50-year-old Benigni playing the part of a little boy. A little optimistically, the film was named as Italy’s contender for best foreign language film in the 2002 Oscars. To nobody’s surprise, it wasn’t nominated, although Benigni did go on to win the worst actor award at that year’s Razzies.
Callie Khouri: Thelma and Louise (1991)
Thelma and Louise was not only supposed to be a good film, it was supposed to be socially important. At last, two leading women had proved they could carry a buddy picture on their own and make it a commercial success. In the image of Thelma and Louise holding hands and driving to their doom, the women’s movement had discovered its own defiant heroines — a Butch and Sundance for the 1990s. Both the stars, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, were nominated for best actress, and Ridley Scott was up for best director, but only Callie Khouri, who wrote the screenplay, actually won. Still the point had been proved: a fierce new voice was in town.
But over the past 14 years, Khouri has completed just two features. The first, Something to Talk About, was a romantic comedy, also about dastardly men, which proved particularly unmemorable. Then in 2002 Khouri wrote and directed an adaptation of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which southern female companionship was once again writ large. Critics panned it en masse.
Halle Berry: Monster’s Ball (2001)
Whatever the future holds for Halle Berry — and let us all hope that it is not Catwoman 2 — her legacy will always be assured for topping Gwyneth Paltrow’s record for most spectacular nervous breakdown in an Oscar acceptance speech. After being made the first black woman to win best actress for her performance in Monster’s Ball, she hysterically thanked 25 people, including Oprah Winfrey and her lawyer, and took Hollywood’s delusions of importance to new levels by dedicating the award to “every faceless, nameless woman of colour that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” Since that door opened, she has made X2, Gothika and Catwoman — a colossal critical and commercial failure.
Jeremy Irons: Reversal of Fortune (1991)
Before Hugh Grant came along and made bumbling sexy, Jeremy Irons was the patrician embodiment of posh British totty. He has made several fine films in his career, such as Dead Ringers and The Mission, but none of them since he won his Oscar for playing posh Euro totty Claus von Bulow, the man who may or may not have tried to murder Glenn Close, in Reversal of Fortune. Since then, Irons has been busy making dozens of films, without quite recapturing the glories of his pre-Oscar days. There have been some highlights, however: an evil uncle in The Lion King, a German terrorist in Die Hard With a Vengeance, and as the voice of the Millennium Dome.
Timothy Hutton: Ordinary People (1980)
Hutton’s feature film career had the perfect beginning. As an unknown teenager, he was cast by Robert Redford opposite Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore in the role of Conrad, a suicidally depressed young man — the Academy loves mental illness. The film, Ordinary People, won four Oscars, including best picture, and best supporting actor for Hutton, but it has turned out to be perhaps the most comprehensively forgotten best picture of the past 25 years — and many who remember it do so as the middlebrow melodrama that usurped Raging Bull.
For Hutton the triumph faded quickly. He had been the critics’ darling in 1980, and gathered great sympathy for having lost his father to liver cancer just a few months before shooting on Ordinary People began. But his successive appearances as brooding young men in Taps, Daniel, Iceman and The Falcon and the Snowman failed to catch the imagination and his star status gradually faded — although he has kept working and is now appearing in Kinsey. Hutton typifies the supporting-actor Oscar’s poor record of introducing new stars. Since 1980, it has usually been given to established favourites, and while Denzel Washington, Kevin Spacey and Benicio Del Toro have been propelled to greater things by winning it, none of them was exactly unknown at the time. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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