Best Actress Ranking - Update

Here is a new update. The newly added performance is highlighted in bold. 

My winning performances are higlighted in red.

1. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939)
2. Jessica Lange in Frances (1982)
3. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
4. Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949)
5. Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967)
6. Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927-1928)   
7. Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978)
8. Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
9. Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful (1985)
10. Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991)

11. Edith Evans in The Whisperers (1967)
12. Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938)
13. Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939)
14. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
15. Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998)
16. Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
17. Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941)
18. Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965)
19. Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958)
20. Glenda Jackson in Women in Love (1970)

21. Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
22. Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
23. Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941)
24. Julie Christie in Away from Her (2007)
25. Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun (1951)
26. Audrey Hepburn in Wait until Dark (1967)
27. Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
28. Anne Baxter in All about Eve (1950)
29. Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997)
30. Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1932)

31. Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978)
32. Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
33. Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959)
34. Meryl Streep in One True Thing (1998)
35. Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953)
36. Katharine Hepburn in Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967)
37. Marsha Mason in Chapter Two (1979)
38. Jane Wyman in The Yearling (1946)
39. Martha Scott in Our Town (1940)
40. Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) 

41. Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945)
42. Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year (1978)
43. Susan Hayward in My Foolish Heart (1949)
44. Eleanor Parker in Detective Story (1951)
45. Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
46. Diane Keaton in Marvin's Room (1996)
47. Loretta Young in Come to the Stable (1949)  
48. Mary Pickford in Coquette (1928-29)
49. Sissy Spacek in The River (1984)
50. Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point (1977)

51. Irene Dunne in Cimarron (1930-1931)
52. Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (1928-29)
53. Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade (1932-1933)

Martha Scott as Emily Webb in Our Town

Compared to my initial ranking of Martha Scott’s performance (1940 was actually the first year I ever reviewed on this blog…memories…), I decided to upgrade her a little bit as there are some moments in her performance that are truly beautiful but she also faces various challenges that prevent her from going any higher on my list.

The character of Emily Webb is certainly one of the most odd entries in history of the Best Actress category. It is a very well-known part in a very famous play so it makes sense that the Oscars recognized her when the play was turned into a movie in 1940 but at the same time she is part of the overall concept of Our Town that doesn’t really present characters but rather puts them in a larger context and mostly asks them to becomes symbols for the play’s message. I admit that I don’t know a lot about Our Town but having seen the movie and a couple of staged productions on YouTube, I see that these are not characters that we are supposed to be involved with but rather characters that are telling us a very specific message – in the case of Emily, it is the message of living your life as if every day was your last, of seeing the beauty around you and treasuring those few precious moments we have on tis earth. Therefore Emily becomes a memorable messenger but she never becomes a character. Emily possesses no depth, no true inner life and no character arc – and this case, this is even wanted and therefore doesn’t allow Martha Scott to do anything else than become the “body with a voice” that carries the playwright’s message.

Apart from these limited opportunities in creating Emily, Martha Scott also faces the problem of a very limited screen time that doesn’t give her the chance to expand Emily in any way. Of course, the amount of screen time does not matter but rather what you do with it but as mentioned just now, Martha Scott didn’t really have much to do with it. 1940 was an interesting race, with newcomer Martha Scott in her film debut up against Hollywood legends Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine and winner Ginger Rogers. The prestige of the movie version of Our Town certainly helped Martha Scott to be carried over in the Oscar race and most likely there was hope to create a new star. This hope didn’t turn into reality as Martha Scott was never seen at the Oscars again and also her subsequent film career never turned her into a true star (though supporting parts in the classics The Twelve Commandments and Ben-Hur did secure her legacy). The fact that Martha Scott was able to break into the leading category also shows that the love story of Emily and George became the most cherished aspect of the movie – Martha Scott is not on the screen for a lot of time in a movie that is a true ensemble piece with various characters and their own stories but the love story is the red thread that lingers during the entire movie and the only real plot line that feels to move from point A to point B. This, in addition to her final scene which is certainly the most famous scene of the play, surely helped Martha Scott to enter the leading category.

