OVP: The Green Years (1946)

Film: The Green Years (1946)

Stars: Charles Coburn, Tom Drake, Beverly Tyler, Hume Cronyn, Gladys Cooper, Dean Stockwell, Jessica Tandy

Director: Victor Saville

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Supporting Actor-Charles Coburn, Cinematography)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I got asked recently whether it was hard to write reviews of bad movies, and I answered honestly that it wasn't.  Bad movies can be fascinating even if they're bad, because of the ways that they're bad.  A bad movie has a perspective, it has something to say & it just totally gets lost in saying it.  The harder reviews (for me) to write are movies that just sort of sit there.  These kinds of movies exist every year, but they do show up in a specific style in the 1940's, when the world had endured a difficult war & people wanted to see pleasant things with limited conflict.  The most famous examples of this type of film are Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's, which are not so much movies as a series of motifs that have very little conflict & clear answers to every problem that comes along.  I don't enjoy these types of movies because while I get why they exist, they are not compelling in retrospect, and unfortunately for me, The Green Years falls into this category.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around Robert Shannon (Stockwell as a boy, Drake as an adult), an orphan who must live with relatives, and becomes attached to his great-grandfather Alexander Gow (Coburn), an unkempt fellow who serves as an unlikely role model for the straight-laced young lad.  The movie expands upon their relationship, and the complicated day-to-day life of this poor Scottish family as they enter the modern age & World War I, and shows how Robert becomes a doctor against the odds.

Like I said, the film doesn't really have much there-there's no proper conflict to the film.  Hume Cronyn is meant to play the villain, but really all he does is sit there hoarding nonexistent fortunes, and most of the plot is "we're poor, and who will get the money?"  There are major moments of pain (including two out-of-the-blue deaths, one a bit galling as a classmate of Robert's is run over by a train, thus giving Robert a scholarship opening to go to medical school), but they don't register & the film doesn't know how to capitalize on them.  It's not helped by the fact that Drake & Beverly Tyler's romance is a dud, and you don't want to spend any time with the main characters.  I'm going with the rare 1-star not exactly because it was bad, but because it has so little risk, and even that risk doesn't pay off.

The film won two Oscar nominations, for Best Supporting Actor & Cinematography.  Coburn could play this part in his sleep, and while it's fun, there's nothing much to it.  He's playing this role simply as a warm old man who is cantankerous...and yet is generous from the get-go with this orphaned boy.  He's supposed to be cantankerous, but they don't even bother to have him thaw to the boy as the film progresses.  The Cinematography is a nonstarter for me as well-nothing distinguishes the mostly interior scenes, and there's barely any closeup shots that work well.  Overall, it's the type of movie that you won't remember, which makes it an even greater sin than merely being bad.

OVP: Mrs. Parkington (1944)

Film: Mrs. Parkington (1944)

Stars: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Edward Arnold, Agnes Moorehead, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper

Director: Tay Garnett

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Greer Garson, Supporting Actress-Agnes Moorehead)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

We conclude our week devoted to Best Supporting Actress with one of the category's most beloved figures.  Few actors have made a bigger name for themselves in this category than Agnes Moorehead, who throughout the years received four Academy Award nominations (and four losses, never getting a trophy despite some close calls, particularly 1964's Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte).  Moorehead is best-known for her work today on TV's Bewitched, but she was a presence in movies for decades, a key part of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre (she played Charles Foster Kane's mother), and was the first woman to host the Academy Awards.  Today we go to possibly her least known nomination (and for me, the final one I hadn't seen), with her starring opposite one of Classic Hollywood's most beloved pairs, Greer Garson & Walter Pidgeon, in Mrs. Parkington.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is told in large part through flashback, with Susie Parkington (Garson, both young & old) a wealth society dame, remembering her relationship with Major Parkington (Pidgeon), all while her relatives are visiting her, assuming she's near death's door & will soon be bequeathing their inheritance upon her.  As we see, Susie didn't have an easy life, starting her time in a boarding house and then meeting Major Parkington, a cutthroat businessman who cares little for the lives of his employees until his carelessness leads to Susie's mother's death, and he takes her under his wing, with the help of Baroness Aspasia Conti (Moorehead), his former lover who still has feelings for him.  The two have a troubled-but-happy marriage, oftentimes with Parkington's blunt demeanor & carelessness getting in the way of their happiness (even resulting in Susie having a miscarriage), but it's one that is built on love (eventually) and not money, and when Susie sees that money has corrupted her heirs, she tells them that she will disinherit them, giving the money to those her grandson-in-law has ripped off through a criminal enterprise, and will return to the modest beginnings she once had before she met Major Parkington.

