Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners

Congratulations to Zoe Saldana and her Best Supporting Oscar win.

Want to know the best Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners?  How about the worst Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners?  Curious about Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners box office grosses or which Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which one got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place because we have all of that information.

Drivel Part: (That is what my wife calls this part of the page).  A few years ago, we wrote three movie pages on Oscar winners: Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Actress.  Our goal was to write six different pages…but we got sidetracked. Well with it being “Movie Award Season”, we figured it was time finish off the last three Oscar winning pages we wanted to write.   I have seen 79 of the 81 movies listed in the table.  The only movie to escape me so far is 1936’s Anthony Adverse.

Since 1936, there have been 85 Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners. This page will rank all Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners from Best to Worst in five different sortable columns of information.  If you use the sort and search buttons the massive table becomes very interactive.

shelley and dianne
Dianne Wiest and Shelley Winters are the only actresses in the history of people to win 2 Best Supporting Actress Oscars

Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners Can Be Ranked 5 Ways In The Table Below

The really cool thing about ther table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort by the winners
  • Sort Best Supporting Actress Winners by actual domestic box office grosses
  • Sort Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners by critic reviews and audiences voting.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar nominations and how many Oscar® wins each movie won
  • Sort Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score.  UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.  The ceiling to earn points for box office is $200 million…once a movie passes that mark it stops earning points in that category.
 
One of my favorite Best Supporting Actress Oscar winning roles is Maggie Smith in California Suite...Michael Caine being in the movie has nothing to do with it.
One of my favorite Best Supporting Actress Oscar winning roles is Maggie Smith in California Suite…Michael Caine being in the movie has nothing to do with it. Smith might have lost the Oscar in the movie but she won the Oscar in real life.

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22 thoughts on “Best Supporting Actress Oscar Winners”

  1. Best Actress Supporting Oscar Winners That Still Need An UMR Page
    1. Beatrice Straight
    2. Jane Darwell
    3. Katina Paxinou
    4. Lila Kedrova
    5. Melissa Leo
    6. Anna Paquin
    7. Mo’Nique
    8. Patty Duke
    9. Brenda Fricker
    10. Mercedes Ruehl
    11. Yuh-Jung Youn
    12. Margaret Rutherford
    13. Marcia Gay Harden
    14. Mira Sorvino

    Reply

    1. I have knocked out 4 more of these winners…only 10 to go.
      Best Actress Supporting Oscar Winners That Still Need An UMR Page

      1. Jane Darwell
      2. Katina Paxinou
      3. Lila Kedrova
      4. Melissa Leo
      5. Anna Paquin
      6. Brenda Fricker
      7. Mercedes Ruehl
      8. Yuh-Jung Youn
      9. Margaret Rutherford
      10. Mira Sorvino

      Reply

  2. With Ruth Gordon’s page being completed….there are now 47 of these Best Supporting Actress winners that have an UMR page. 47 done….37 to go….or 54% complete.

    Reply

  3. Thank you for this list. You did such a great job.
    Let us hope that the Academy brings back many of the previous winners for the 90th ceremony as they did for the 75th ceremony.
    The two oldest living past winners are Olivia de Havilland and Eva Marie Saint. It would be so great to see them honored along with many more past winners.

    Reply

    1. Hey Neil…..thanks for the very kind words about this page. I am so glad I did these pages……I think they are the best list of winners out there…as they provide so much more information than just the winner, year and movie title. It would be awesome to see Olivia de Havilland and Eva Marie Saint on the show….not too mention another appearance by Kirk Douglas. Thanks for stopping by and commenting…it is greatly appreciated.

      Reply

  4. Hi

    A great list of talent, Ruth Gordon I particularly love in Rosemary’s Baby and Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon, (who was really a lead) It’s interesting how A listers like Davis, Hepburn and Crawford would never have taken a supporting role at their peak and yet in the last few years people like Catherine Zeta Jones, Renee Zelwegger and Cate Blanchett all have been nominated and won.

    Reply

    1. Hey Chris. I agree that Gordon is excellent in Rosemary’s Baby. It was only recently did I realize how successful Gordon and her writing partner/husband Garson Kanin were…..3 Oscar nominations. For some reason…Tatum O’Neal and Paper Moon never really connected with me. Back then…..A listers would not even consider a supporting role….they had a real fear that if they took a supporting role….they would never be a leading lady again. I agree that today it is so different…..though things have not gone so well for Zeta-Jones and Zelwegger since winning their Oscars. Zelwegger has shockingly changed in the last 5 years…she is almost unrecognizable now. Blanchett on the other hand….is the perfect example of going back and forth between supporting roles and leading roles. Carol might get her yet another Oscar nomination this year.

