Actors Who Won Oscars For Their First Movies

Sometimes it takes ages for an actor to finally get their due — they spend years grinding until they’re considered to have waited long enough to earn themselves an Oscar (often for a bewilderingly subpar film that’s far from their best work). But every once in a while, they end up knocking it out of the park and bowling over the Academy so thoroughly that they win an Oscar for their first feature film. 

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You see it more often with women, for whom writing — until relatively recently — tended to be stronger in younger roles and in supporting performances, but these first-time Oscars crop up for all different types of characters. And unfortunately, winning an Oscar for your first movie can be as much of a curse as it is a blessing — after all, how can you possibly top that? Here are each and every actor who earned an Academy Award for their debut performance: Some you likely remember, while others have faded into obscurity.

Harold Russell gave the Academy a number of firsts when he won Best Supporting Actor for the 1946 drama “The Best Years of Our Lives,” one of the best films of the 1940s. He was the first non-professional actor to win an Oscar — Russell was cast largely for his very specific disability that was central to the plot, and just happened to put in a moving performance along the way. He was also the first amputee to win an Academy Award. 

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Russell lost both of his hands in a bomb explosion while he was serving as an Army instructor, making him the perfect fit for the character of Homer Parrish, who returns home from the war a double amputee reluctant to take up with his high school sweetheart again, believing that no one would want to marry someone in his condition. For his work in the film, he was given an honorary Oscar for the importance of his performance for disabled veterans, making him the only actor to win two awards for the same role. Although he acted in a few other projects after “The Best Years of Our Lives,” it largely marked the end of his Hollywood career.

The Hollywood debut of acting legend Julie Andrews comes with a considerable amount of tea. Andrews got her start on Broadway, originating the role of Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” which was an instant hit. However, when the time came for the big-screen adaptation, Andrews was passed over for the part, with producers insisting that she wasn’t a big enough name to carry the film. They decided to cast Audrey Hepburn instead, despite the fact that she had little experience as a singer.

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Meanwhile, Andrews was given the star-making role of the magical nanny in 1964’s “Mary Poppins,” the quintessential Disney film that made her an instant sensation. When it came time for the Oscars that year, Andrews took home Best Actress, while Hepburn failed to snag a nomination in the same category. Mary Poppins would probably be too sweet to comment on it, but Andrews must have felt vindicated by her win.

By the time Shirley Booth appeared in “Come Back, Little Sheba,” she had already been acting for 37 years — just not on the big screen. She began her theatrical career in 1915 and earned a total of three Tony Awards, including one for the 1950 Broadway production of “Come Back, Little Sheba,” a role she reprised two years later on the big screen. In it, she plays Lola, the wife of an alcoholic doctor (Burt Lancaster) who openly resents her, a fact laid bare when they rent out a room in their home to a beautiful young college student, Marie (Terry Booth). The state of their marriage deteriorates throughout the film, leading to a violent confrontation.

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Despite the fact that “Come Back, Little Sheba” earned Booth an Academy Award for Best Actress, she preferred acting on stage and only made a handful of other performances in film before returning to the theater. Still, she popped up on television occasionally, including as the lead in the series “Hazel,” which ran in the mid-’60s and earned her two Emmys.

Based on the classic novel by Ernest Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” starred Gary Cooper as Robert Jordan, who fights against Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and Ingrid Bergman as Maria, the guerrilla fighter who falls in love with him. But the film also relies on the presence of Pilar (Katina Paxinou), a guerilla fighter who takes control of the operation and offers support for Jordan’s mission behind enemy lines.

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Paxinou was a prominent Greek actress who had made a name for herself in theater before making her film debut in 1943’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” After winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she appeared in a handful of other Hollywood films before returning to Europe, where she continued to act, most famously in Luchino Visconti’s Italian drama “Rocco and His Brothers.”

When Tatum O’Neal was just 10 years old, she made Hollywood history as the youngest person to ever win a competitive Oscar. She starred in the 1973 film “Paper Moon” — an unexpected inspiration for “The Mandalorian” — as Addie, a young orphan who teams up with professional con man Moze (Ryan O’Neal, Tatum’s real-life father) in the Depression-era Midwest. Her Addie is spirited, clever, and has few qualms about doing whatever it takes to get ahead. But she also develops a touching relationship with Moze, seeing in him an ersatz father figure. 

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“Paper Moon” was a box office success, and Tatum O’Neal’s performance is now considered to be near the peak of child acting (even if her Best Supporting Actress win may be Oscar category fraud). Although she made a few other childhood hits, including “The Bad News Bears,” she struggled to transition to an adult career in film, with her most notable performance coming with a main cast role on Denis Leary’s “Rescue Me.”