Mrs. Parkington is, as you can tell from that star rating, kind of a catastrophe.  It's so boring, and I actually genuinely like Greer Garson (I know that this is a reaction a lot of people associate with the actress, who played similar roles across her heyday), but this movie is dense, and Pidgeon is at his charmless worst here.  The movie is preachy, frequently only valuing "the morals of the masses" and assuming that money is a completely corrupting force (it's preaching to the choir for the audience, but it's a little bit of an eyebrow raise to modern audiences watching these wealthy actors try to cater for profits in such a way).  It's also predictable, and most of the performances are wooden.

This is true for Garson (though worse for the non-nominated Pidgeon).  She doesn't bring much at all to Mrs. Parkington, and surely was a default nomination for one of the Academy's favorite actresses; her Susie is bland & without personality.  This isn't the case for Moorehead, the saving grace of the film.  Her Baroness steals every scene she's in, and while she's also tasked with a burdensome chore of a role (we know from the opening that these two women will be friends, but also that they're desperately in love with the same man but by sheer will of star billing Garson is going to get him), it's the one reason to see this film.  She's been better (her magnum opus two years earlier in The Magnificent Ambersons remains her career capper), but what a welcome relief in this unbearable movie.

OVP: Green Dolphin Street (1947)

Film: Green Dolphin Street (1947)
Stars: Lana Turner, Van Heflin, Donna Reed, Richard Hart, Frank Morgan, Edmund Gwenn, May Whitty, Gladys Cooper
Director: Victor Saville
Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Cinematography, Special Effects*, Sound, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Lana Turner-click here to learn more about Ms. Turner (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked about the film that graduated Lana Turner from playing the "random beautiful love interest" to a proper leading lady, someone who might be able to handle meatier roles after her triumph in The Postman Always Rings Twice.  This lasted only for a little while, but it did result in a number of high-profile films (and hits) in Turner's career, one of which we're going to talk about today.   A year after Postman, Turner emerged in one of the new, "more quality" roles that was now being afforded her, Green Dolphin Street, which would prove that she was at her peak in terms of financial viability for the studio (the movie was MGM's highest-grossing picture of 1947), but it also showed some of the limitations of Turner's acting ability, never quite understanding the woman who had sizzled across movie screens the year earlier.

(Spoilers Ahead) At 142 minutes, Green Dolphin Street (it gets the name from the ship in the film and a street in the town where the film is set) is a long movie, so I'll try and summarize the plot in a paragraph but might gloss over some points.  Essentially, you have two sisters, Marguerite (Reed) and Marianne (Turner), who fall in love with the same man William (Hart), who happens to be the son of their mother's former lover, played here by Frank Morgan (Edmund Gwenn is their father, Gladys Cooper their mother, and Dame May Whitty a Mother Superior in a pretty star-studded supporting cast).  The two sisters similar names get them in trouble when William, after being branded a deserter in the navy (he fell for an Asian prostitute in a problematic scene in the film, as she then robs him & leaves him out-in-the-cold to die), gets drunk and proposes to Marianne, when he means to propose to Marguerite, whom he claims is his true love.  Marianne goes, and convinced by his friend Tim (Heflin), who is in love with Marianne & doesn't want her dishonored, William proposes to her.  You can see where this is going-Marguerite becomes a nun, Tim shares his love for Marianne, but she rejects him because she loves William, and William realizes in the end that it was Marianne he was meant for.  Oh, and there's an earthquake.

