This Is the First Actor To Win an Oscar for Playing a Real-Life Person

There are few things Hollywood likes more than an inspiring true story, unless it “lets the truth get in the way of a good story,” as a number of supposedly “historical” films can attest. There are always plenty of biopics and historical films nominated for the top Oscar categories in any given year, and the history of Best Picture winners is littered with dozens of historical films that won the grand prize, from Gandhi And Chariots of Fire To King’s speech And 12 years of slavery. The history of the Academy Award for Best Actor also confirms this admiration for the convincing performance of real people. Gary Oldman finally got his Oscar for his role as Winston Churchill in dark hour; Helen Mirren for the role of Elizabeth II in Queen; Meryl Streep won for the role of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady; Eddie Redmayne for Stephen Hawking Theory of everything; the list could go on forever. However, as much as Hollywood loves films like this, there was once a trendsetter in this category that initially unlocked the untapped potential of biopics and historical films. To get an Oscar-winning role as a real historical character, this choice only had to wait until the third Academy Awards, like in 1930. George Arliss walked away with a golden statuette for his role as Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in 1929. Disraeli.

History of “Disraeli” by George Arliss

The film, as the title suggests, is about Disraeli, the two-time prime minister of Great Britain. It focuses on Disraeli’s attempts to secure control of the Suez Canal while fending off Russian attempts to do the same and sparring with his political rival William Gladstone. He goes through many different political games, shenanigans and deceptions along the way and ends up receiving funding to buy back the shares of the Channel from the Khedive of Egypt, which ends in a career triumph.

As for the film itself, it took an interesting long process to bring the story to the screen - a process in which Arliss was directly involved from the very beginning. In 1910 Arliss, a rising theater star, gave a producer George Tyler The idea for a play about Disraeli, as Arliss believed that the man led a fascinating life, which would be the perfect subject for a stage adaptation in which he could star. Tyler then instructed the playwright Louis Napoleon Parker write a play about Disraeli. This was done, and in 1911 the play premiered, starring Arliss. Since Arliss played Disraeli both on stage and screen, this part of his story also proved to be an element that was later repeated with great success in the awards season.

How Disraeli created an award-winning phenomenon

This was just the beginning of the story Disraeli, however. Over the next few years, she gradually became Arliss’s defining role. However, despite this fact, when it was first made into a film, the 1916 version Disraeli starred not Arliss, but Dennis Go instead of. However, Arlis himself soon managed to secure the rights to the film and released another film version. Disraelistarring again in 1921. In this film, as in the later version, Arliss’s wife Florence Arlissalso played the part of Disraeli’s wife, Lady Beaconsfield.

When films began to use sound, which marked the beginning of the end of the silent film era, Arliss decided to remake the film once again, adapting the play to the new technology and becoming one of the first films to incorporate sound into its story. Thus, when Arliss received an Oscar for his performance in 1930, this victory made a lot of sense: it was not only his iconic role, but also a role that he played and perfected for almost twenty years. years before he won his Oscar.

But even beyond George Arliss’ acting, the film ended up breaking new ground and becoming a trendsetter in a number of different categories. First, it was, of course, one of the first sound films and therefore a pioneer of new technologies; on the other hand, with his win, Arliss also became the first British actor to win this award. Even more than these outstanding accolades, however, Arliss’ film and performance set precedents that would mark the season’s powerful awards for decades to come.

Late Hollywood trends that followed George Arlis and Disraeli

Not only that Disraeli set a precedent for future award-winning biopics and historical films, but also became one of the more prominent early examples of a number of later Hollywood trends. It was a film adapted from a play, starring an actor who moved from stage to screen. As a result, Arliss also became the first actor to win an award for a remake of a film, and the first to win an award for a role he had already played in an earlier film. The modern obsession (and complaints about them) with relentless remakes and reboots may be justified, but while there are plenty of great remakes out there, it’s hard to imagine even now that the same movie has been made three times in 13 years.

It was also emblematic of another common future trend in cinema, the heavily embellished “true story”. Parts and whole plot lines of the story were apparently not taken from Disraeli’s real life, but from another early 19th-century play, and a number of characters in the play were completely invented for the story or turned into characters that are different from real events. , as the fictional character of Sir Hugh Myers replacing the real Lionel de Rothschild when buying the rights to the channel.

DisraeliOf course, he didn’t single-handedly create a furor with historical films, remakes, adaptations of plays or actors reprising the same roles, but it certainly was one of the earliest and most notable examples of how these elements can be effectively and effectively implemented. artistically used to create a compelling story based on a compelling story and an experienced actor. The 1930 awards proved to be a testament to the effectiveness of this kind of story, as the film not only won Best Actor, but was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. While it wasn’t necessarily the source of all the trends it played in, it was an important early example of the power of the historical biopic as the ultimate Oscar powerhouse it eventually became.