27 Years Ago, Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench Shared the Strangest Oscar Record in History

The Oscars are full of the most bizarre, random factoids for those fascinated by trivia.The biggest:Meryl Streephas the most acting nominations, with 21 total. John Williams has five awards for Best Score. Edith Head earned eight awards for costume design. Bob Hope was the most frequent ceremony host.But for the true fans, when looking at the whole of 98 years of Academy Awards, it’s about the deep-cut factoids. For instance, did you know two actresses have been nominated for playing Billie Holiday? Or that two different actresses have won for playing Anita in an adaptation of West Side Story?

One of the most fun of all the superlatives, though, has got to be a feat achieved by two of the Academy’s all-time favorite actresses: Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench. Excuse me, Dame Judi Dench.The feat? They’re the only actresses ever nominated in the same year for portraying the same historical figure in different films.

Cate Blanchett’s Breakthrough Changed Everything

In 1998, Blanchett was the up-and-coming Australian actress on the precipice of proving herself to be the ultimate performer. Within a few years, she’d have such all-timers under her belt as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Lord of the Rings series, Babel, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. In the late 90s, she had a few Australian credits to her name, as well as a couple of high-profile indies like Oscar and Lucinda, in which she was paired opposite A-lister Ralph Fiennes.

Playing Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, and the laundry list of accolades that would come with it, would make Blanchett into not just a movie star, but a respected actor of the highest degree. Following her triumph as the legendary Queen of England, the star would make five — count ‘em, five — movies in 1999. Over the next seven years, she’d make 19 films, a busy runway leading up to her first Academy Award for The Aviator, in which she portrayed the all-time Best Actress Oscar champ Katharine Hepburn.

Many pundits expected Blanchett to win Best Actress for Elizabeth. Instead, Shakespeare in Love dominated the ceremony following one of the most aggressively campaigned Oscar seasons in Academy history. Paltrow ultimately won Best Actress, while Blanchett would later win Oscars for The Aviator and Blue Jasmine.

Judi Dench Won for Just 8 Minutes of Screen Time

The Duke of Wessex talks to Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love

By 1998, Judi Dench was one of the preeminent performers on stage and screen. Theater had largely been her primary focus since the onset of her career in the 1960s.By the end of the 1990s, she had already won six of her eventual seven Olivier Awards, often considered the West End equivalent of the Tony Awards.

While she had certainly appeared in many well-known movies before the ‘90s, including Kenneth Branagh’sHenry V and A Room with a View, it was taking over the role of M in the James Bond franchise that really catapulted the veteran into full-fledged movie stardom. Her first Oscar nomination, for Mrs Brown, soon followed in 1998, the same year Shakespeare in Love was released.

For this romantic comedy, which featured an all-star cast including Joseph Fiennes as William Shakespeare, plus Paltrow, Colin Firth, Ben Affleck, Imelda Staunton, Tom Wilkinson, and Rupert Everett — among other familiar faces — Dench was only called upon for what was, essentially, a cameo role. While Blanchett’s Elizabeth was completely constructed around the titular queen, Dench’s queen is a pivotal plot element.

Unlike Blanchett, Dench took home an Oscar that 1999 evening, although she demurred about her worthiness in her speech, quipping, “I feel for eight minutes on the screen, I should only get a little bit of him.” But critics praised the actress for the strong impression her performance made. In her review for The New York Times,Janet Maslin wrote, “Judi Dench’s shrewd, daunting Elizabeth is one of the film’s utmost treats.”

Other Oscar Records That Nearly Match This 1

While the 1999 ceremony is the only time in Academy Award history that two actresses managed to rack up nominations for playing the same role in different movies, the feat has been duplicated for actors portraying the same character at different ages in the same film. Just one year prior, both Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated for playing Rose DeWitt Bukater’s different ages in Titanic. Barry Fitzgerald — in what essentially amounted to an oversight in the Academy rules that was later corrected — was nominated for playing Father Fitzgibbon in Going My Way in BOTH the lead and supporting actor categories. Olivia Colman and Jessica Buckley both got nominations for playing Leda Caruso in 2021’s The Lost Daughter. And, of course, Dench herself would be nominated for playing Dame Iris Murdoch for 2001’s Iris, as would Kate Winslet.