That earthquake is what the film is most famous for.  The film was nominated for four Oscars, and won one, and boy did it deserve it.  In an era prior to computer-generated effects (and location shooting, apparently because that could not look more like California if it tried), the film manages to have a gigantic earthquake sequence that shows the ground shifting, trees crashing, and then follows it with a spectacular flash flood that nearly drowns Richard Hart (I left quite petrified, and it was said in reviews of the film at the time that the audience could practically feel the earth shake from the movie).  The Oscar is richly-deserved, but it's the only nomination I'm getting behind.  The cinematography is fine (it's nice to be outdoors, I guess), but not all that compelling (mood lighting on a woman as beautiful as Lana Turner isn't groundbreaking), the editing is clumsy (the film drags on too long, and they use at least one shot twice during the earthquake scene), and the sound, outside of the earthquake scene, isn't important at all (also, it's not entirely clear during that scene who is screaming).

This is all to say that Green Dolphin Street is probably the type of movie that Turner was hoping for, but it's not what she wanted.  She's taken seriously as an actress here-it's easy to see a more storied thespian like Bette Davis in the role that Turner plays here, and she gets big, meaty speeches.  But the movie doesn't care much about defining her Marianne, and she doesn't either.  This is a woman who is strong, but also needs to be taken down a peg according to the script...but is constantly credited for being strong.  Turner gets off better than Reed, who is just there to look pious, and it's never clear exactly why Hart's William is in love with her since they barely spent any time together, and it's obviously Marianne who challenges & intrigues him.  Heflin is the best part of the film (and let's be honest, the best actor of the main four quartet in general), but he's inconsequential to the plot, and it's never clear again why he's fallen for Marianne, since an early scene shows he doesn't like strong women.  All-in-all, this is a lousy film with one truly great sequence in its center, the kind of "important" film that scoops up awards & box office, but feels utterly disposable afterward.  Turner was better off with the lower-budget but higher-quality Postman.

OVP: Separate Tables (1958)

Film: Separate Tables (1958)
Stars: Rita Hayworth, Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Burt Lancaster, Wendy Hiller, Gladys Cooper, Rod Taylor
Director: Delbert Mann
Oscar History: 7 nominations/2 wins (Best Picture, Actor-David Niven*, Actress-Deborah Kerr, Supporting Actress-Wendy Hiller*, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2020 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress known as an iconic "film sex symbol."  This month, our focus is on Rita Hayworth-click here to learn more about Ms. Hayworth (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Rita Hayworth's final years in show business were the stuff of nightmares for her personally.  She continued to act well into her forties, a time period many other actresses known principally for their beauty might have disappeared (it helped that Hayworth always looked younger than she actually was onscreen).  Her marriages during the 1950's were terrible even judging on her own crumby scale, with actor Dick Haymes squandering her money on his own debts, and producer James Hill, her final husband, emotionally abusing her, frequently in front of crowds, until she was to the point of tears (Charlton Heston once claimed that he was "ashamed" of not slugging Hill for how he treated Hayworth in front of him).  During this time, though, she made perhaps the last great film of her career, Separate Tables, that put her front-and-center with acting titans like Burt Lancaster & Deborah Kerr.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is an ensemble piece, the type that occasionally comes back en vogue and is favored by certain modern directors (Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, Garry Marshall).  The entire film takes place over a 24-hour period at a hotel, and the film gains its name from the fact that the residents sit at "separate tables" when they eat meals.  There are two driving catalysts in the film.  The first is a beautiful woman Anne (Hayworth) showing up late in the evening looking for a room, with clear links to John Malcolm (Lancaster) (it turns out they used to be married and are still very much in love, though they also haven't forgiven each other for the past), who is having an affair with the hotel's proprietress Ms. Cooper (Hiller).  The second is that the rather bombastic Major Pollock (Niven) has been involved in a scandal, indicating that he lied about his war record, and more damning, had sexual improprieties with women at a local theater.  Mrs. Railton-Bell (Cooper) insists that they drive Major Pollock out, bullying the other residents into agreeing with her, including her daughter Sibyl (Kerr) who has a fondness for Major Pollock.  The film ends with these stories being tied up.  Despite his offenses, the people want to keep a repentant Major Pollock on at the hotel, Sibyl stands up to her mother, and Anne & John tentatively reunite, with Ms. Cooper left to have the hotel and its guests be her insurance against not being lonely as she creeps into old age.

