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1958
The winner is listed first, in CAPITAL letters.
Actor:
DAVID NIVEN in "Separate Tables", Tony Curtis in "The
Defiant Ones", Paul Newman in "Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof", Sidney Poitier in "The
Defiant Ones", Spencer Tracy in "The Old Man and
the Sea"
Actress:
SUSAN HAYWARD in "I Want to Live", Deborah Kerr in "Separate
Tables", Shirley MacLaine in "Some Came Running",
Rosalind Russell in "Auntie Mame", Elizabeth Taylor
in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"
Supporting Actor:
BURL IVES in "The Big Country", Theodore Bikel in "The
Defiant Ones", Lee J. Cobb in "The Brothers Karamazov",
Arthur Kennedy in "Some Came Running", Gig Young in "Teacher's
Pet"
Supporting Actress:
WENDY HILLER in "Separate Tables", Peggy Cass in "Auntie
Mame", Martha Hyer in "Some Came Running", Maureen
Stapleton in "Lonelyhearts", Cara Williams in "The
Defiant Ones"
Director:
VINCENTE MINNELLI for "Gigi", Richard Brooks for "Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof", Stanley Kramer for "The
Defiant Ones", Mark Robson for "The Inn of the
Sixth Happiness", Robert Wise for "I Want to Live!"
 This year's Oscars ceremony was hosted by Oscar-winner
David Niven for Separate Tables. He was the only person
to win an Oscar the same year he was a host.
It
was a momentous year when the eight Oscar record held by  Gone
With The Wind (1939) (and equaled by From
Here to Eternity (1953) and On
The Waterfront (1954)) was finally broken by Vincente
Minnelli's elegant and charming, yet overpraised musical Gigi.
The film had a total of nine nominations and nine Oscars and
awards in almost every category including Best Picture (produced
by the legendary MGM producer Arthur Freed), Best Director,
Best Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), Best Color Cinematography,
Best Art/Set Direction, Best Song ("Gigi" by Lerner
and Loewe), Best Musical Score (Andre Previn), Best Costume
Design, and Best Editing. This record-breaking film with the greatest number
of Oscars would hold the honor - for one year only. [Minnelli
had almost forty films to his credit by 1958, but this was
his first and only Oscar win. Possibly the Academy
was making up for his snub fourteen years earlier when he lost
as Best Director for Meet
Me In St. Louis (1944).]
Gigi remains one of the few films to win all
the awards for which it had been nominated (in four or more
categories), and is one of only eleven Best Picture winners
in the Academy's first 82 years not to receive a single acting
nomination. It was highly unusual that none of the
excellent cast, young Parisian ingenue Gigi (Leslie Caron),
rich suitor and suave aristocrat Gaston (Louis Jourdan),
Gigi's grandmother and ex-Chevalier lover (Hermione Gingold),
or Gaston's charming but roguish uncle Honore (Maurice Chevalier),
received acting nominations. However, the Frenchman Maurice
Chevalier, known for his singing of Thank Heaven For Little
Girls, was
presented with an Honorary Oscar Award "for his contribution
to the world of entertainment for more than half a century."
Set in early 1900s Paris - it told
the slightly distasteful story by French writer Colette of
a young teen-aged Parisienne girl trained by a wealthy aunt
at the turn of the century to become a courtesan (in the tradition
of her family) to a wealthy suitor or "protector." She
double-crossed her family by enchanting her proposed suitor
and marrying him instead. During the time of the smash Broadway
hit My Fair Lady (that wouldn't be available for the
screen for a number of years (until My
Fair Lady (1964)), the stage hit's composers Alan
Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and costumer Cecil Beaton
were hired by MGM to create a movie musical from the Broadway
non-musical Gigi.
The other Best Picture nominees were the following:
- director Morton DaCosta's commercially-successful Auntie
Mame (with six nominations and no wins) - a film based
on Patrick Dennis' novel about a flamboyant, eccentric,
and zesty Bohemian aunt
- director Richard Brooks' film adaptation of
Tennessee William's play that was severely bowdlerized, Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof (with six nominations and no wins)
about a greedy struggle for a patriarchal Southern family
inheritance
- director Stanley Kramer's message film The
Defiant Ones (with nine nominations and two wins
- Best Story and Screenplay, and Best B/W Cinematography)
about two escaped Southern prisoners chained together
(one black and the other white)
- Delbert Mann's dramatic telling of Terence
Rattigan's stage play Separate Tables (with seven
nominations and two wins - Best Actor and Best Supporting
Actress) about a group of guests at a British seaside hotel
Three of the directors of the Best Picture nominees
were also nominated for Best Director - Vincente Minnelli for Gigi,
Richard Brooks for Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, and Stanley Kramer for The
Defiant Ones. Minnelli, with his second and last Best
Director nomination, won his first Best Director Oscar
for Gigi, although he had directed some of the greatest
MGM musicals ever made ( Meet
Me In St. Louis (1944), The Pirate (1948), and The
Band Wagon (1953)) and other great non-musicals (including Madame
Bovary (1949), Father of the Bride
(1950), The Bad and the Beautiful
(1952), Lust for Life (1956), and Some Came
Running (1958)).