But what about the performance itself? How did Martha Scott interpret a role that possesses so little character? In this way, Martha Scott actually succeeded very well. Emily Webb is the ideal American girl, smart and beautiful, marrying the boy from next-door to become the perfect wife and mother. And Martha Scott does truly inhabit this aspect – she is a very charming actress and she also as no problem to play a teenager who experiences love for the first time. She communicates the unconditional love that Emily has for her parents, her hesitation opposite George and her understanding of herself as a person. Also, it is nice to see how Martha Scott, who had originated the role of Emily on the stage and acted here in front of the camera for the first time, so easily adjusted herself to his new medium – her acting is very subtle and quiet, her close-ups never exaggerated and she clearly understands what acting in a movie demands opposite to acting on the stage. But even with these positive aspects, there is still few highlights that can actually be pointed out. She is lovely when she talks to William Holden’s George in front of their house and they talk about their future plans and has the right tone when she asks her mother if she is pretty but these are all moments that any competent actress could realize and the limitations of the part also make it difficult to build any emotional connection to Emily. However, in one small moment, she truly shines and is able to create Emily as a person and also establish her position in the overall messaging – when her father catches her late at night when she is not in bed but rather looking out the window, she delivers the lines “I just can’t sleep yet, Papa. The moonlight’s so wonderful…” with an almost overwhelming beauty. It’s just a small moment but here she establishes how Emily cherishes life and how she already sees things that others don’t and how she understands the wonders that are happening around us all the time without us noticing them. But again, it’s only a small moment and you have to wonder if two beautiful line deliveries are really enough to carry an actress to an Oscar nomination. Because what’s also visible in these moments so far is that while Martha Scott understands her part and plays it accordingly and also displays the right innocent charm, she is not the kind of actress that demands attention. It’s easy to imagine producers in 1940 casting a rather established actress like Ginger Rogers or Olivia de Havilland in this part or it might have been a comeback role for Luise Rainer if she had still been interested in Hollywood and audiences had still been interested in her. Of course, I won’t complain that Martha Scott got the chance to preserve her performance for all time – so many stage performances only exist in memory or in photos so it’s wonderful to see that Martha Scott’s work has not been lost. But still, she doesn’t possess that true star quality that could make Emily more interesting simply by the presence of the actress playing her – obviously, Emily is not supposed to be kind of girl who is a star but in the structure of Our Town, she is the one that in the end will become the one who takes us on the most important journey of the story and Martha Scott lacks this quality that makes it easy to follow her. Maybe this is also one of the reasons why she didn’t establish herself as a well-known leading lady after her first success on the screen.