The film in a lot of ways reminds me of Grand Hotel more than the melodramas of the 1950's (think the Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams plays that dominated cultural discussions during the era).  The film lives-or-dies not just on our investment in the drama of the picture, but in the acting onscreen, and both are marvelous.  The film probably would have gained a wee bit from the original stage production, which gave more background to the Sibyl/Major relationship (this was also in the original script, but producer Burt Lancaster wanted more screen-time for his character, a decision that Delbert Mann claimed "cost Deborah Kerr the Oscar"); it also makes more sense if the Major is homosexual, which is what the original stage script insinuated.

However, these are small trifles to have with a movie this good.  The acting is terrific.  The film was nominated for three acting trophies, and at least the winners richly deserved these citations.  Hiller finds a sort of quiet steel in her character.  She never gets a great big scene where she confesses her loneliness & how she's certain that if she does the "right thing" by Anne, she'll likely lose her own happiness, possibly forever, but it's there in her tense posture and pleading eyes.  She wants John to stay with her, but knows that he'll never forgive her if he doesn't make the decision to leave Anne on his own, and so she must watch as he retreats to a woman whose beauty and advantage are things she's never been given.  Matching her is David Niven, giving arguably the shortest film performance ever to win a lead Oscar (different sites argue whether it's him or Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs).  He plays the Major as a man bereft of emotional connection, someone who has struggled to be taken seriously so he has invented reasons to do so.  His scenes with Kerr are odd (again, there needs more grounding here or for him to be gay to properly define their friendship as platonic or romantic), and Kerr occasionally overplays them, but I don't think I've seen Niven be this good before, and with a drama of all things!

As for Hayworth, she's spellbinding per usual.  Kerr won the Best Actress nod, but if they were going to go with someone from this film for that category it should have been Hayworth who gets the more difficult part and the more humiliating scenes.  She has to basically watch as John shoves her 40-year-old face under a lamp, showing the starts of aging on a woman who has demanded (and received) everything due to her looks for years, and the final scenes, where it's clear she's looking at either forgiveness or suicide as her options, are devastating, as is the ambiguity of what happens next for the couple.  While she'd make a few more pictures, including a Golden Globe-nominated turn in Circus World, and work in television shows like Laugh-In and The Carol Burnett Show, this was the last important film of her career, and once again, she went home empty-handed from the Academy.  By the 1970's, her alcoholism and years of emotional abuse were masking what would ultimately kill her: Alzheimer's Disease, of which she would die at the age of 68 in 1987.

Next month we will take a look at a woman who rivaled Hayworth's stardom for almost the entire run of both of their careers, and whose personal life & seismic beauty demanded far more headlines than her films ever did, but who (unlike Hayworth) the Oscars found room for just once...in what would lead to one of the most notorious chapters in the Academy's history.  Stay tuned to find out to whom I'm referring on Friday as we kick off another month of Saturdays with the Stars.

