Angelina Jolie, Angela Lansbury, Steve Martin, Piero Tosi Receive Academy’s Governors Awards
Angela Lansbury, Steve Martin and Piero Tosi will receive honorary Oscars and Angelina Jolie will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said Thursday.
All four awards will be presented at the Academy’s 5th Annual Governors Awards on Saturday, November 16, at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland Center.
Jolie is the only one of the four who has won a competitive Oscar, although the other three honorees have long associations with the Academy in various capacities.
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Lansbury has received three Academy Award nominations for her supporting performances in “Gaslight,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Manchurian Candidate.” Although many of her biggest successes came on stage in plays like “Sweeney Todd” and “Mame” and on television in the long-running “Murder, She Wrote,” she also etched memorable performances in the films like “The Long, Hot Summer,” “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
Martin is a three-time host of the Oscars, most recently appearing in 2010 with Alec Baldwin. His many box office successes include roles in “Parenthood,” “The Jerk” and “It’s Complicated.” He has also delivered at least two performances that many critics felt were unjustly denied Oscar nominations — his lovestruck update of Cyrano de Bergerac in “Roxanne” and his work as a man possessed by a woman in “All of Me.”
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Tosi is a veteran costume designer who helped make Italian film even more fashionable throough his collaborations with director Luchino Visconti on such films as “White Nights,” “Rocco and His Brothers,” and “The Leopard.” His work received five Oscar nominations for such films as “Death in Venice,” “La Cage aux Folles” and “La Traviata.”
Jolie, who won an Oscar for her supporting performance in “Girl, Interrupted,” has been heavily involved in a range of humanitarian and social justice efforts. She has worked for a number of global advocacy groups and causes including the Prevent Sexual Violence Initiative, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), for which she was appointed a special envoy of High Commissioner António Guterres in 2012.
The awarding of the honorary Oscars is no longer televised as part of the Academy broadcast in March. That allows the celebration to be looser and more free-wheeling; a change some members have seen as an improvement.
Since the creation of a separate show for the Governors Awards in 2009, the board has voted three or four awards each year. The current rules require only a majority vote of the governors for the first three honorees, and a three-fourths majority for a fourth award.
Four is the maximum number of honorees, and they can be any combination of Honorary Academy Awards, Irving Thalberg Awards for producing, and/or Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards. Honorary Oscars are by far the most common.
Since the awards underwent a change in 2009, the 15 recipients have included only two women, Oprah Winfrey and Lauren Bacall, and only two people of color, Winfrey and James Earl Jones.
Other recent honorees include Francis Ford Coppola, Eli Wallach, Roger Corman, Lauren Bacall and Jean-Luc Godard.
Last year was the first time since 2009 that the Academy didn’t include an actor among the recipients, something they have made up for with the inclusion of Martin and Lansbury.
Steve Pond contributed to this report.
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