I can imagine that Martha Scott was a stronger presence as Emily on the stage – simply because the idea of Our Town works better in this environment. Our Town doesn’t really ask the audience to become involved but rather to observe and understand and this is always easier on the stage since this environment is more obviously make-believe while it’s easier to get lost in a movie. This also affects Martha Scott’s final scene even if this one also presents her greatest success. Up to that moment, it’s hard to understand what exactly made Martha Scott stand out enough to garner an Oscar nomination (an earlier scene where she and George confess their love for each other was also a slight misstep in her work as her attempts to underplay Emily’s feeling resulted rather in the opposite) but when Emily apparently dies in childbirth and then re-visits her sixteenth birthday only to lament how much she lost and how much she will miss the ordinariness of life with all its beauty, Martha Scott finally gets the chance to stand out and create some unforgettable moments. On the plus side of this scene it is to say that Martha Scott again avoided any exaggerated acting in this moment and express all her pain and love through her face and her voice that slowly begins to crumble as Emily realizes “So all this was going on…and we never noticed”. She evokes a certain pain these scenes comes very unexpected and suddenly and therefore enhances the effect of her speech. It is certainly the only true unforgettable moment in the movie and in her work but it is enough to leave a satisfying impression after having made the viewer wonder about the purpose of the character for so long. In this scene, Martha Scott inhabits the message of the play very clearly without making it too obvious – she never gives the impression of delivering this message but rather makes it appear that it is Emily who is having these thoughts and feelings. It is a beautiful and touching moment that stays with the viewer or a long time. On the minus side, there are again some obstacles that make it very hard for Martha Scott: first of all, the scene, while impressive, does again not really need any character – the scene itself happens rather out of context and in some way could be delivered by anyone. Because Emily is such a small presence during Our Town, it never really feels that this is her personal loss and so her speech does not really feel like a part of her. Obviously, Martha Scott did deliver it beautifully but is doesn’t really seem to be part of her creation of Emily as a person. Also, the medium of motion pictures again seems to be working against her – on the stage, it’s easy to imagine how the losses of Emily overwhelm the audience. In the movie, her ghost-like appearance that sometimes make it hard to clearly see her face and the fact she often just hovers in the background lessen the impact of her monologue. Personally, I don’t think the fact that the movie changed the ending of the play truly matters in regards to her performance – if Emily dies or lives in the last scene does not really influence her speech before. But still, the scene never truly feels as affecting as it could be – and I finally understood why when I saw the stage production with Penelope Ann Miller in a Tony-nominated (in the featured actress category) performance as Emily Webb online. In her performance, that final scene finally displayed all its potential and suddenly it became obvious just how devasting this monologue and this speech can truly be and how it can truly evoke an overwhelming feeling of loss and regret in just a few moments. Martha Scott’s approach to the part was obviously different, less emotional and more intellectual which also works on its own but doesn’t seem to grab that scene so completely.

So, it’s a performance where it’s hard to point out anything negative as Martha Scott did a lot with a role that barely exists as a true person but the effect sometimes still feels too small. Still, the beauty of her approach and her final scenes are enough to give her this position in my ranking.   

YOUR Best Actress of 1940

Thanks to everyone who voted!

Here are the results of the poll for Best Actress 1940:

1. Ginger Rogers - Kitty Foyle (15 votes)

2. Joan Fontaine - Rebecca (9 votes)

3. Katharine Hepburn - The Philadelphia Story (8 votes)

4. Bette Davis - The Letter (1 vote)

5. Martha Scott - Our Town (0 votes)

Best Actress 1940 - The resolution!

After having watched and reviewed all five nominated performances, it's time to pick the winner!

5. Martha Scott in Our Town

Martha Scott clearly felt very comfortable in her role but there was nothing she could do nor that she was allowed to do to find any kind of woman in the thin creation that is Emily Webb. A beautiful performance, turned into an indecisive miscue by the screenplay and the direction.

4. Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle

Ginger gives a surprisingly strong performance in this dramatic role but the banality of the script makes it hard for her in this competition. Still, Ginger carries the movie beautifully.

3. Bette Davis in The Letter

A typical, intense and strong performance from the great Bette Davis. After one of the greatest openings ever her character keeps us fascinated until the dark end.

2. Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story

Katharine Hepburn does everything right in a part that fits her like a glove. Her combination of drama and comedy is a joy to watch and her chemistry with Cary Grant and James Stewart makes this movie one of the all-time classics.

1. Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Joan is pitch-perfect as the young second Mrs. de Winter who is haunted by the memory of her predecessor. She creates a fascinating character, always tense, always insecure. A flawless performance that carries one of the greatest movies of all time.

Best Actress 1940: Martha Scott in "Our Town"