OVP: Love Letters (1945)

Film: Love Letters (1945)
Stars: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ann Richards, Cecil Kellaway, Gladys Cooper, Anita Louise
Director: William Dieterle
Oscar History: 4 nominations (Actress-Jennifer Jones, Art Direction, Score, Original Song-"Love Letters")
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Jennifer Jones is not really whom you'd consider my favorite actress of the 1940's.  Her pie-eyed optimism and constant saintliness (I'm aware I still need to see Duel in the Sun, where supposedly this image should be shattered) was in direct contrast to the femme fatales, the Bette Davises and Joan Crawfords and Gene Tierneys that populated this era and my heart.  She certainly was one of Oscar's however, as she managed to scoop up five nominations, including four consecutively from 1943-1946. Love Letters is smack dab in the middle of her nominations count at number three, and was when she was one of the biggest names in Hollywood.  Under the watchful eye of her soon-to-be-husband David O. Selznick, she stars as an amnesiac (possible murderess) in this potboiler that is scripted by (of all people) Ayn Rand.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film tells the tale of Alan Quinton (Cotten...doesn't that feel like the name of every one of Joseph Cotten's characters though?) writing love letters for his caddish fellow soldier in a war that is so inconsequential they don't even bother to say which one it is (it's World War II, for the record) and we learn soon that he has fallen in love with the woman, named Victoria, whom he has been pulling a Cyrano toward.  The war ends, and we learn that the caddish soldier has died and that Alan's fiancee Helen (Louise) can't handle his PTSD and that he is clearly in love with a woman he has never met, and instead he goes off into the world, living at his aunt's house and meeting a woman named Singleton (Jones) who is clearly in love with him even as he pines for Victoria, whom he discovers has died and murdered her husband.  Singleton cannot handle this, and though Alan soon figures out that Singleton is indeed Victoria, he cannot tell her because she has amnesia and everyone thinks the shock will hurt her.  The film eventually shows that the caddish soldier was killed by her grandmother after he drunkenly hurt her granddaughter Victoria, and then Alan and Victoria, like all good 1940s romances, end up living happily ever after.

It's all as melodramatic as it sounds, and never once does it veer into a particularly compelling series of performances to make up for the sincere lack of surprise (it's quite obvious to anyone who has seen a movie before that headliner Jennifer Jones, who is far too misty to not have something going on in her head, is clearly the woman he initially fell in love with and not some other actor).  Jones and Cotten were constantly playing romantic leads in the 1940s (three of her five Oscar nominations, in fact, were for falling in love with Cotten though he never once would be noticed by the Academy, making him one of the weirdest snubs in their long history considering the pedigree of his pictures), but I see very little chemistry here to explain why.  Jones is too glass-eyed and willing to throw herself on the tracks for my taste and her character is banal and uninteresting.

The film received three other nominations on-top of Jones baffling citation, though only one of them really stands out as something that deserved the accolade.  The film has a wonderful score, written by Academy favorite Victor Young, soaring throughout and adding a dreaminess to the mystery that Ayn Rand tries to inject into the film to keep the plot running and not just making the film an hour long.  The original song, which is entirely instrumental in the film, lends credence as to why Young deserved a nomination though considering we don't get the words to the Dick Haymes hit it feels a little self-indulgent that we get a second nomination for Young's score when one would have been sufficient (it feels like mad cheating to include the film as a song nominee when words were only added later as part of a radio-friendly hit-this would never pass the music branch's tough muster now).  The film's third nomination is for art direction, and while we get many dusty old English country houses, I never actually believed we weren't on a Hollywood sound-stage, which is a pretty hard knock against a nomination in this category.

Those are really my thoughts on the disappointing Love Letters, for which I'd had much higher hopes.  I'm now just one performance (Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's) away from finishing off the 1945 Best Actress lineup-do you have a favorite amongst them?  What are your thoughts on Love Letters' three other Oscar mentions?  And why do you think Joseph Cotten was never AMPAS' cup-of-tea?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Oscar's Late-Blooming Actresses

Next week I'll be giving you an article about the overall Best Actress race and my thoughts on how crazy-awesome it looks this year (so many possibilities!), but before I get there I want to focus on one woman in particular who might be able to make a significant impression on the race: Sandra Bullock.  Bullock has a major film coming out that she's getting strong reviews for in Our Brand is Crisis, and at this point it's hard to imagine that she spent most of the Aughts wandering through the wilderness before finally making a major comeback and scoring an Oscar for The Blind Side.