      Reply

      1. Hi

        I forgot to mention Kim Basinger in LA Confidential. I thought Gloria Stewart would have got it for Titanic but I guess she was an old timer, but not a big enough name.
        You make a good point abour Renee Zellwegger, her career seems to have gone downhill since winning the Oscar. The same for Catherine Zeta. I think Cate Blanchett has the advantage of being known for more of a character actress than just a movie star so can easily go between leads and supports. The problem with so many nominees is that only one can win and over the years there’s been some fantastic supporting actresses, Thelma Ritter has been nominated at least 6 times but never won. Gladys Cooper was fantastic in The Song of Bernadette and Now Voyager and so many others.

        Reply

  5. Hi, Bruce.

    I’m not sure whether or will come in second over Steve or not.

    Although I usually list what movies I have seen by ranking, I’m not sure I want to do that with this particular page. As with the Best Actress topic, there are certain actresses that make me cringe when I see them advertised as being in a film-despite them being hugely popular among both the critics and audience, I find them highly overrated and try to avoid seeing these pictures. Certain directors and actors cause the same reaction in me too and I tend to avoid talking about them in these pages. The same could be said about certain genres. Such is my answer to the question of whether or not your ranking system works for other topics.

    Not that this explains why I don’t answer your recent artists pages. I am after all more interested in the classic era.

    So I will not say which is the highest ranked film performance I have not seen except to say that it is in the top 20. I have seen 19 of the top 20.

    I have no problem saying, however, that the chances of me ever watching Rosemary’s Baby is non-existent. Not my type of film. So if you want to pretend that number 22 is the highest ranking film I have not seen, go ahead.

    I have seen 25 of the top 30.

    I have seen 34 of the top 40

    I have seen 42 of the top 50

    I have seen 46 of the top 60

    I have seen 51 overall. So I do edge past Steve.

    The lowest ranked film I have seen is the final one of Ethel Barrymore in None But the Lonely Heart.

    As for seeing movies on the big screen, I did see A Beautiful Mind on the big screen. Just one though.

    I have seen several of these films only once with no interest in seeing them again.

    Some of the films I see often have more to do with the overall movie rather than any one performance. However, movies I have seen multiple times which I have not otherwise mentioned in other pages about other artists include Separate Tables, National Velvet, and Murder on the Orient Express.

    My hope to watch Oscar Winning performances before the artists die has sometimes been a bad choice. I wish I had been much older than my early 20’s when I first saw Zorba the Greek. The ending really bothered me.

    Some of the recent films that have either a mystery/suspense genre or are about the golden era of Hollywood I have seen where otherwise I wold not otherwise see them. Besides A Beautiful Mind, such titles include L.A. Confidential and The Aviator. Others I have seen because I read the book in highschool such as The Accidental Tourist.

    As for titles I have been meaning to watch but still haven’t the top of that list is All the King’s Men.

    Cheers,

    Flora

    Reply

    1. Hey Flora.
      1. I appreciate you commenting, especially since some of these movies make you “cringe”.
      2. Well I appreciate your comments on my classic performers…when I first started doing these pages….I had no idea that the classic performers would be my most popular pages…..but that is what has happened. When looking at my Top 10 pages….6 of them are classic pages…..and when looking at the Top 20, 14 of them are classic pages.
      3. 95% of the Top 20 is pretty stout.
      4. Tally count….me 78, you 51 and Steve 48….yeah for me.
      5. I think a lot of these movies were one and done for me….scanning the list….I would say there are only a handful of these movies that I would ever watch again….watching Reds one time was enough in my lifetime….lol.
      6. Murder on the Orient Express (the power of Widmark?…lol), California Suite, A Beautiful Mind and The Help would be exceptions to the previous statement.
      7. The final moments and immediate death of Madame Hortense are pretty disturbing in Zorba the Greek….pretty that is the scene you are mentioning…unless you are talking about Zorba’s log invention not working.
      8. All The King’s Men is pretty good…but it is very dated. It is still way better than the Sean Penn remake though.
      As always thanks for stopping by and talking movies.

      Reply

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