It’s always interesting to find one nominee among the five contenders for Best Actress whose name is not as familiar today anymore as it maybe used to be when the nominations were first announced. Because the level or popularity of a certain performance is certainly in no way an indication for its quality and, who knows, maybe some underseen gem is hiding behind this unknown name. Expectations are completely open when neither the actress nor her acting style nor her movie are truly familiar. And in a line-up that included Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine and Ginger Rogers, the fifth nominee Martha Scott can easily be called ‘the forgotten nominee’. To be fair, she is not a truly forgotten nominee like other names this category has seen (Maggie McNamara? Ann Harding? Diana Wynyard?) – she played Charlton Heston’s mother in two of Hollywood most well-known epics, The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, and acted on the stage, on the screen and on TV. Maybe it is because of the fact that her competitors were such still famous actresses that her name just automatically appears to be unfitting. And, of course, 1940 also offered what many consider the career-height of another Hollywood legend, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday – her omission is often mentioned as one of the Academy’s biggest oversight and if she had been included, this line-up would truly have consisted of five legendary actresses from Hollywood’s Golden Age. This omission makes Martha Scott’s nomination even more interesting – clearly her entrance into the world of motion pictures was extremely well-regarded in 1940 – Martha Scott is a prime example for an actress who may have lost her popularity over the years but made a large impression during the beginning of her career. She created the part of Emily Webb in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Our Town and later reprised the role when the play was turned into a movie in 1940. Maybe the fact that the movie stayed very close to the original play was the reason why newcomer Martha Scott was able to accompany the role of Emily to the screen instead of being pushed aside for an already established film actress. And casting a stage-performer who has already achieved a high reputation for her or his performance in a later movie version can often add credibility and a high level of critical respect (prime examples are Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker, Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac or Shirley Booth in Come back, little Sheba who all won Oscars for their efforts) and sometimes the exclusion of a stage performer can even result in a lot of criticism or even outrage (with Julie Andrews omission for the role of Eliza Dolittle in the movie version of My Fair Lady probably being the most famous example). Martha Scott would probably fall somewhere in the middle of all this – surely there would have been few complaints if an actress like Olivia de Havilland or Ginger Rogers had taken over the part in the movie version and in fact, many other actresses were tested before Martha Scott was finally considered for the role, but at the same time she had already connected herself with the name of Emily Webb strongly enough to make her casting something of a logical choice and an anticipated star-making sensation. Well, the sensation lasted only one Oscar season but she was, after all, the only cast-member to receive an Oscar nomination despite a supporting cast of such seasoned veterans like Fay Bainter, Beulah Bondi or Thomas Mitchell. So, choosing Martha Scott for the role of Emily did add respectability to the production and was therefore clearing a risk that paid off – and in the case of Martha Scott, it was not only her mostly unknown name that presented a risk but also the fact that she had never acted on the screen before. Our Town marked Martha Scott’s movie debut and it’s well-known that movie acting and stage acting are worlds apart. And just because a certain performer is successful on the stage does not guarantee the same level of success for the screen. Is the actor or actress able to adjust the acting for the camera or is he or she acting for the last row of the second balcony instead?

So far, there has been very little talk of Martha Scott’s actual performance. Why? Is it a very hard performance to write about? Yes, it actually is. Again – why? Did she not succeed to transfer her acting style from the stage to the screen? Luckily, this is one aspect of her performance that cannot be criticized – Martha Scott made the transfer to the screen with a beautiful subtlety and played her part with a touching and lovely restraint that suits both the style and the message of the movie.  So, her work does not need to hide behind that of fellow nominee Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story who also reprised her own stage role without any sign of stage acting (but of course, Katharine Hepburn had the advantage of having already established herself as a screen actress of first class). No, the problems cannot be found here – Martha Scott clearly had an intuitive understanding for the film camera right away and played her part with a very honest quietness that is much different from the quietness that can be found in a stage performers. In this aspect, her performance shines and it shines much brighter than that of the cast members around her – Martha Scott easily established herself as the most interesting cast member of Our Town, mainly because her role allowed her to be a silent flow that goes along with the story instead of appearing to interrupt it like the supporting cast does. And Martha Scott also feels truly genuine in crafting Emily Webb – her quietness, her shyness but also her determination to succeed in school, this typical presentation of a young, American girl who is well-behaved, likeable, beautiful, bright, charming and responsible comes across as very natural and believable in her performance.
So, with this early praise, why is it hard to write about this performance?

