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It’s one of the enduring mysteries of the Academy Awards nominating process. How do two performers who seem to have equal billing and equal screen time in a film wind up with one being tapped for the lead category and the other in the supporting camp? Take, for example, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio was placed in the Best Actor race, losing to Joker’s Joaquin Phoenix. Meanwhile, co-star Brad Pitt–with only six fewer minutes of screen time than Leo–found himself winning as Best Supporting Actor.
A similar situation arrives on March 2nd, with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande nominated as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively, for Wicked. It’s not quite the same here, since Erivo’s Elphaba is clearly the main character, but the set-up does give the British-born Erivo a chance to make a bit of Academy history. Before this year there had been just three Oscar-nominated performances for playing a witch or wizard, all in the supporting categories. Ruth Gordon took home Best Supporting Actress for her quietly unnerving portrayal of caring neighbor/coven member Minnie Castevet in 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby. Coming up short were Ian McKellen’s Gandalf in 2001’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Meryl Streep as the nameless Witch in 2014’s Into the Woods.
Why are magic practitioners overlooked come awards time? It could be that the fantasy and family genres where you usually find such characters don’t lend themselves to the serious tone the Academy likes to display, with nominations galore for troubled monarchs, crusading attorneys, call girls, and people living with disabilities. It also might be that the types of movies featuring witches, wizards, and warlocks often give performers too much opportunity to overact and chow down on the scenery. And, lately, voters may think that actors take a back seat to the CGI-generated fireworks in today’s effects-driven blockbusters.
Nonetheless, there are many great spellcasting turns that would not have looked out of place on the Oscar nominee rolls. Since it takes 13 members to make up a witches’ coven, I’d like to offer a bakers’ dozen of my favorite enchanting performances. In chronological order, they are:
Margaret Hamilton, The Wizard of Oz (1939) – Let’s face it, this is the one that all subsequent movie witches are measured against. With her often-imitated cackle of a laugh to her gleefully menacing delivery, Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West ranks as one of Hollywood’s all-time great villains. One can’t help but watch her, from her fiery debut to her watery demise. By the way, that fiery first scene almost did the actress in, when a trap door failed to open under her. Hamilton suffered second- and third-degree burns and her face and hand and had to be hospitalized.
Mickey Mouse, Fantasia (1940) – Okay, he’s not really a sorcerer, just a sorcerer’s apprentice. Still, everyone’s favorite rodent gives his all as the would-be mage who borrows his mentor’s enchanted hat for help with the chores…with disastrous results. Walt Disney’s groundbreaking animated feature didn’t get one Oscar nomination (it did receive two special awards), so it’s no wonder Mickey was left out. Fun Fact: The Sorcerer was given the semi-official name Yen Sid (spell it backwards) by the animators.
Veronica Lake, I Married a Witch (1942) – The luscious Lake stars as Jennifer, a witch who has the misfortune of living in 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts. Tried and executed along with her father, Jennifer is revived in the 1940s and seeks revenge on a descendant (Fredric March) of the Puritan leader who put her to death, only to wind up falling for him after ingesting a love potion. Director René Clair’s supernatural romance was one of the inspirations for the hit ’60s sitcom Bewitched.
Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, and Elsa Lanchester, Bell, Book and Candle (1959) – Yes, this romcom was another film that Bewitched drew from. Greenwich Village shopkeeper and witch Gillian Holroyd (Novak) uses magic to woo her book publisher neighbor, Shepherd Henderson (James Stewart), away from his fiancée. Aiding Gillian on her quest are her jazz-loving warlock brother Nicky (Lemmon), her slightly befuddled aunt Queenie (Lancaster), and her feline familiar Pyewacket. The Holroyd clan are the most entertaining witches this side of the Sanderson sisters (see below), and at least Bell had a happier ending than Novak and Stewart’s other 1958 film…Vertigo.
Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff, The Raven (1963) – There’s a raven, all right, perched upon a bust, as well as a woman named Lenore. That’s pretty much all of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, however, that you’ll find in this horror/comedy romp from director/producer Roger Corman and scripter Richard Matheson. Price and Lorre (who spends a good part of the film in avian form) are rival magicians Craven and Bedlo, who pit their skills against master sorcerer Scarabus (Karloff) in order to free Craven’s lost love Lenore (Hazel Court) from his clutches. The three shock cinema veterans are having the time of their lives (although Karloff was put off by Lorre’s ad-libbing on the set), and the film even features an early turn by Jack Nicholson as Lorre’s son.
