Not a 1967 event
The first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress did so long before 1967. Janet Gaynor received the award at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in May 1929. The genuine 1967 link is that Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress at the April 1967 ceremony, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The first ceremony
The first Academy Awards were presented at a private dinner at a Hollywood hotel in May 1929. It was a short, small event compared with later ceremonies, and it honoured work from a period of roughly a year, from 1927 into 1928, rather than a calendar year. The winners had also been announced in advance, months before the dinner, so there was little suspense on the night. Later ceremonies changed these practices.
The Best Actress Oscar was one of the original categories. It went to Janet Gaynor, a silent-film star at the peak of her popularity.
Honoured for several films
Gaynor’s win is unusual by modern standards because it recognized more than one film. Her award covered three titles: 7th Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise. In the early years the rules allowed an actor to be honoured for a body of work over the eligibility period, and this was one of the features that disappeared as the awards were reshaped. Today each nomination is tied to one performance in one film.
The honour came at a transitional moment. Sound films were just arriving, and the careers of many silent stars were about to change sharply. Gaynor continued working in the sound era and remained popular for several years. The film Sunrise, directed by F. W. Murnau, is often highly regarded by film historians today.
How the early awards differed
The early Academy Awards were different from their modern form in several ways:
- The eligibility period straddled two calendar years in the first years.
- Some early honours were given for multiple films.
- The ceremony was a private industry dinner rather than a public broadcast. Radio coverage came in the 1930s, and television coverage much later.
Details of the early procedures are sometimes presented differently by different sources, so it is safest to treat them as outlines.
Elizabeth Taylor in April 1967
The 1967 ceremony, held in April, honoured films of 1966. Elizabeth Taylor won Best Actress for her role as Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, directed by Mike Nichols and adapted from Edward Albee’s play. The role had been seen as a sharp change from her glamorous screen image, and it earned her a second Best Actress award; her first was for Butterfield 8 a few years earlier.
Taylor’s win also reflects how the awards had changed since 1929. They had become a major annual event with large public interest, and they were a barometer of what the industry considered important. The films honoured in the late 1960s showed the tension between the old studio system and the new, franker cinema. Her film was one of those that tested the limits of the old censorship rules, a story told in the account of how the Production Code eroded.
The following year, at the April 1968 ceremony, Katharine Hepburn won Best Actress for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, sharing the award in a rare tie with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl. Both of those were awards for films of 1967, which is why the Best Actress category links so closely to the year.
Why the first winner is easy to overlook
Gaynor’s name is less familiar than many later winners, partly because silent cinema is less widely watched. But her win shows how early the Academy was willing to honour women’s performances, and it establishes the prize that Taylor, Hepburn and many others later won. It also shows that the question “who was first?” depends on how the awards worked at the time, a useful reminder when reading about other early prizes.