From Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump to Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer, some of the best Oscar-winning actors were given plenty of screen time to shine in their Academy-favorite performances. It’s always impressive when an actor wins an Oscar with limited screen time, like Anthony Hopkins for The Silence of the Lambs or Beatrice Straight for just five minutes in Network, but they’re much more likely to catch the Academy’s attention if they’re on-screen for the overwhelming majority of the movie. The more screen time an actor has, the more opportunities they have to wow Oscar voters.
The Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Actress tend to go to movies that essentially function as a showcase for their lead actor. Joaquin Phoenix is on-screen for all but 19 minutes of Joker (and a few of those minutes are end credits). Even though the opening act of Forrest Gump covers the character’s childhood, where he’s played by the younger Michael Conner Humphreys, Hanks is only off-screen for 37 minutes of the movie. Some of the best Oscar-winning performances had plenty of breathing room to chew the scenery.
10 Art Carney In Harry And Tonto
1 Hour, 40 Minutes
Art Carney is best known for his role as Ed Norton in the classic sitcom The Honeymooners. But later in his career, he earned an Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn as elderly widower and retired teacher Harry Coombes in Paul Mazursky’s 1974 road movie Harry and Tonto. After getting kicked out of his New York City apartment, Harry decides to travel cross-country with his pet cat Tonto.
For most of the movie, Carney’s only scene partner is a cat, so he was given plenty of time in the spotlight. Mazursky directs the movie with a slow, patient pace that allows Carney’s performance to really shine. Carney’s performance would’ve been strong enough to earn the Academy’s attention either way, but Oscar voters love when a sitcom star shows off their unseen dramatic capabilities — especially when they have an hour and 40 minutes to do it.
9 Meryl Streep In Sophie’s Choice
1 Hour, 41 Minutes
Meryl Streep earned her fourth out of a whopping 21 Oscar nominations — and second out of three wins — for her heartbreaking performance in Sophie’s Choice. Streep plays a Holocaust survivor who was forced to choose which of her two children would be sent to a gas chamber and killed. After she won Best Supporting Actress for Kramer vs. Kramer, this was Streep’s first Best Actress win (she later won a second Best Actress award for playing Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady).
Streep’s turn in Sophie’s Choice is still one of her most affecting performances. She perfectly captures the anguish of a woman who was forced to make an unthinkable decision and couldn’t forgive herself for it. Peter MacNicol is technically the star of the movie, since it’s told from his character’s perspective, but Streep steals the show with an hour and 41 minutes of screen time.
8 Joaquin Phoenix In Joker
1 Hour, 43 Minutes
Joaquin Phoenix became the second actor after Heath Ledger to win an Oscar for playing the Clown Prince of Crime when he won Best Actor for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck in Todd Phillips’ Joker. Narratively, Joker has been criticized for being derivative of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and thematically, it’s been criticized for glorifying vigilante justice. So, Phoenix’s performance and Lawrence Sher’s gorgeous cinematography had to do a lot of heavy lifting.
Since most of the movie takes place from Arthur’s perspective — and a lot of it might be happening as a hallucination in his mind — Joker didn’t have many opportunities to cut away to other characters’ perspectives. This meant that Phoenix had plenty of time to chew the scenery; he’s on-screen for almost all of the movie. He appears for 103 of the film’s 122 minutes.
7 Tom Hanks In Forrest Gump
1 Hour, 45 Minutes
One year after his Oscar-winning turn in Philadelphia, Tom Hanks won his second consecutive Academy Award for Best Actor for playing the iconic title role in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump. After Forrest Gump gets past the early scenes set during Forrest’s childhood, Hanks is on-screen in almost every scene for the rest of the movie. He appears for an hour and 45 minutes.
Since Forrest is telling the story to random fellow bus passengers in a framing narrative, the whole thing is told from his perspective. The movie follows Forrest wherever he goes. If he’s sent to fight in Vietnam, it goes to Vietnam. If he becomes a ping pong prodigy, it goes to the ping pong circuit. And if he runs up and down the country several times over, the movie goes up and down the country several times over.
6 George C. Scott In Patton
1 Hour, 48 Minutes
George C. Scott won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as General George S. Patton in Franklin J. Schaffner’s aptly titled biopic Patton. But he famously declined the award, becoming the first actor to do so. Scott didn’t like the idea of actors competing to be the “best” and had a further distaste for the Academy’s voting process. The movie’s producer, Frank McCarthy, accepted the award on Scott’s behalf.