Maybe it is because of the fact that Martha Scott always remains more admirable for what she is than for what she does. Yes, she establishes the character of Emily Webb beautifully – but after this, she has nowhere to go, neither with the role nor with her characterization. What surprises about Our Town is what little presence Martha Scott is during the first 50 minutes of the movie. She is barely on the screen and mostly reduced to some little conversations with William Holden who is playing the boy next door and with whom she slowly falls in love. Martha Scott knows how to portray this youthful and frightened discovery of love and she is always believable as a young teenager but it’s hard to find a moment in her performance that goes beyond the surface of this underdeveloped character. I mentioned before that Martha Scott is the most interesting cast member – that is true but mainly because the other parts are even less developed and present even less depth and complexity. Emily Webb is never really a person but rather a symbol and always open to interpretation – and therefore Martha Scott plays her too harmless, without any edges or interesting angles, as straight-forward as possible, never truly developing any kind of personality to constantly keep her like a white piece of paper on which the viewer can write his or her own thoughts on this woman. So, her performance is charming and lovely to look at but it’s almost impossible to find any true character – Emily falls in love with George, she talks to him a few times and gets married. All this happens in a couple of scenes stretched out over the storyline. Again, she does all this fine – when she asks her mother if she is pretty or helps George with his homework at night, she shows Emily’s natural simplicity but this simplicity also affects her performance in too many ways. Emily is barely a character and no scene shows any development – or even a foundation for any possible development. A later scene in which she meets George in a Soda shop and they talk about their plans for the future and slowly realize their feelings for each other again gives Martha Scott the possibility to display Emily’s innocence but again – it’s all too simple, an almost lifeless presentation because there is almost no life inside Emily.

Martha Scott uses her screen time wisely and despite all the obstacles is able to make Emily a lasting character despite her limited appearances and character but this is mostly due to the fact that, in the limited surrounding of Our Town, Emily is the only person to ever achieve any kind of visibility. Because of this, her performance is strangely touching and completely unremarkable at the same time, a bizarre example for ‘wanting more’ from an actress but not getting it. In some cases, the viewers want more because of the strength of the performance or the character but in some cases, they only want more because the performance feels so incomplete and narrow. Unfortunately for Martha Scott, the latter is the truth. She does the most she is allowed to do but this is just too little – both because the screenplay simply sees Emily, despite her intelligence and dreams, as a woman who, even though not ready to get married, only exists to eventually do get married, and because the structure of the movie asks her to be as flat and pale as possible to prevent her from pushing the character in any kind of direction. Martha Scott cannot be blamed for any of the flaws in her work – but this doesn’t change the fact that everything in Our Town is constantly holding her back.

So, her nomination for Best Actress is, in some ways, a head scratcher. But what probably explains it is her final scene, the only one in which she truly becomes the center of attention. After she has given birth to a child, Emily apparently died and watches as a ghost over her family and herself when she was a teenager, remembering the joy of living and taking over the part of the movie’s conscience, telling the viewers to notice the beauty of life while living, finding fulfillment in the little things that shape our daily existence. Martha Scott handles those strange scenes beautifully as she finds the right way to play this long monologue, realistically and yet strangely unearthly. But she also suffers in this scene – playwright Thornton Wilder apparently not only wanted to put the weight of the play and his own ideas onto Emily’s shoulders but rather the weight of the whole world. Just like the rest of the movie, Martha Scott is not truly to blame for all these shortcomings as she succeeded in creating a strangely lost and helpless feeling but the heavy-handed monologue she is given only feels powerful while it lasts but becomes strangely unsatisfying when it is over.

Martha Scott clearly felt very comfortable in her role but there was nothing she could do nor that she was allowed to do to find any kind of woman in the thin creation that is Emily Webb. A beautiful performance, turned into an indecisive miscue by the screenplay and the direction. It’s frustrating to see an obviously talented performer being held back so strongly but her dedication and success in the dreamlike final sequence help her to receive

Best Actress 1940

The first year will be 1940 and the nominees were

Bette Davis in The Letter

Joan Fontaine in Rebecca

Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story

Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle

Martha Scott in Our Town