Bullock was 45-years-old when she received her first nomination, which is actually pretty old for an acting nominee, particularly a female nominee.  Most women tend to be nominated in their twenties (I have read the average age for a Best Actress nominee is around 29), and especially those women who are going to be nominated multiple times will have started early.  As a result of this, I was wondering if Bullock gets her third nomination this year (she was also cited for Gravity for those keeping track at home), will she make the list of the Top 10 3+-nominees in terms of age at their first nomination?  Let's take a look at the top ten, shall we?

10. Anne Revere

Age at First Nomination (we'll be going age at the Oscar ceremony): 40
First Nominated Film: Best Supporting Actress in The Song of Bernadette (1943), followed by supporting citations in National Velvet (1945) and Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
Did She Win?: Yes, Revere pulled off the win for playing Elizabeth Taylor's mother in National Velvet, besting two women who are still alive to hold grudges, actually (Dame Angela Lansbury, the youngest person ever to be nominated for two Academy Awards and Ann Blyth, Joan Crawford's demon spawn in Mildred Pierce).
What Took So Long?: Revere was most noted for her work on the stage (she would eventually win a Tony Award for Toys in the Attic), and was more just a contract player who gained steadily in stature in the years that followed Song of Bernadette until she was forced to resign from the Screen Actors Guild because she refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Also Worth Noting: Revere played opposite Taylor six years after her Oscar win as Montgomery Clift's mother in A Place in the Sun.  Despite the film being a huge hit with Oscar and the Academy's penchant for both women, neither would be nominated for the film.

9. Agnes Moorehead

Age at First Nomination : 42
First Nominated Film: Best Supporting Actress in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), followed by Mrs. Parkington (1944), Johnny Belinda (1948), and Hush...Hush Sweet Charlotte, all in supporting.
Did She Win?: No, Moorehead never made it.  Based on some readings I have done she was probably closest either for The Magnificent Ambersons (where she may have fallen prey to the Orson Welles-hate that was still reverberating from the year before) or for 1964's Hush...Hush, where she was the sentimental favorite but Oscar was very international that year, going with all non-Americans for the first time ever that year rather than the Massachusetts-born Moorehead.
What Took So Long?: Moorehead really struggled early in her career, frequently going without work and even food.  She eventually found success in radio, working with Orson Welles and his Mercury Players.  This resulted in her getting the two most iconic roles in her film career: as Charles Foster Kane's mother in Citizen Kane and her marvelous work as Fanny in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Also Worth Noting: She didn't do particularly well at the Emmys either, never winning for Bewitched, her best-known role overall to modern audiences, though she did pick up an Emmy for her role on The Wild Wild West of all things.

8. Kathy Bates

Age at First Nomination: 42
First Nominated Film: She was first noted for her iconic breakthrough as Annie Wilkes in 1990's Misery, followed by supporting citations for Primary Colors (1998) and About Schmidt (2002)
Did She Win?: She won in a bit of a surprise on her first outing for Misery, a very atypical role for a Best Actress contender, though it's hard to tell if Joanne Woodward or Julia Roberts was her bigger competition.  Eight years later she'd nearly pull off an upset over Judi Dench when she was the only American in a field of Brits (which frequently results in a win for the Yank).
What Took So Long?: Bates was initially one of those character actors who never really popped.  Though she appeared in films for prestigious directors (Milos Forman and Robert Altman), she had more success on the stage, winning a Tony nomination for 'night Mother and eventually transferring to television in a series of soap roles.
Also Worth Noting: In one of those great "what could have been" sorts of moments, Anjelica Huston was originally offered the role of Annie Wilkes, and wanted to do the movie but was committed to making the film The Grifters.  Huston would go on to lose the Oscar for her Grifters performance to Kathy Bates.