[Minnelli directed the only other Freed
musical to win the Best Picture Oscar, An
American In Paris (1951), but he lost the Best Director
award to George Stevens for A Place
in the Sun (1951).] The directors of Best Picture nominees Auntie
Mame (Morton DaCosta) and Separate Tables (Delbert
Mann) were not nominated. Mark Robson was nominated
as director of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (the film's
sole nomination), starring an un-nominated Ingrid Bergman as
Gladys Aylward - an English missionary in 1930s China opposite
Robert Donat in his last film, and Robert Wise was likewise
nominated as Best Director for I Want to Live! (with
six nominations and one win - Best Actress) about a prostitute
framed for murder and sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
The Best Actor category winner was David Niven
(with his sole career nomination) in Separate Tables as
a lonely, retired, war-braggart - British army Major Pollock
in the fascinating character study set in a small English seaside
hotel on England's south coast. The award was Niven's first
and only Oscar after a twenty-three year-old film career.
According to some sources, his performance - at 15 minutes,
38 seconds - was the shortest duration of a performance to
win a lead acting Oscar. See also Anthony Hopkins' performance
in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).
The other Best Actor nominees were:
- Paul Newman (with his first nomination) for
his role as athletic, but hobbled and troubled 'homosexual'
Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
- Spencer Tracy (with his sixth nomination)
as an old Cuban fisherman who battles a giant marlin in director
John Sturges' The Old Man and the Sea (with three
nominations and one win - Best Dramatic Score)
- the two co-stars of The
Defiant Ones (their nominations presumably cancelled
each other out)
- Tony Curtis (with his sole nomination) as white convict John
Jackson
- Sidney Poitier (with his first of two career nominations)
as black convict Noah Cullen
Both were escaped, runaway chain-gang convicts who were shackled
together for short-lived freedom and forced to realize they
needed to help each other. [Poitier's nomination was the first for
an African-American actor in either the Best Actor or Best
Supporting Actor categories.]
In the Best Actress category, all of the nominees
had not yet won an Oscar. There were many nominees who had
received multiple unsuccessful nominations in the past. Susan
Hayward had been in the running for a Best Actress Oscar for
many years (in 1947, 1949, 1952, and 1955) - so it was fitting
that she won for her fifth nominated performance in the bravura
drama I Want to Live!, as prostitute/thief Barbara Graham,
suspected as a murderess, convicted and sent to the gas chamber
in San Quentin prison in 1953 after appeals and a long fight
to spare her life. The others were:
- Rosalind Russell with her fourth nomination
for her title role in Auntie Mame (Russell had three
prior nominations (in 1942, 1946 and 1947)), a recreation
of her successful Broadway stage role
- Deborah Kerr with her fifth nomination
(following four priors in 1949, 1953, 1956 and 1957) - she
was nominated for Separate Tables as a shy, repressed,
mousey, mother-dominated spinster named Sybil Railton-Bell
who resides in the seaside hotel and still loves the phony
David Niven
- Elizabeth Taylor (with her second of
four consecutive nominations) for her role as sex-starved
Maggie the Cat (and Paul Newman's wife) in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof [The 1958 death of Taylor's husband
Mike Todd in a plane crash was expected to help her chances,
but her very-public breakup of Eddie Fisher's marriage to
Debbie Reynolds tarnished her public image]
- first-timer Shirley MacLaine who was nominated
for her role as sexy floozy/factory worker Ginny Moorhead
in director Vincente Minnelli's second film of the year, Some
Came Running (with five nominations and no wins) - from
James Jones' follow-up novel to From
Here to Eternity (1953).