Angela Lansbury, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) – More than a decade before she was solving murders in coastal Maine, Angela Lansbury was helping a trio of orphaned siblings fend off invading Germans from WWII coastal England. As correspondence-course “apprentice witch” Miss Eglantine Price, Lansbury and her mail-order mentor “Professor” Browne (David Tomlinson) take the children on a quest to complete the spell they need to stop the Nazis. Disney’s charming mix of live-action and animation was a box-office failure, which probably contributed to fewer people noting Lansbury’s captivating performance.
Nicol Williamson, Excalibur (1981) – No list of magical beings would be complete without a mention of Merlin. And perhaps the most intriguing screen depiction of the enigmatic wizard came in director John Boorman’s lavish Arthurian saga. Positioned midway on the morality scale between the absent-minded mentor of Disney’s The Sword in the Stone and the jealous villain of 1949’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Williamson’s Merlin is a wily schemer who has no problems using mortals as pawns in his grand plan to unite England. Incidentally, the on-screen animosity between Williamson and Helen Mirren as Morgan le Fay wasn’t simply acting; the two had clashed years earlier during a stage production of Macbeth, and Boorman used this to fuel their feuding in front of the camera.
James Hong, Big Trouble in Little China (1986) – In a 70-plus-year acting career, Minnesota-born James Hong has credits ranging from voice work in 1956’s Godzilla, King of the Monsters! to Chinatown to Seinfeld to Best Picture Oscar-winner Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. For many, his most memorable role came as the wizard Lo Pan, seeking a green-eyed woman to free him from a curse a Chinese emperor placed on him centuries earlier, in John Carpenter’s offbeat action/martial arts/comedy romp. “I just wanted a girl to love,” Hong once recounted to an interviewer. “I just wanted to have a girl with green eyes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon, The Witches of Eastwick (1987) – Three women in a small New England town discover their supernatural abilities thanks to the arrival of a devilish stranger (Jack Nicholson) in this darkly comic fantasy based on the John Updike novel. While all three members of the titular trio were overlooked by the Academy, Cher did win the Best Actress award that year for a very different role, Italian-American widow Loretta in Moonstruck.
Anjelica Huston, The Witches (1990) – Author Roald Dahl, upon whose book this twisted children’s fantasy film was based, was unhappy with the adaptation and publicly criticized it (so what else is new?). He did, however, react positively to Huston’s gleefully gruesome performance as the Grand High Witch, an alternately seductive and repulsive sorceress who devises a plot to turn every child in the world into a mouse. Her scheme may be silly, but along the way there are some genuinely scary moments.
Bette Midler, Hocus Pocus (1993) – I hate to begrudge or downplay Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker’s turns as daffy spellcasting siblings Mary and Sarah Sanderson. Nevertheless, it was Midler–using her buck teeth to feast on the sets, props, and everything in sight as head sister Winifred–that helped the Disney horror-comedy overcome mixed reviews and a poor box-office showing (due in part to it being released in July instead of closer to Halloween) to achieve the cult status it now enjoys.
Ralph Fiennes, Michael Gambon, Richard Harris, Alan Rickman, Maggie Smith, et al., The Harry Potter franchise – Oh, come on, now! Nearly half the working actors and actresses in the U.K. put in at least one appearance in the film series, and not one of those performances was deemed worthy of an Oscar nomination? Because of my sentimental and monetary attachment to Dame Maggie Smith, I’d be tempted to cast my vote for the shape-shifting head of Gryffindor, Professor McGonagall. But instead I’ll turn to Slytherin and say that Alan Rickman’s multi-layered portrayal of Professor Snape, particularly in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, deserved at least a nom.
Angelina Jolie, Maleficent (2014) – Most film fans will agree that Disney’s decade-plus wave of live-action remakes of their classic animated features has been, shall we say, a mixed bag. 2014’s Maleficent, which gave a powerful backstory to the titular “evil fairy,” was one of the re-dos that landed on the positive side of the score. The main reason was Jolie’s striking performance as Maleficent, who over the course of the film goes from jilted lover to victim to vengeful fury to protector of the princess she had set out to curse. “She’s one of those characters that, for me, you couldn’t do halfway,” the actress explained in an interview. And believe me, she didn’t.
Did we overlook your favorite movie magic-user? Let us know in the comments.