7. Fay Bainter

Age at First Nomination: 45 (for those interested, Bullock was slightly older when she landed her first nomination by a few months and so would knock out Bainter if she were nominated again)
First Nominated Film: Bainter became the first actor nominated in two different acting categories in the same year, being cited for lead actress in White Banners and supporting in Jezebel in 1938.  She would go on to get a very late-in-her-career supporting nod for The Children's Hour in 1961.
Did She Win?: She did-Bainter set a longtime pattern of actors who were nominated for two different categories in the same year winning the supporting trophy, a trend that would last for fifty years until Sigourney Weaver broke it in 1988 (to this day she's the only actor to have been nominated twice in one year to have never won an Oscar, thanks to Julianne Moore's recent victory).
What Took So Long?: Like several women on this list, Bainter got her start and much of her success on the stage, appearing in a number of major New York productions before MGM finally convinced her to give film a try, and she became wildly successful pretty quickly.
Also Worth Noting: Back in the day, supporting actors would occasionally present the category they won the previous year, rather than the alternating genders we see today.  As a result, Bainter was the first person ever to present an Oscar to an African-American when she handed the statue to Hattie McDaniel for Gone with the Wind.

6. Thelma Ritter

Age at First Nomination: 48
First Nominated Film: Like most of her costars, Ritter scored a nomination for the classic 1950 film All About Eve, and followed that up with five supporting bids for The Mating Season (1951), With a Song in My Heart (1952), Pickup on South Street (1953), Pillow Talk (1959), and Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).
Did She Win?: Ritter is the most-nominated woman without a competitive Academy Award trophy to show for it, tied with Deborah Kerr and Glenn Close (though it's worth noting Kerr eventually got an honorary Oscar).  Despite the plethora of options, it's hard to tell if Ritter was actually ever close or just the female equivalent of Arthur Kennedy.
What Took So Long?: Ritter, though she was classically-trained, never really popped, working largely in radio and stock theater until she managed to have small parts three Best Picture nominees (Miracle on 34th Street, A Letter to Three Wives, and All About Eve), which brought her to the attention of casting directors.
Also Worth Noting: She was nearly able to make a fifth nomination in a row in 1954 for the classic Rear Window, which would have tied her with Greer Garson and Bette Davis for the most consecutive nominations.  Considering that she would have almost-certainly lost to Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront, perhaps the miss was for the best for a woman who said her many losses meant she "knew what it was like to be a bridesmaid, but never a bride."

5. Helen Mirren

Age at First Nomination: 49
First Nominated Film: Mirren scored a bit of a surprise nomination for The Madness of King George in 1994, but followed that with three expected citations for Gosford Park (2001), The Queen (2006), and The Last Station (2009).
Did She Win?: Mirren stampeded to basically every award known to mankind in 2006 with The Queen, a performance so noteworthy that she ended up winning a Tony for the same role nearly a decade later.
What Took So Long?: One of the most unexpected movie stars of the past decade, Mirren worked steadily in films in the 1980's, but almost always in character roles.  She also took frequent time off to do theater, and wasn't one of the Merchant-Ivory go-to's at the time, which probably hurt as that was what British actors were being cited for during the era.
Also Worth Noting: Mirren is well-known for her work as a monarch.  In her lifetime she's played 5 Queens: Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Queen Charlotte of Mexklenburg-Strelitz, Queen Gertrude (in Halmet), and the Queen of Egypt in The Prince of Egypt.

4. Gladys Cooper

Age at First Nomination: 54
First Nominated Film: Cooper's first nomination came for her nightmarish work in Now, Voyager (1942), and she earned two more supporting nods for The Song of Bernadette (1943) and My Fair Lady (1964).
Did She Win?: Cooper never pulled this off.  I wonder if she was pretty close for Song of Bernadette (it's a show-y part), but the other two seem unlikely.
What Took So Long?: Cooper spent much of her earlier career as one of the biggest theatrical draws of the 1930's, frequently finding herself headlining shows in the West End and on Broadway.  It wasn't until she moved to Hollywood in 1940 that she made her mark in film, and all things considered got on with Oscar pretty damn quickly.
Also Worth Noting: Is one of the rare actresses to have been nominated for the Tonys, Emmys, and Oscars without winning any of them.  Had she been nominated for a Grammy and lost, she would have joined Lynn Redgrave as the only person to have been nominated for all four awards and never won a trophy.

