10 Best Actors Who Never Got a Single Oscar Nomination

Getting an Academy Award is not everything, but it’s also not nothing. The whole yearly ceremony can be silly and a bit overblown, but earning a nomination – and maybe even winning – would still feel great, you’d imagine. It can feel good if an actor who gave a performance you liked won, after all, so it must be even better to be the person doing the winning.

It’s one thing for people to have been nominated a bunch of times without winning (like Peter O’Toole, who didn’t win for Lawrence of Arabia or any of the other seven roles he earned nominations for), but another thing entirely to never even be nominated. There’s no shortage of discussion about actors who are active and haven’t been nominated, but less so – and more upsettingly – are those actors who weren’t ever nominated, and never can be, since they’ve either passed away or retired. Those actors/actresses are below. Also, as one more side note, there are so many non-English-speaking actors who’ve been overlooked (consider how no one from the cast of Parasite was nominated), but there are mostly English-speaking actors and actresses below, just because you could probably fill a top 50 or top 100 with examples otherwise, as the general lack of international performances getting nominated – especially going back a few decades or more – has been noted before.

10

Vincent Price

Movies Included: ‘Laura’ (1944), ‘The Ten Commandments’ (1956), ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990)

Image via 20th Century Fox

Vincent Price is often tied up with the horror genre, and horror movies haven’t always gotten a ton of love at the Academy Awards. Things have changed a bit in more recent years, but Price probably wasn’t ever going to get nominated for the likes of The Last Man on Earth or The Masque of the Red Death (both 1964), no matter how solid they were, and no matter how much he elevated them further with his acting alone.

Price also had range, and showed up in supporting roles in movies like Laura (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), and The Ten Commandments (1956). The last of those felt like a proper Oscar-worthy film, but he was just one of many smaller moving parts there. Look, they could’ve thrown him a nomination in 1990, for stealing the few short scenes he (very memorably) had in Edward Scissorhands, but it wasn’t to be. But seriously, good luck finding any bad Vincent Price performance, or a movie where his presence brings down the overall quality of the film somehow.

9

Marilyn Monroe

Movies Included: ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ (1953), ‘Some Like It Hot’ (1959), ‘The Misfits’ (1961)

Image via United Artists

Maybe it comes down to critics and voters never taking her as seriously as she deserved (also, sure, her career was not long), but it’s still surprising that no performance of Marilyn Monroe’s earned an Oscar nomination. Monroe being snubbed for her Some Like It Hot performance feels especially surprising, since she’s effortlessly funny in that film, and it was also nominated for six other Oscars.

There’s also The Misfits, which was the last film she completed before her death, and that’s one where she got to show more dramatic range, compared to the other films she was known for. That film in general wasn’t really appreciated properly upon its release, though. Marilyn Monroe was still undeniably (and obviously) iconic without ever needing an Oscar nomination to attain such a following, but it still feels notable and more than a little strange that she didn’t get one.

8

Toshirō Mifune

Movies Included: ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954), ‘Throne of Blood’ (1957), ‘Yojimbo’ (1961)

Image via Toho

You don’t have to look further than his collaborations with Akira Kurosawa to see just what a powerhouse Toshirō Mifune was, as an actor. He starred in more than a dozen movies Kurosawa directed, including some of the absolute best of all time, like Seven Samurai (1954), Rashomon (1950), and High and Low (1963). Of course, you can look beyond Kurosawa’s filmography if you’re talking about Mifune, and maybe you should.

Going beyond Kurosawa demonstrates he was even greater, since he was fantastic in the underrated Hell in the Pacific (1968), The Sword of Doom (1966), and the Samurai trilogy (1954–1956), just for starters. He was another one of those actors who seemed incapable of phoning it in, and also proved capable of being good in movies that were otherwise not great. If the Academy Awards had been a little more willing to nominate more performances from foreign films back when Toshirō Mifune was at his peak, he would’ve surely earned a nomination.

7

Joseph Cotten

Movies Included: ‘Citizen Kane’ (1941), ‘Shadow of a Doubt’ (1943), ‘The Third Man’ (1949)

Image via British Lion Films

He might not be a household name, but he was in a bunch of movies that very much were classics. Joseph Cotton’s filmography in the 1940s alone is quite stunning, since he was in two movies directed by Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), an Alfred Hitchcock classic (Shadow of a Doubt), and then Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which is an all-timer of a film noir/thriller.

Since he was in all those classics, and continued to act in other decent to good movies throughout the remaining decades of his (quite lengthy) career, you’d think that eventually, one of Cotton’s performances would’ve been Oscar-nominated, but… well, his name is here. So he didn’t. His name shouldn’t be, but it is, so calling him a bit under-appreciated could itself be something of an understatement.

6

Maureen O’Hara

Movies Included: ‘How Green Was My Valley’ (1941), ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ (1947), ‘The Quiet Man’ (1952)

Image via Republic Pictures

There is so little insight to offer here. Maureen O’Hara was a dependably good actress in her fair share of very good movies, but was maybe the female equivalent of Joseph Cotton in that you’d just expect an Oscar nomination to happen eventually, after a more-than-reasonable showing of both quantity (of performances) and quality (of acting). But it never happened with O’Hara.