In the Best Supporting Actor category, Burl Ives
(with his sole nomination) won as western patriarch and scruffy
rancher Rufus Hannassey, caught in the murderous water-rights
dispute with Charlton Heston, Charles Bickford and Gregory
Peck in director William Wyler's sweeping epic western The
Big Country. [Burl Ives played two other patriarchs in
the same year: "Big Daddy" in Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, a much better performance than the
one he was nominated for, and as a New England farmer in Desire
Under the Elms.] The other Best Supporting Actor nominees
were:
- Arthur Kennedy (with his fifth and last un-successful
Oscar attempt) for his role as Frank Hirsh (Frank Sinatra's
brother) in Some Came Running
- Lee J. Cobb (with his second and last unsuccessful
nomination) as the family patriarch - Fyodor Karamazov in
director Richard Brooks' Hollywood version of Dostoyevsky's
novel, The Brothers Karamazov (the film's sole nomination)
- Theodore Bikel (with his sole nomination)
as Sheriff Man Muller in The Defiant
Ones
- Gig Young (with his second of three career
nominations) as psychologist Dr. Hugo Pine (Doris Day's boyfriend
and rival to Clark Gable) in director George Seaton's comedy Teacher's
Pet (with two nominations and no wins)
British stage actress Dame Wendy Hiller won the
Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Miss Pat Cooper - the lonely,
efficient proprietor of a seaside guest house/hotel (the Hotel
Beauregard in Bournemouth, England) and the engaged-to-be married
mistress of divorced writer Burt Lancaster (a resident who
is also rekindling his former marriage with the arrival of
his vain, aging ex-wife and fashion model Rita Hayworth) in Separate
Tables. [It was Hiller's first Oscar win (her first
nomination was for Pygmalion (1938) and
she would later be nominated, her third and final nomination,
for A Man for All Seasons (1966))].
The other Best Supporting Actress nominees included:
- Peggy Cass (with her sole nomination) as ugly
and plain secretary Agnes Gooch who becomes pregnant in Auntie
Mame
- Martha Hyer (with her sole nomination) as
college teacher Gwen French (in love with co-star Frank Sinatra)
in Some Came Running
- Maureen Stapleton (with her first of four
career nominations in her film debut role) as cripple's wife
Fay Doyle in director Vincent Donehue's Lonelyhearts (the
film's sole nomination)
- Cara Williams (with her sole nomination) as
the unnamed, lonely mother in The
Defiant Ones
In the Short Subject: Cartoon awards category,
Warner Bros.' Knighty Knight Bugs brought Bugs Bunny
his first Oscar and Friz Freleng his fourth Oscar.
In the Oscar-winning Looney Tunes cartoon, a medieval court
jester Bugs Bunny must recover the Singing Sword from the evil
Black Knight (Yosemite Sam). Freleng's previous Oscar wins
were for Tweety Pie (1947), Speedy Gonzalez (1955),
and Birds Anonymous (1957).
Oscar Snubs and Omissions:
Two films that towered over the Best Picture
nominess, but did not receive many deserved nominations and
awards (including Best Picture) were the following two classic
film gems:
- Alfred Hitchcock's greatest suspense-thriller Vertigo (it
had only two unsuccessful, minor nominations for Best Sound
and Best Art Direction/Set Decoration) with the films' great
un-nominated stars:
- James Stewart (as retired San Francisco
detective John "Scottie" Ferguson afflicted
with both acrophobia and necrophilia) in a perverse
relationship with
- Kim Novak (in a complex dual role as
Madeleine Elser/Judy Barton) who Scottie 'made over'
to resemble his previous love
- Orson Welles' last noirish masterpiece about
evil doings in a bordertown, Touch
Of Evil (completely un-nominated), in which the director
starred as obese, cigar-smoking, corrupt veteran police detective
Hank Quinlan
Another film, a complex drama titled Some
Came Running, from this year's honored director Vincente
Minnelli, had five (unsuccessful) nominations (Best Actress,
Best Costume Design, Best Song, Best Supporting Actor and
Best Supporting Actress), the film didn't receive a Best
Picture nomination - probably because it was pushed aside
by Gigi.
Stanley Donen's sophisticated romantic comedy Indiscreet,
with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman (now triumphantly back in
Hollywood), lacked nominations.
Although Alec Guinness won the Best Actor Oscar
for The
Bridge On The River Kwai (1957) in the previous year,
he was un-nominated for another great role as unorthodox painter
Gulley Jimson in this year's British comedy The Horse's
Mouth. And while Spencer Tracy was nominated as Best Actor
for The Old Man and the Sea this year, he was neglected
for another role as political boss Frank Skeffington in John
Ford's political drama The Last Hurrah (completely unnominated).
And Rock Hudson was un-nominated for his performance as Burke
Devlin in Douglas Sirk's excellent melodrama adapted from a
Faulkner novel, The Tarnished Angels (also unnominated).
Two actresses who should have been included in
the list of Best Actress nominees were Ingrid Bergman for her
role as American missionary-to-China Gladys Aylward in nominated
director Mark Robson's The Inn of the Sixth Happiness,
and Kim Stanley in her debut film as a self-destructive film
star in The Goddess. And one of the stars of the honored Gigi -
Hermione Gingold - failed to be nominated for her supporting
role as a mischievous witch in Bell, Book and Candle -
a film that also starred James Stewart and Kim Novak, the major
characters in Hitchcock's Vertigo. |