Sometimes you see someone in a film and you can just tell that they’re destined for stardom. This was certainly the case with Lupita Nyong’o in 2013’s “12 Years a Slave,” where she played Patsey, whom Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) befriends when he is sold into slavery. Plantation owner Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) has taken a shine to Patsey, which puts her in a terrifying position — she is both sexually assaulted by her master and abused by his wife, upset by his infidelity. It’s a harrowing role that easily stands as one of the best film debuts of all time, and she was rewarded accordingly with an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. 

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Since then, Nyong’o has largely avoided the Oscar curse, with performances in both big-budget franchises like “Star Wars” and “Black Panther” in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as well as smaller, more independent dramas. In 2016, she starred in “Eclipsed” on Broadway, earning herself a Tony nomination for Best Actress in a Play.

After Harold Russell, Haing S. Ngor became the second non-professional to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. And like Russell, Ngor was cast in his role because of the life experiences that made him especially well-equipped for the role. 1984’s “The Killing Fields” details the genocidal reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime in 1970s Cambodia. Ngor played Dith Pran, a Cambodian photojournalist covering the story for The New York Times alongside American Sydney Schanberg (Sam Waterston). 

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Few actors in Hollywood would have been able to relate to the material as strongly as Ngor, who was himself a Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge, having served three prison sentences at the hands of the regime alongside his late wife. She died in childbirth even though Ngor was an obstetrician, as he had to conceal his education due to anti-intellectual hostilities or risk his entire family’s lives. Sadly, Ngor himself was murdered in 1996, which was officially considered the result of an attempted robbery, although some believe it was politically motivated.

By the time Marlon Brando starred in Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront,” he was already a Hollywood icon. But the same could not be said for his co-star, Eva Marie Saint, who won Best Supporting Actress for her first film appearance as Edie, the love interest of Terry (Brando) and the sister of a man he inadvertently helped murder. Prior to her film debut, she made a career in New York on the stage, radio, and the fledgling medium of television. 

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In an interview with Premiere magazine, Saint recalled her experience making the 1954 film, “[Elia] Kazan put me in a room with Marlon Brando. He said ‘Brando is the boyfriend of your sister. You’re not used to being with a young man. Don’t let him in the door under any circumstances.’ I don’t know what he told Marlon; you’ll have to ask him. He put me off balance. And I remained off balance for the whole shoot.” She continued to act in Hollywood, appearing in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North By Northwest” and, years later, playing Martha Kent in “Superman.” At 100 years old as of 2025, Saint remains one of the last living connections to the golden age of Hollywood.

Barbra Streisand had a prominent career as a singer before she took on the leading role of Fanny Brice in 1968’s “Funny Girl,” but this was her first film performance. In bringing to life an interpretation of the vaudeville star, she showcases all of the wit and charm that made her beloved by audiences both as a singer and actress. Her sense of humor is on full display, as is her unexpectedly strong chemistry with Omar Sharif as the troubled Nicky Arnstein.

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This year marks one of the rare occasions in which the Oscars fielded a tie — in this case, Streisand and Katharine Hepburn (“The Lion in Winter”) sharing Best Actress honors. In a way, the juxtaposition between the stars was perfectly fitting, putting together one of Hollywood’s greatest actors (Hepburn began her career in the 1930s but was still going strong by 1968 — she had won the previous year as well for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” and had one more Oscar still to come) and one of its most promising newcomers.

Jennifer Hudson may not have won her season of “American Idol” (in point of fact, she finished in seventh place in 2004, which is still wild to us), but she’s without a doubt one of the most accomplished performers the reality series has ever produced. Two years after she was launched on the scene in “American Idol,” she was cast as Effie White in “Dreamgirls,” the original lead singer of the Dreamettes who is replaced with the more commercially viable Deena (Beyonce). But although she’s ousted from the spotlight, she still gets the film’s showstopping number, “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

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Hudson walked away with the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and from there, simply could not stop winning. In 2022, she became the 17th person in history to win an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony) when “A Strange Loop” took home Best Musical at the Tonys.

At only 20 years old, Marlee Matlin took on the role of the fiery Sarah Norman in 1986’s “Children of a Lesser God,” a janitor working at the school for the Deaf that she attended as a child. Almost against her better judgment, she begins a relationship with the charismatic new speech teacher James Leeds (William Hurt), but they face seemingly infinite conflict in their perspective on hearing and cultural deafness — particularly when James keeps pushing her to try to speak. He wants to encourage her to use her voice, but he doesn’t realize that for her, that may not involve speaking out loud at all and that it’s not fair to try to force her to communicate on his terms.

