Literary Characters & The Oscars (By the Numbers)

Since the first Academy Awards in 1928, thirty-three Best Picture winners were based on novels.

All told, that accounts for almost half of all Academy Award winning films! That’s quite a track record attesting to the critical success of “book to screen.” But do literary characters fare equally well?

An old Hollywood cliche depicts Best Actress/Best Actor nods going strictly to real people who triumph over some form of adversity. “Want an Oscar? You have to play a real person!” National Geographic explored the phenomenon before last’s years ceremony.

In fact, of EW’s top performances, only two are real women (Hilary Swank as Brendan Terra in Boys Don’t Cry and Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose).

We couldn’t help but wonder how the rest shake out. Where do the finest performances in cinema history come from? Despite the old adage, novels fair well in Hollywood. Of the 176 lead acting performances awarded Oscars since 1927, a whopping 67% originated as characters from novels.

Here is the definitive list of Academy Awards bestowed upon lead actors who portrayed fictional characters from novels and novellas (sorry Mr. Shakespeare). This does not include plays, musicals, or any other medium written for the stage or screen. It also does not include non-fiction works of biography or memoir.

Note: For those of you who think the novel is dead (long live the novel!), more novel characters have won Oscars this decade than in the 1980s…that’s before the internet was on computers!

Fear not, however, fond novel lover. In Hollywood, characters created by novelists are still alive and well. Take EW’s ranking of the “50 Greatest ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Actor’ Performances Of All Time,” for example.

Of the 50 ranked performances, 18 of them were based on literary characters, while only 13 came from portrayals of real-life. The men were 80% more likely to be recognized for playing real people than women were (or, maybe there are 80% more movies being made about notable men than there are about notable woman…run a Google search for “biopic” and you’ll get a list of the 60 most popular. Only six of them are about women. Better make that 90%.).

More Random “Novel to Screen” Facts:

• In 1931, the first literary character to win an Oscar was actually two characters: Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.

• Holy duality, Batman. Fredric March is also the only actor to win two leading role Oscars for portraying two different characters who originated from novels. He won again in 1946 for playing Al Stephenson from The Best Years of Our Lives.

• Only four of the novels listed above won the Pulitzer Prize. Can you pick them out? They are Gone with the Wind, All the King’s Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Hours.

• Only three literary pairs (two characters from the same work) won Oscars together. Can you guess the characters and/or the works? They are Night Bus (It Happened One Night), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Silence of the Lambs.

• It’s a popular misconception that BOTH leads from Gone With the Wind won Oscars. Only one of the lead characters won: Scarlett.  

• Another Gone With the Wind misconception: Margaret Mitchell was not the first female author to write an Academy Award winning character. Nobel winner Pearl S. Buck beat her to it, two years earlier, for The Good Earth. Women authors account for less than 20% of the novels listed above. None are authors of color.

• There’s only one other Nobel Laureate on the list above: Sinclair Lewis.

• Twice in Oscars history, a lead acting award was given for the portrayal of a REAL person from a completely fictionalized account of that person (i.e. a novel). They were given just two years apart, in 2002 and 2004: Idi Amin from The King of Scotland and Virginia Woolf from The Hours.

• Novelist John O’Brien (Leaving Las Vegas) killed himself upon learning that his novel was to be turned into a movie.