If there’s one factor the Oscars love, it is a large second. The envelopes containing the winners of essentially the most prestigious movie awards in Hollywood could also be sealed, however that does not cease the powers-that-be behind annually’s Oscars telecast from setting the night time up for optimum shock, drama, and inspiration. It would not at all times work, like when, on the 93rd Oscars, the classes had been rearranged so the telecast might finish with Chadwick Boseman’s posthumous Greatest Actor win (or so many presumed, though producer Stephen Soderbergh denied this). Besides Boseman did not win, and class winner Anthony Hopkins wasn’t on the ceremony, so the seemingly pre-planned large end turned out to be a clumsy dud.
Every now and then, although, the Academy’s penchant for attempting to plan round potential wins ends in some glad accidents. Such was the case in 1947, when Harold Russell made historical past as the primary non-professional actor to win an Oscar — and the solely actor to ever take house two statuettes for a similar function — for his flip in “The Greatest Years of Our Lives” (per The Guardian).
Russell’s casting in William Wyler‘s post-war drama, itself that yr’s Greatest Image Oscar winner, was an early case of a disabled actor taking part in a disabled function, because the younger World Warfare II veteran misplaced each palms throughout a coaching accident. His on-screen character, Homer Parrish, was a star athlete who had additionally had each palms amputated in the course of the warfare, and who feared his relationship together with his fiancee can be ruined by the metallic hooks he’d been given of their place.
Harold Russell received an honorary award in 1947
“The Greatest Years of Our Lives” is commonly considered one of the crucial sensitively informed on-screen portrayals of PTSD and the after-effects of warfare in America. It earned a then-staggering sum of money on the field workplace and almost swept the Oscars, successful seven of the eight classes for which it was nominated. Journalist Kristen Lopez, whose work focuses on incapacity on display screen, as soon as referred to as the film “probably the greatest portrayals of incapacity I can advocate.” When the Library of Congress started including essentially the most culturally and traditionally necessary American films ever made to its archive within the late ’80s, “The Greatest Years of Our Lives” was one of many very first batch chosen.
Regardless of all this, it looks as if Russell wasn’t anticipated to win his Greatest Supporting Actor class. He wasn’t an expert actor, however had been scouted for the movie by Wyler after showing in a brief government-made documentary titled “Diary of a Sergeant.” As a primary time actor, it appeared possible that Russell would not beat out trade veterans like Claude Rains, Clifton Webb, and Charles Coburn, all of whom had been nominated for Oscars earlier than 1946. Nonetheless, his flip within the film was exceptional, and the Academy clearly needed to acknowledge it one way or the other. Thus, they gave Russell a particular Oscar, offered to him by Shirley Temple for “bringing hope and braveness to his fellow veterans” (per the LA Occasions).
Later that night time, Russell defied expectations by successful Greatest Supporting Actor in any case, making historical past on the nineteenth Academy Awards for his unprecedented double win. Sadly, the publicity did not result in a Hollywood profession for Russell, as The Guardian famous that Wyler informed him to return to varsity as a substitute of pursuing appearing “as a result of there wasn’t a lot name for a man with no palms within the movement image trade.” The Oscar winner fought ableism in different methods, serving on a committee for the employment of disabled folks below a number of totally different presidential administrations. He handed away in 2002, however his reminiscence lives on in “The Greatest Years of Our Lives,” in his historic Oscar second, and in his work on behalf of disabled folks all over the place.