She starred in the Christmas classic that is Miracle on 34th Street, which got a few Oscar nominations in other categories, and then she was also in How Green Was My Valley, which won five of its 10 nominations, including for Best Picture. And then there was The Quiet Man and some other films she starred in with John Wayne, all feeling worthy, but none ultimately recognized by the Academy Awards.

5

Tatsuya Nakadai

Movies Included: ‘The Human Condition’ (1959–1961), ‘Harakiri’ (1962), ‘Ran’ (1985)

Like Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai was in Seven Samurai… but only just. He’s basically an extra in the film, but would go on to collaborate with Mifune properly in later years, and have actual starring roles in later Akira Kurosawa films, too. The most noteworthy of these was probably Ran (1985), which saw Nakadai playing an aging warlord who tries to pick a successor, but then things get messy and war breaks out.

Nakadai was in his early 50s in Ran, but convincingly played someone much older, and then he did something similar in Harakiri (1962), being 30 the year that film came out, but convincingly playing a grandfather. He was always committed and chameleonic, as an actor, and intense like few others. His range might be best demonstrated by The Human Condition, a trilogy that goes for about 10 hours and shows a pacifist being broken down morally and physically by a war that becomes increasingly harder to avoid.

4

Jeanne Moreau

Movies Included: ‘Elevator to the Gallows’ (1958), ‘La Notte’ (1961), ‘Jules and Jim’ (1962)

Image via Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France

Again, it’s a little tricky with actors who were in non-English-language movies generally not getting recognized, but Jeanne Moreau starred in some French movies that became popular outside France, and also in a few English-language films, too. One of her best films was The Trial, directed by Orson Welles, though that was one of those “ahead of their time” sorts of movies, with more appreciation for it nowadays.

There were also worthy collaborations she did with François Truffaut and Louis Malle, and sure, they weren’t English-language movies, but still… in 1960, Sophia Loren did win Best Actress for Two Women, which wasn’t an English-language movie, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. But Moreau seemed to fall victim to the Oscars not really liking foreign and/or arthouse movies all that much, way back when.

3

Peter Lorre

Movies Included: ‘M’ (1931), ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (1941), ‘Casablanca’ (1942)

Image via Vereinigte Star-Film GmbH

Peter Lorre is one of those actors who might well have had his best role right at the start of his film career, since he starred in M as the killer in 1931 (he’d had one uncredited film role before that). It’s arguably Fritz Lang who’s the star of M, for his work behind the camera, but Lorre does add a great deal to the film nonetheless, and he became pretty prolific in the years following.

Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon are two of his most noteworthy movies, and sure, his parts in those films and various others were small, but he often did the Vincent Price thing of being memorable regardless of how many minutes he was actually on screen for. One Oscar nomination for at least something, surely, would’ve made sense, but it wasn’t to be.

2

Alan Rickman

Movies Included: ‘Die Hard’ (1988), ‘Sense and Sensibility’ (1995), ‘Love Actually’ (2003)

Image via 20th Century Studios

Sure, no actor ever received an Oscar nomination for a role in a Harry Potter movie (the series itself earned 12 Oscar nominations in other categories, although none of those resulted in wins), but if someone could’ve, or should’ve… maybe Alan Rickman? He did so much with Severus Snape, and it’s been hard reading the Harry Potter books in a post-movie world, trying not to hear Rickman’s voice when reading Snape’s dialogue.

But Rickman is more than Snape, so maybe the most glaring role of his overlooked by the Academy Awards would be playing Hans Gruber in Die Hard (1988), which is one of the all-time greats as far as movie villains go. That was also his first feature film role, which is pretty wild. And nominating him for Galaxy Quest really wouldn’t have been outrageous, either. He’s kind of the highlight of that one, and he also makes a large impression in both Sense & Sensibility and Love Actually. It’s weird to think he wasn’t nomination-worthy, for whatever reason, when you look over just how many movies he was one of the best parts – or maybe even the best part – of.

1

Donald Sutherland

Movies Included: ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1973), ‘Ordinary People’ (1980), ‘JFK’ (1991)

Image via Paramount Pictures

One of Donald Sutherland’s smallest yet best roles came in JFK, where his character, identified only as “X,” speaks about a vast conspiracy, and Sutherland really commands the screen even if he’s just talking in a park. He helps make it maybe the best scene in the movie, so it showcases his acting chops, but then it’s also relevant because it feels like there’s possibly some kind of conspiracy surrounding why Donald Sutherland never received an Oscar nomination.

He had been active since the 1960s, and made an impression in too many good movies to count. Maybe getting snubbed for Ordinary People stands out most of all, since Mary Tyler Moore, Judd Hirsch, and Timothy Hutton were all nominated (with the last of those three also winning), but Sutherland wasn’t. Nothing for M*A*S*H, nor The Dirty Dozen, nor Don’t Look Now, nor Pride & Prejudice. It all feels like a bit of a mystery, so if conspiracy theorists want to jump on board and get to the bottom of this snubbing, maybe they should.