When 21-year-old Kate Hudson lost the Oscar for Almost Famous in 2001, her stepfather, Kurt Russell, said to her, “Congratulations — you can now go have your career.”
It’s a bit of wisdom that the actress, now on her second Oscar nom for Song Sung Blue at age 46, has shared over the years in relation to her own growth as an actor and creative force in the business. Yet it also speaks to the bitter irony that at times comes with an Oscar win for a certain demographic. Taking home your industry’s highest honor, while only at the beginning of your career, can render the path forward more complicated, not less.
Only once in the Oscars‘ 97-year history has a man under 30 won best actor — The Pianist‘s Adrien Brody, who was 29. By contrast, the Academy has anointed dozens of leading ladies in their 20s over the past century — from 22-year-old Janet Gaynor at the first-ever Oscars to Mikey Madison, who pulled off her Anora triumph a few weeks before her 26th birthday last year.
Hollywood has, of course, been historically unforgiving to actresses as they progress deeper into their careers — and the glaring spotlight of the stage for Hollywood’s biggest night doesn’t exactly help matters. “I think it’s hard for anyone, but especially if you’re 26 years old,” Gwyneth Paltrow told me in December of the aftermath of her win for Shakespeare in Love. “I couldn’t fully process the meaning of it all — and also then, ‘Where do I go from here?’ You feel people stop rooting for you. I just didn’t know where to turn. … I didn’t know what I was supposed to do after that.”
This goes even for cases of compounding success. Jennifer Lawrence, the second-youngest best actress winner at 22 for Silver Linings Playbook, had simultaneously emerged as a box office superstar with The Hunger Games. Eventually, she stopped acting for about three years as “the attention on me was so high and extreme,” she told Vanity Fair in 2021. She’s since returned to the scene, leading indie projects like Causeway and Die My Love, while taking charge as a power producer — development roles that other young winners like Natalie Portman, Emma Stone and Brie Larson have similarly taken on.
The trend has reflected a necessary response to the reality of many career-launching Oscars: They can leave old-guard decision-makers clueless, reliant on entrenched biases and attitudes. As experiences like Paltrow’s have become more publicly known, so too has the need to take matters into your own hands. “The industry wasn’t ready for me,” Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for her feature debut in 12 Years a Slave, told me a few years ago. “It was actually really sobering when the scripts after I won were to play other enslaved people — but this time on a boat.” The Yale graduate credited her “stubbornness” for her confidence in saying no and waiting: “I just chose.”
This time last year, all eyes were on Madison to see what she’d choose, placing her in that familiar, bewildering post-Oscar glow. She promptly made headlines for turning down an offer to get absorbed into the Star Wars machine, passing on Shawn Levy’s Starfighter pic and instead opting to continue working in the auteur-driven lane where she made her name in Anora. She’ll play Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in Aaron Sorkin’s buzzy Social Network follow-up, The Social Reckoning, out in October, and is wrapping filming on Charlie Polinger’s darkly comic The Masque of the Red Death, backed by A24.
These are considered, exciting moves. Count Madison among this exclusive club of stars blazing their own trail, taking in the lessons — implicitly or not — of those who’ve traveled the same path. For there is life after Oscar — win or lose.
This story appeared in the March 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
