Melissa Leo is getting candid about how winning an Oscar has impacted her profession — or relatively, not impacted it.
Leo, 65, won Best Supporting Actress on the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011 for her role in The Fighter, which costarred Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg. She had previously been nominated for 2008’s Frozen River within the Best Actress category.
In a reader Q&A with The Guardian published on Thursday, January 15, Leo was asked, “What goes through your mind if you arise to receive an Oscar?”
“One loses one’s mind. I had won a variety of prestigious awards for The Fighter that season, and sat in that great gigantic theater considering: ‘Well, it definitely is feasible,’” Leo recalled.
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She continued, “Kirk Douglas got here out to present the Best Supporting Actress award, opened the envelope and called my name. I used to be so delighted to fulfill him – that was all I used to be desirous about.”
Leo said she had a transient moment of panic on stage which caused her to curse on live television.
“I turned to the home, which in most theaters, you may see by looking just a little above your personal eyesight,” she explained. “Within the Dolby Theatre, you’ve got to boost your chin such as you’re about to scale Mount Everest. Each actor, director and producer you recognize is staring you within the face. I then cursed, and I’m still sorry I cursed. I f***ing curse on a regular basis, but you can not curse on network television. Thank God for the 10-second delay, which was introduced for f***ing idiots like me.”
It was then that Leo shared her real thoughts on winning an Oscar.
“Having said that, winning an Oscar has not been good for me or my profession. I didn’t dream of it, I never wanted it, and I had a a lot better profession before I won,” she said.
Back in 2011, Leo by accident dropped an F-bomb while giving her acceptance speech.
“Yeah, I’m type of speechless. After I watched Kate two years ago, it looked so f***ing easy,” she said, referring to Kate Winslet, who had won Best Actress for The Reader two years before.
Backstage, Leo apologized for the slipup.
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“I actually don’t mean to offend, and [the Oscars were] probably a really inappropriate place to make use of that individual word,” she told reporters backstage after accepting her award.
Leo isn’t the one star to precise concern about winning an Oscar.
Back in 2003, Marcia Gay Harden said winning Best Supporting Actress for the 2000 movie Pollock was “disastrous on an expert level,” per the Los Angeles Times.
“Suddenly the parts you’re offered and the cash grow to be smaller. There’s no logic to it,” she added.
On the flip side, Goldie Hawn once said she regrets not attending the 1970 Oscars, where she was named Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower.
“I never got dressed up. I never got to select up the award,” Hawn, 80, told Variety in 2023. “I regret it. It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It might have been so great to give you the chance to have done that.’”