From Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs to Beatrice Straight in Network, some shockingly brief Cillian Murphy’s Oscar-winning turn in Oppenheimer is incredible, but he had three whole hours full of lengthy IMAX closeups to wow audiences with his work. It takes a special kind of actor to earn an Oscar with less than 20 minutes of screen time.
Usually, the Best ing Actor and Best ing Actress awards go to performers who are given so much screen time that they’re practically a lead, so they have longer to connect with the audience (and with Oscar voters) than a true ing player. For example, Mahershala Ali won Best ing Actor for his piano-playing turn in Green Book, despite having over an hour of screen time. But some actors have clinched those awards with 15 minutes on-screen. And it’s even more astounding when an actor wins a leading-role Oscar with that amount of screen time.
10 Anthony Hopkins In The Silence Of The Lambs
16 Minutes
One of the first names that comes up in discussions of Oscar-winning performances with the briefest screen time is Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins won Best Actor with just 16 minutes of screen time as calm, collected cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s seminal crime thriller The Silence of the Lambs. Hopkins’ turn as Hannibal the Cannibal is so chilling that it feels like he appears on-screen for much longer.
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Jodie Foster’s turn as FBI rookie Clarice Starling anchors the movie spectacularly, but whenever she shares the screen with Hopkins, he steals the show. Hopkins’ performance is full of rich details that make it extra captivating. For example, he uses the Michael Caine trick of never blinking when he’s on-camera, forcing the audience to look into the hollow eyes of a heartless mass murderer.
9 David Niven In Separate Tables
15 Minutes
David Niven won his only Academy Award for Best Actor for his turn in the 1958 drama Separate Tables, in which he has just 15 minutes of screen time. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role in the same leading-man category. Niven’s scarce runtime is mostly due to the sprawling structure of the story. Based on a pair of one-act plays by Terence Rattigan, Separate Tables revolves around several characters all staying at a seaside hotel in Bournemouth.
He’d made a career playing the kind of suave, debonair man’s man that his Separate Tables character Major Pollock wishes he could be.
It’s an ensemble piece — there is no lead in this movie — but Niven took home the Oscar for a leading role. Niven caught the Academy’s attention by playing wildly against type. He’d made a career playing the kind of suave, debonair man’s man that his Separate Tables character Major Pollock wishes he could be.
8 Anne Hathaway In Les Misérables
15 Minutes
Anne Hathaway won Best ing Actress for her turn as Fantine, a struggling factory employee who resorts to sex work to provide for her daughter, in Tom Hooper’s blockbuster 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables. Hathaway earned the award with just 15 minutes of screen time, which is even more impressive considering the movie is over two-and-a-half hours long. Hathaway won an Oscar for a movie in which she appears for less than 10% of the overall runtime.
Hathaway cut her hair for Les Misérables, indicating her commitment to the role. While Russell Crowe was criticized for his shaky singing in the film, Hathaway’s singing was widely praised. Her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” was hailed as a showstopper, and one of the main reasons why she made a lasting enough impression to score an Academy Award.
7 Kim Basinger In L.A. Confidential
15 Minutes
Kim Basinger won Best ing Actress for her turn as Lynn Bracken, a high-class sex worker who begins a relationship with Russell Crowe’s Officer Bud White, in Curtis Hanson’s 1997 neo-noir L.A. Confidential. L.A. Confidential lost almost all of its Oscar nominations to Titanic, including Best Picture and Best Director. But Hanson and Brian Helgeland won Best Adapted Screenplay for their adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel, and Basinger beat Titanic’s Gloria Stuart to Best ing Actress.
Basinger has just 15 minutes of screen time in L.A. Confidential, but she managed to stand out in a star-studded ensemble that includes Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, and Danny DeVito. Basinger is essentially cast as a stock character — the sex worker with a heart of gold — but she brings real depth and dimensionality to that archetype. It’s a deeply human performance.
6 Penelope Cruz In Vicky Cristina Barcelona
15 Minutes
Penelope Cruz won both the Academy Award and BAFTA Award for Best ing Actress for her turn in Woody Allen’s 2008 romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. While the entire cast was praised, Cruz was singled out for acclaim in most of the film’s positive reviews. What’s especially impressive about Cruz’s standout performance in Vicky Cristina Barcelona is that she plays neither Vicky nor Cristina; she managed to upstage the two title stars, Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson.
Hall and Johansson play two American tourists spending the summer in Barcelona.
They meet a handsome artist, played by Javier Bardem, who falls for both of them. The love triangle gets even more complicated when his emotionally unstable ex-wife María Elena, played by Cruz, shows up and turns it into a love quadrangle. The story is well underway by the time Cruz shows up, but she steals the whole movie with 15 glorious minutes of acting.
