As the 88th Academy Awards approach, there is no better time to look back at some of Oscar’s most memorable moments. The Awards are supposed to be Hollywood at its gilded best and that - perhaps inevitably - excludes the recent past, which has not yet been burnished with the passing of time. Look! There’s Marlon, Audrey, Jack, Dennis and Billy. Let’s mingle...
Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, ahead of the 30th Academy Awards ceremony on 26 March 1958 | Ralph Crane / Getty Images
Faye Dunaway, 1977
Faye Dunaway at the Beverly Hills Hotel, 29 March 1977 | Terry O'Neill / Getty Images
Network
Dunaway finally won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Network, having been nominated two years earlier for Chinatown and in 1968 for Bonnie and Clyde.
Peter Finch, who played "mad as hell" news anchor Howard Beale, died two months before the awards, and was awarded the Best Actor Oscar posthumously. The movie also won in the Best Supporting Actress and Best Original Screenplay categories, with nominations for Best Picture, Sidney Lumet as director, William Holden, also for Best Actor, Ned Beatty as Best Supporting Actor, and for Editing and Cinematography.
Finch was the only person to win an acting Academy Award posthumously until Heath Ledger's Best Supporting Actor award in 2009.
Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway in Network (1976)
Audrey Hepburn, 1954
Audrey Hepburn at the 1954 ceremony in New York, where it was jointly held in the NBC Century Theatre and at Hollywood's Pantages Theatre
Roman Holiday & Dalton Trumbo
Hepburn won the Best Actress award for the romantic comedy Roman Holiday. The film also won in the costume and screenplay categories, the latter credited to Ian McLellan Hunter and John Dighton.
McLellan Hunter was actually a front for screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. One of the top-earning Hollywood writers in the 1930s and 40s, Trumbo had been blacklisted in 1947 for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1950 he served 11 months in prison for contempt of Congress.
Trumbo, who died in 1976, was posthumously awarded the Academy Award in 1993 for writing Roman Holiday.
Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston (interviewed above) plays Trumbo in a new film biopic, a role for which he is nominated in the Best Actor category at this year's Awards.
Jack Nicholson & Dennis Hopper, 1970
Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper talk at an Academy Awards after party, Los Angeles, April 1970 | Max Miller / Getty Images
Easy Riders
Jack Nicholson was nominated as Best Supporting Actor for his role in the cult classicEasy Rider, one of the films that heralded a new Hollywood era led by young auteur directors who were fully aware of the American counterculture and were often 'the people our parents warned us about'.
Dennis Hopper & Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider
The film also received a Best Original Screenplay nomination, for director Dennis Hopper alongside Peter Fonda and Terry Southern.
The huge commercial and critical success of Easy Rider allowed its director to negotiate complete control of his next project. Dennis Hopper spent $1million makingThe Last Movie, in Peru, and the film's total commercial failure (coupled with Hopper's outrageous reputation) led to his virtual exile from Hollywood. He didn't direct another film until 1980.
Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album
Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim at their wedding in Las Vegas, 1965 © Dennis Hopper
Marlon Brando, 1954
Marlon Brando with his Oscar for On the Waterfront | George Silk / Getty Images
On the Waterfront & The Godfather
Marlon Brando won his first Best Actor Oscar in 1954, having been nominated for the previous three years running (for A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata! and Julius Caesar).
He subsequently won a further Best Actor award in 1972 for his performance in The Godfather. This time Brando boycotted the ceremony and refused to accept the Oscar (becoming the second actor to refuse a Best Actor award after George C. Scott in 1970).
Brando sent American Indian Rights activist Sacheen Littlefeather in his place, where she announced that his boycott was due to the depiction of American Indians by Hollywood.
Al Pacino also boycotted the 1972 ceremony as he objected to being nominated in the Supporting Actor category, rather than Best Actor, when his on-screen time significantly exceeded that of Brando.
Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) | Getty Images
Henry Fonda, 1982
An ill Henry Fonda receives his Academy Award for Best Actor from his daughter Jane Fonda (left) and wife Shirley | George Rose / Getty Images
On Golden Pond
Henry Fonda's role in On Golden Pond, as a cantankerous old man presiding over a family reunion, reflected some of the real-life tensions in the Fonda dynasty.
Playing alongside Katharine Hepburn, Fonda's performance was honoured by the Academy with his first Best Actor award; it was presented in a special ceremony at the Fonda's Beverly Hills home.
The part of the couple's daughter was played by Jane Fonda, who purchased the rights to the screenplay specifically for her father. She was nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category.
On Golden Pond received ten nominations in total, also winning Best Actress for Hepburn and Best Adapted Screenplay. Henry Fonda had been nominated once before, 42 years previously, for The Grapes of Wrath.
Fonda died a few weeks after being presented with the award.
Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond | Getty Images
Billy Wilder, 1960
Billy Wilder in his Hollywood office, 1960 | Gjon Mili / Getty Images
The Apartment
Austrian-born Billy Wilder directed and produced the hit 1960 comedy The Apartment, starring Jack Lemmon, winning Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, and sharing the Best Original Screenplay award with his long-term writing partner I. A. L. Diamond.
Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Hope Holiday in The Apartment | Getty Images
Only seven other film-makers have achieved this 'triple' for one film: Leo McCarey (forGoing My Way in 1945), Francis Ford Coppola (for The Godfather Part II in 1975), James L Brooks (for Terms of Endearment in 1984), Peter Jackson (for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004), brothers Joel and Ethan Coen (for No Country for Old Men in 2008) and Alejandro G. Iñárritu (for Birdman in 2015).
Wilder had already won three Oscars, in 1946 for director and screenplay on The Lost Weekend, and for Best Original Screenplay on Sunset Boulevard in 1951.
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