Oscar at last: Which actresses had the longest careers before winning?
Four and a half decades after she made her screen debut as a teenager in the 1978 horror classic “Halloween,” Jamie Lee Curtis finally achieved her first Oscar nomination and win for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Upon receiving the Best Supporting Actress award for her work in the 2023 Best Picture winner, she became the female performer with the fourth longest pre-Oscar win career ever. Considering both the lead and supporting actress categories (and counting only credited roles in feature films), her waiting period of 45 years significantly surpasses the all-time average, which currently stands at 14.1 years.
Curtis went Oscarless longer than all but two of her fellow featured actresses: Peggy Ashcroft (“A Passage to India,” 1985) and Youn Yuh-jung (“Minari,” 2021). Whereas she triumphed at age 64, both of her predecessors were over 72, having respectively waited 52 and 50 years for their academy recognition. The general female record belongs to Jessica Tandy, who took the 1990 Best Actress prize 58 years after debuting in “The Indiscretions of Eve” (1932). Factoring in male actors, she shares the top position with John Gielgud, who secured his supporting trophy for “Arthur” (1982) well after getting his start in “Who Is the Man?” (1924).
First-time supporting female victors typically prevail 15.1 years into their careers, while the corresponding lead average is 13.7 years. The most recent rookie champs in each respective category are Da’Vine Joy Randolph (“The Holdovers,” 2024) and Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), who began building their feature resumes 11 and 39 years earlier. Reigning Best Actress winner Emma Stone (“Poor Things”), who previously took the same prize for “La La Land” (2017), scored both of her victories within 17 years of her film debut.
Including Curtis, Ashcroft, Youn, Tandy, and Yeoh, 11 women have acted for at least 30 years before winning the academy’s favor. Also in this club are leads Helen Mirren (40 years, “The Queen,” 2007), Geraldine Page (33, “The Trip to Bountiful,” 1986), and Loretta Young (31, “The Farmer’s Daughter,” 1948) and supporting performers Laura Dern (40, “Marriage Story,” 2020), Judi Dench (35, “Shakespeare in Love,” 1999), and Ethel Barrymore (31, “None but the Lonely Heart,” 1945). Young, who started out at age four, is this group’s youngest entrant (35), while the oldest is Tandy (80).
Of the 158 individual actresses who have ever been awarded competitive Oscars, 105 (or 66.5%) succeeded on their inaugural bids. This includes Randolph but not Stone, who received a supporting nomination for “Birdman” (2015) before bagging her first trophy. Within the past five years, the only cases of actresses triumphing on their second bids or later have involved Dern and Jessica Chastain (Best Actress, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” 2022), each of whom had been recognized twice before.
Considering the results of the past 10 years alone, the average pre-win female acting career has lasted 24.9 years, with nine of this period’s 16 first-timers having waited at least two decades. The range ends with Youn and begins with 2016 Best Supporting Actress winner Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”), who, having begun her career just six years earlier, is the only post-2014 honoree who had less than a decade of experience.
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