5 Alan Arkin In Little Miss Sunshine
14 Minutes
Alan Arkin was nominated for Best Actor twice in the late 1960s — for The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming in 1967 and for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 1969 — but he didn’t win an Oscar until 2007, 40 years after his first nomination. Arkin won Best ing Actor for his turn as the grumpy grandpa, Edwin Hoover, in the tragicomic road movie Little Miss Sunshine. While Edwin is a miserable curmudgeon to most people, he’s sweet and loving to his granddaughter, Olive.
Arkin only has 14 minutes of screen time in Little Miss Sunshine, but he made an unforgettable impression in those 14 minutes. Everyone can see their own grandpa in Arkin’s Little Miss Sunshine character; he’s a grump, but deep down, he’s really a softie. His monologue about winners and losers is arguably the most touching scene in the movie.
4 Gloria Grahame In The Bad And The Beautiful
9 Minutes
Gloria Grahame took home Best ing Actress for her turn as Rosemary, the vapid Southern belle wife of Dick Powell’s James Lee Bartlow, in the 1952 melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful. Rosemary doesn’t show up until about two-thirds of the way through the movie and appears on-screen for just over nine minutes. At the time, this was the shortest Oscar-winning performance of all time, and Grahame held onto that record for more than two decades before a five-minute performance won in the same category in 1977.
It won Best Screenplay (before it was split into two separate categories) and Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design in the black-and-white categories.
Kirk Douglas is great in the lead role, but Grahame was the clear standout. In addition to Grahame’s Best ing Actress win, The Bad and the Beautiful took home four other Oscars. It won Best Screenplay (before it was split into two separate categories) and Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Costume Design in the black-and-white categories.
3 Anthony Quinn In Lust For Life
8 Minutes
Anthony Quinn won Best ing Actor for playing Vincent van Gogh’s friend and fellow painter Paul Gauguin in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 biopic Lust for Life. Kirk Douglas won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his turn as van Gogh, but it was Quinn who scored at the Oscars. Not only did Quinn manage to draw attention away from van Gogh in his own life story; he did so with just eight minutes of screen time.
There’s a lot to ire about this biopic. Douglas captures van Gogh’s neuroticism brilliantly, while Minnelli’s choices of color reflect the unmistakable aesthetic of his subject’s art. But Quinn is one of the film’s highlights. Quinn had previously won Best ing Actor for 1952’s Viva Zapata!, and later received Best Actor nods for Wild is the Wind and Zorba the Greek.
2 Judi Dench In Shakespeare In Love
8 Minutes
Thanks to an aggressive awards campaign by now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, Shakespeare in Love swept the Oscars in 1999. It controversially beat Saving Private Ryan to Best Picture, and also won Best Actress for Gwyneth Paltrow, Best Original Screenplay for Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, and Best Original Score for Stephen Warbeck. The film’s seven Oscar wins included Best ing Actress for Judi Dench’s turn as Queen Elizabeth I.
Much like Quinn in Lust for Life, Dench had just eight minutes of screen time in her Oscar-winning performance. But that turned out to be more than enough; the Academy loves when an actor brings an iconic historical figure to life, especially when that actor is a revered screen legend like Dench. Dench’s screen time might be brief, but she lives and breathes Elizabeth I whenever she’s on-screen.
1 Beatrice Straight In Network
5 Minutes
The record for shortest Oscar-winning performance in film history has been held by Beatrice Straight for almost 50 years. Straight won Best ing Actress with just five minutes of screen time as Louise Schumacher in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satirical drama Network. Straight is one of three Oscar winners in the cast of Network; Faye Dunaway won Best Actress and Peter Finch posthumously won Best Actor.
But Straight’s Oscar win is arguably the most impressive of the three, because she took home the gold with just over five minutes on-screen. Four of those minutes are taken up by a rousing emotional monologue upon learning that her husband is having an affair with a much younger woman. Straight’s delivery of the mixed emotions in this soliloquy is so powerful that that monologue alone earned her an Oscar.
- Dates
- March 2, 2025
- Location
- Los Angeles, CA
- Network
- ABC
- Website
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https://www.oscars.org/
The Oscars, also known as The Academy Awards, is an annual awards show celebrating workers in the film industry for their artistic and technical abilities. The Oscars are often considered the most prestigious awards show in the industry and date back to 1929. The 96th Academy Awards will be held on March 10, 2024, and be hosted by Jimmy Kimmel on ABC.