3. Judi Dench

Age at First Nomination: 63
First Nominated Film: Dench, like so many British actresses of a certain age before her, got in for playing a queen, in this case Victoria in Mrs. Brown.  She followed that turn with six more nominations for Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005), Notes on a Scandal (2006), and Philomena (2013).
Did She Win?: She did, for Shakespeare in Love, the second-shortest performance ever to win an Academy Award after Beatrice Straight in Network.
What Took So Long?: Dench didn't really do film prior to her major breakout in Mrs. Brown, focusing principally on television and theater (she's in the Royal Shakespeare Company).  However, it is worth noting that she won a BAFTA eleven years prior to her turn in Mrs. Brown for the Oscar-blessed Room with a View.  Had her costar Maggie Smith stuck to lead like she did at the BAFTA's for the Oscars, Dench may well have gotten to Oscar eleven years earlier than expected (which still would have kept her on this list, for the record).
Also Worth Noting: Dame Judi has never been able to pull off an Emmy, perhaps the only major acting trophy she hasn't bagged, despite three nominations (for The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, Cranford, and Return to Cranford).  Dench nearly got a Razzie nomination for her bizarre appearance in The Chronicles of Riddick (she was on the shortlist), but the bizarre list of Britney Spears, Condoleezza Rice, Carmen Electra, Jennifer Lopez, and Sharon Stone kept her from such a dubious distinction.

2. Ethel Barrymore

Age at First Nomination: 65
First Nominated Film: The Grand Dame of the American Stage got her first Oscar nomination in None But the Lonely Heart in 1944, followed by The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Paradine Case (1947), and Pinky (1949).
Did She Win?: Yes, Barrymore won on her first try with None But the Lonely Heart.
What Took So Long?: Barrymore made a few silent films very early in her career, but largely stuck to the stage and was actually quite snobbish about the cinema, sticking to the theater and doing the likes of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Maugham in the process.  She was bought by a major paycheck for None But the Lonely Heart, her first film in over a decade, and the acclaim that followed convinced her to stay in Hollywood.
Also Worth Noting: Barrymore turned down a marriage proposal from Winston Churchill because she thought he wasn't going anywhere.  That has nothing to do with movies or Oscars, but is a good anecdote so use it at your next dinner party.

1. Edith Evans

Age at First Nomination: 75
First Nominated Film: In the only year where three women were nominated in Supporting Actress for the same film, Evans joined her costars Diane Cilento and Joyce Redman in being nominated for Tom Jones (1963).  She followed that citation with nods for The Chalk Garden (1964) and The Whisperers (1967).
Did She Win?: No, Evans never won.  She likely came the closest in 1967 after picking up a number of precursors and getting numerous plaudits (she's superb in the largely forgotten film).  However, sentiment won the day and the inferior Guess Who's Coming to Dinner got Kate Hepburn her second trophy in the wake of Spencer Tracy's death.
What Took So Long?: Evans was one of the biggest names on the British stage, playing numerous Shakespearean roles and debuting roles in plays by the likes of Noel Coward and Bernard Shaw.  Though she dabbled in film, she didn't really take off until her small role in Tom Jones.  After that she stuck with film and gained a large amount of success during the 1960's and 1970's.
Also Worth Noting: Though she didn't win in 1963 (fellow dame Margaret Rutherford was successful), she did get to pick up Tony Richardson's Best Director award for him as he wasn't there.

It's worth noting before we go that Bullock isn't the only actress that is in contention for being included in this list (though she's the only one with a film that's an immediate threat).  Brenda Blethyn, Jacki Weaver, Catherine Keener, Viola Davis, and Melissa Leo also all are sitting at two nominations and would crack this Top 10 if they scored a third.  Do you think Bullock or any of these women will be able to go-the-distance and get a third nod?  Share your thoughts in the comments!