Actress Melissa Leo Says Winning an Oscar ‘Has Not Been Good for Me or My Career’

Melissa Leo is getting candid about how winning an Oscar has impacted her career — or rather, not impacted it.

Leo, 65, won Best Supporting Actress at 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 in 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 when you stand up to receive an Oscar?”

“One loses one’s mind. I had won a lot of prestigious awards for The Fighter that season, and sat in that great gigantic theater thinking: ‘Well, it certainly is possible,’” Leo recalled.

She continued, “Kirk Douglas came out to present the Best Supporting Actress award, opened the envelope and called my name. I was so delighted to meet him – that was all I was thinking about.”

Leo said she had a brief moment of panic on stage which caused her to curse on live television.

“I turned to the house, which in most theaters, you can see by looking a little above your own eyesight,” she explained. “In the Dolby Theatre, you have to raise your chin like you’re about to scale Mount Everest. Every single actor, director and producer you recognize is staring you in the face. I then cursed, and I’m still sorry I cursed. I f***ing curse all the time, but you cannot 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 career. I didn’t dream of it, I never wanted it, and I had a much better career before I won,” she said.

Back in 2011, Leo accidentally dropped an F-bomb while giving her acceptance speech.

“Yeah, I am kind of speechless. When 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.

“I really don’t mean to offend, and [the Oscars were] probably a very inappropriate place to use that particular word,” she told reporters backstage after accepting her award.

Leo isn’t the only star to express concern about winning an Oscar.

Back in 2003, Marcia Gay Harden said winning Best Supporting Actress for the 2000 movie Pollock was “disastrous on a professional level,” per the Los Angeles Times.

“Suddenly the parts you’re offered and the money become 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 pick up the award,” Hawn, 80, told Variety in 2023. “I regret it. It’s something that I look back on now and think, ‘It would have been so great to be able to have done that.’”