At 172 minutes, Patton is almost three hours long, and Scott appears on-screen for 108 of those minutes. Scott often has the screen all to himself. The movie opens with Scott delivering a rousing monologue with a giant American flag behind him. It’s no wonder he impressed Oscar voters enough to score a Best Actor award — they literally couldn’t take their eyes off him.
5 Cillian Murphy In Oppenheimer
1 Hour, 53 Minutes
After nearly two decades of playing supporting roles in Christopher Nolan’s movies, Cillian Murphy finally landed a starring role as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer. Murphy’s first lead role in a Nolan movie also scored him his first Academy Award for Best Actor. When watching the movie, it seems as though Murphy is on-screen for all of Oppenheimer, but he’s only actually in one hour and 53 minutes of this three-hour movie, so there’s over an hour of Oppenheimer that doesn’t feature Murphy at all.
Nolan puts Murphy’s mesmerizing performance front and center throughout Oppenheimer. He’s more interested in showing the conflict on Oppenheimer’s face than showing the bullet-point historical events of the Manhattan Project. Murphy gets a lot of extensive IMAX closeups to really shine, and that undoubtedly earned him the Oscar.
4 Daniel Day-Lewis In There Will Be Blood
1 Hour, 57 Minutes
Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for his portrayal of unscrupulous oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s historical epic There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis had previously won the award for My Left Foot and later won it a third time for Lincoln, but There Will Be Blood is arguably both his best movie and finest performance. There Will Be Blood is a character study above all, focusing more on Plainview’s moral downfall than the growth of his business, so Day-Lewis was given plenty of screen time.
In My Left Foot, he had 50 minutes of screen time, and in Lincoln, he had an hour and 17 minutes. In There Will Be Blood, Day-Lewis has almost as much screen time as both of those previous Oscar-winning performances combined. He appears on-screen as Plainview, watching his empire grow and delivering captivating monologues, for an hour and 57 minutes.
3 Barbra Streisand In Funny Girl
2 Hours, 1 Minute
Eight years before she won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for her track “Evergreen” from A Star is Born, Barbra Streisand won Best Actress for her starring role in the William Wyler musical Funny Girl. Streisand plays Fanny Brice, an up-and-coming performer who ignores the producers telling her to quit for cosmetic reasons, embraces her physical imperfections with a sense of humor, and becomes a huge star. Streisand has a total of two hours and one minute of screen time in the role of Fanny.
Funny Girl arrived at the tail end of the Golden Age of Hollywood when mega-scale roadshow musicals were going out of style. It was one of the last two-and-a-half-hour musical extravaganzas to succeed at the box office before the genre went out of style. (Technically, Streisand’s Best Actress win was tied with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter.)
2 Charlton Heston In Ben-Hur
2 Hours, 1 Minute
18 years before he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, Charlton Heston won his only non-honorary Oscar. He beat out Jack Lemmon and James Stewart to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn as the titular Judah Ben-Hur in the big-budget religious epic Ben-Hur. While Ben-Hur is best remembered for the cinematic spectacle of its chariot race sequence — which has influenced just about every action filmmaker in the decades since — Heston’s performance is just as spectacular.
Much like Streisand in Funny Girl, Heston has two hours and one minute of screen time in Ben-Hur. Part of the reason for Heston’s above-average screen time is the movie’s above-average runtime. At 212 minutes, Ben-Hur is over three-and-a-half hours long, and that’s not including the overture, the intermission, or the entr’acte. Heston had plenty of time to shine.
1 Vivien Leigh In Gone With The Wind
2 Hours, 23 Minutes
Vivien Leigh holds the record for longest Oscar-winning performance with a whopping two hours and 23 minutes of screen time in Victor Fleming’s epic historical romance Gone with the Wind. It helps that Gone with the Wind is one of the longest mainstream movies ever made. It has a gargantuan runtime of 221 minutes — or three hours and 41 minutes — so even with two hours and 23 minutes on-screen, Leigh is still absent from Gone with the Wind for over an hour.
Although Gone with the Wind is problematic for its depiction of American slavery, Leigh’s Best Actress-winning performance as Scarlett O’Hara remains iconic. Leigh later won a second Best Actress Oscar for playing Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, but Scarlett is still her defining role. She’s so perfect for that part, it’s as if she was born to play it.
The Oscars | Academy Awards
- Location
- Dolby Theatre – Los Angeles, California
- Description
- The Academy Awards, AKA the Oscars, is a film awards show that honors excellence in filmmaking, acting, and various fields associated with making movies. The ceremony will be in its 95th year in 2023, with Jimmy Kimmel returning to host the event. The Oscars typically air around March and accept movies for nomination that were released between January 1st and December 31st of the year being honored.