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For this performance, Matlin won the Oscar for Best Actress, making her the youngest winner in Academy history, as well as the first Deaf winner. She was the only Deaf performer to take home an Oscar until 2022 when Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor for “CODA” — a film that also featured Matlin in a prominent role.

If you want to be pedantic, technically Timothy Hutton was in one film before 1980’s “Ordinary People” — he played the uncredited character of “Boy Who Runs to Father” in one of his dad’s movies as a child. But since that’s extra work rather than acting (all due respect to background performers), we’re still going to count “Ordinary People” as his proper feature film debut. After a series of television appearances, he was cast in this quiet film and was just 20 when he took home the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the traumatized son of a repressed WASP family grieving the loss of his older brother in a boating accident. With his win, he became the youngest-ever Best Actor awardee — a record he holds to this day.

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Although “Ordinary People” sometimes gets a bad rap for beating out films like “Raging Bull” and “The Elephant Man” at the Oscars, it’s a compelling and incredibly moving family drama that deserves a lot of credit for the depth of its performances and how intuitively director Robert Redford understands his actors.

Plenty of now-famous actors got their start as children, but there are a rare few who put in such a great performance that they take home an Academy Award. Anna Paquin starred in Jane Campion’s “The Piano” in 1993, playing the young daughter of Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter), who emigrates to New Zealand as part of an arranged marriage. Flora (Paquin) is caught between the relationship of her mother and stepfather (Sam O’Neill), as well as the burgeoning romance between Ada and George (Harvey Keitel), a retired sailor, her impulsive decisions bringing “The Piano” to a sudden and devastating climax.

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Paquin won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress at the age of 11, making her the second youngest winner in history. The film launched her career as a performer, leading to roles in the “X-Men” franchise and “Almost Famous,” as well as a starring turn in HBO’s vampire drama “True Blood.”

In the 1936 film “Anthony Adverse,” Anthony (Fredric March) is born an illegitimate son of a nobleman’s wife, a status that defines his early life until he finds an anonymous benefactor in his maternal grandfather, John Bonnyfeather (Edmund Gwenn). Gale Sondergaard plays Faith Paleologus, who goes from working as Bonnyfeather’s housekeeper to becoming the second wife of Don Luis, the spurned nobleman who Anthony’s mother was married to. Since she has inherited Bonnyfeather’s considerable fortune, this puts her at odds with Anthony, who seeks to claim his birthright.

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Although “Anthony Adverse” is not regarded as one of the classic films of the 1930s, Gale Sondergaard’s antagonistic performance — which made her the Oscars’ first-ever Best Supporting Actress winner — stands out as one of its strongest elements. She continued to act into the 1940s, although her film career was cut short when her husband, director Herbert Biberman, was blacklisted as one of the Hollywood Ten and subjected to a high-profile public trial under suspicion of communist sympathies.

The 1949 movie “All the King’s Men” is a fairly cynical political drama, where an idealistic man of the people candidate ends up being just as open to corruption as the establishment politicians he rails against, all seen through the lens of a journalist (John Ireland) who becomes caught up in his meteoric rise. Mercedes McCambridge plays Sadie Burke, a hard-boiled campaign operative who works with the populist Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford) despite the fact he was only ever meant to be a spoiler candidate. 

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By the time McCambridge was cast in “All the King’s Men,” she was considered one of the most famous radio voices in the country, having performed in dozens of high-profile radio dramas during the 1930s and 1940s, when the medium of radio acted similarly to television as a means of home entertainment. After winning Best Supporting Actress for “All the King’s Men,” she continued acting on screen, with roles in films such as “Suddenly, Last Summer,” “Giant” (for which she earned a second Oscar nomination), and “The Exorcist.”

“East of Eden” — slated to receive a Netflix remake – is the story of twin brothers. In the 1955 film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, Aron (Richard Davalos) seems as though he can do no wrong, while Cal (James Dean) seems as though he can do no right. Jo Van Fleet plays their estranged mother, who they were told died in their infancy, but actually left their father and runs a brothel in town. When Cal discovers her identity and reveals it to his brother … well, Aron doesn’t exactly react well.

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Best Supporting Actress winner Van Fleet began her acting career a decade earlier, developing an impressive reputation on Broadway. The year before “East of Eden” came out, she won a Tony Award for her work in “The Trip to Bountiful,” which also featured fellow debut film Oscar winner Eva Marie Saint. After training at the Actor’s Studio with Elia Kazan, he saw her potential for film work and cast her in “East of Eden,” and the rest is history.