‘Sunset Boulevard’ Star Nancy Olson on Its Weak Showing at Oscars ’51: “Everything Should Have Won”
Nancy Olson, the last living star of Billy Wilder’s seminal Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard, still remembers Oscar night 1951. The film was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won three.
Olson, 96, shared her recollections on a recent episode of It Happened in Hollywood, The Hollywood Reporter‘s eyewitness film history podcast.
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Olson was just 22 at the time, and Sunset Boulevard was only her second picture in a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures. The role — Betty, a studio reader with ambitions to be a screenwriter — earned her a best supporting actress nomination.
“I did not expect to win and I did not win,” Olson told host Seth Abramovitch. “I felt very rewarded being nominated and that was quite enough.”
She says she sensed her fate was sealed when she entered the Pantages Theatre and was ushered to her less-than-prime spot. “I was seated in the back, on the side,” Olson says.
The statuette, presented by Dean Jagger — best supporting actor 1950 for Twelve O’Clock High — went to Josephine Hull for Harvey.
The following year, her suspicions proved correct, when Olson showed up on behalf of her then-husband, the lyricist and librettist Alan Jay Lerner, nominated for 1951’s An American in Paris.
“He was in New York with his father who was dying,” Olson explains. “And so I picked up the Oscar for him. My seat was in the fourth row on the aisle — and I knew right away that Alan was going to get the award.”
More surprising, however, was that Gloria Swanson did not win best actress for playing Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, a towering portrayal of a silent film star who Hollywood has passed by and who spends her days locked away in a mansion with her butler, Max.
But Swanson had some stiff competition that year, including Bette Davis as Margo Channing in All About Eve — like Norma, another actress who finds show business has little use for aging women — and Judy Holliday as the ditzy-as-a-fox blonde in Born Yesterday. It was Holliday who won.
“I mean, they were all wonderful, wonderful movies. And I can understand why there was other choices,” says Olson. “On the other hand, what is the most fascinating is that Sunset Boulevard has outlasted them all. The desire, the gravity that brings people to it is fascinating.”
In the end, Sunset Boulevard won best story and screenplay (by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder and D.M. Marshman Jr.), best art direction — black and white, and best scoring of a dramatic or comedy picture.
“Gloria Swanson and Billy Wilder, the picture, everything should have won,” Olson says.
For more from Olson on her remarkable journey from Wisconsin to Hollywood and the making of Sunset Boulevard, listen to the episode of It Happened in Hollywood.
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