Everybody’s talkin’ at me…Can’t hear a word they’re sayin’…Only the echoes of my mind. It was 1969 when Midnight Cowboy hit the big screen and boy did it score big. It won Best Picture, Best Director (John Schlesinger), and Best Writing (Waldo Salt). Both stars, Jon Voight (Joe Buck) and Dustin Hoffman (Ratso Rizzo) were nominated for Best Actor, but lost to the long-time favorite of Americana, John Wayne for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. Only Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid won more Oscar’s that year, with four, but losing the big ones to Midnight Cowboy and John Wayne. It was the year of the cowboys.
The echoes of my mind are focused on all of my favorite celebrities that are falling off the perch this year, starting with Robert Redford (Sundance Kid). IMDb shows Redford with 46 award wins and 65 nominations. That, and Diane Keaton’s recent death has caused me to wonder about the stars that I have followed the most through my life of movie watching. Keaton had 37 awards and 63 nominations, so, similar accolades to Redford.
The other big stars (22 in total) during my lifetime, as tallied by adding awards and nominations (and ranked accordingly) have been:
Meryl Streep (188 awards and 398 nominations) – 3 Oscars,
Cate Blanchett (218 awards and 295 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
Nicole Kidman (119 awards and 280 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Leonardo DiCaprio (110 awards and 285 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Viola Davis (143 awards and 247 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Denzel Washington (94 awards and 249 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
Tom Hanks (97 awards and 211 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
Frances McDormond (144 awards and 138 nominations) – 3 Oscars,
Judi Dench (72 awards and 186 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Robert De Niro (69 awards and 173 nominations) -2 Oscars,
Daniel Day-Lewis (146 awards and 94 nominations) – 3 Oscars,
Charlize Theron (70 awards and 150 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Anthony Hopkins (74 awards and 131 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
Jack Nicholson (90 awards and 105 nominations) – 3 Oscars,
Tom Cruise (65 awards and 120 nominations) – No Oscars,
Al Pacino (52 awards and 127 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Morgan Freeman (65 awards and 87 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Dustin Hoffman (63 awards and 62 nominations) – 2 Oscars
Robert Redford (46 awards and 65 nominations) – 1 Oscar (Director),
Diane Keaton (37 awards and 63 nominations) – 1 Oscar,
Katharine Hepburn (50 awards and 45 nominations) – 4 Oscars
Bette Davis (56 awards and 33 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
Ingrid Bergman (50 awards and 21 nominations) – 3 Oscars,
and last, but not least, Marlon Brando (36 awards and 39 nominations) – 2 Oscars,
I cannot honestly say that I have, for sure, captured all the most meaningful actors and actresses on my lifetime. For instance, I would have to rank Cher way up there on my list and she does fit on the list comfortably with 53 awards and 93 nominations in addition to getting an Oscar for my favorite movie of all time, Moonstruck. In other words, this may be too difficult of an exercise to do with any accuracy and without an enormous number of regrets as people remind me of actors who I failed to include. Another example would be Bette Midler, who has the same composite numbers as Bette Davis (though no Oscar, despite two nominations therefore). It never occurred to me to include Midler, but when you look up Bette Davis (who’s movie I know of, but have no particular connection or recollection), you can’t help but notice Bette Midler, who I quite liked in Beaches, The Rose, First Wives Club and Ruthless People. And that then that made me think of Marisa Tomei with her one Oscar for My Cousin Vinny.
Every year at the Academy Awards show, they run a montage of those people in the motion picture industry who have passed away in the prior year. It’s always a poignant segment because even if you personally knew none of them, many of them likely touched you in some way. Maybe it was their movies. Maybe it was that they were very young, very tragic or very old. Maybe we relate to them in one way or another. Death has a very meaningful impact on all of us in one way or another, assuming we are even slightly normal. So, as our favorite stars fall by the wayside we are forced to stop and think. At least I do that. I must not be the only one who goes through that because Amazon Prime and Netflix manage to serve up all the movies of the recently departed. I have found myself watching all the old Redford and now Keaton movies. I would note that of all the other celebrities that have died this year so far, I have really only done the old movie revision for Gene Hackman. I liked Val Kilmer and Loretta Swit, but thought that rewatching Top Gun, The Saint or M*A*S*H was not a priority. I think Tony Roberts was like a subset of Woody Allen, so while I didn’t focus on his death, watching the old Diane Keaton movies drove me to Woody Allen and that drove me to review a lot of Tony Roberts footage…go figure.
In addition, once you get focused on celebrity deaths, you, by necessity, end up going beyond the movies. So, even though movies are my entertainment medium of choice, I have been forced to consider some music and TV stars who have moved on. In music, Brian Wilson and his Beach Boys meant a lot in my younger days. I also reacted to Robert Flack, but had to stop to research her songs to remind myself of them. But when I saw that Peter Yarrow died, I was taken aback. Not only did Peter, Paul & Mary carry a lot of meaning for me, but I met Peter Yarrow (a fellow Cornellian) several times and was even in his apartment on the Upper West Side. His songs like Puff, the Magic Dragon (1963), Blowin’ in the Wind (1963), If I Had a Hammer (1962), and Leaving on a Jet Plane (1969) are all songs I can sing almost a cappella. As for TV, I have very fond memories of Dr. Kildare, so Richard Chamberlain was a loss to me. And who didn’t like “Norm!!!” from Cheers, so George Wendt’s passing gave me pause. There were sports stars like George Forman and Hulk Hogan who also died, but not being a follower of sports so much, I wasn’t so affected. I think the only sports death that got stuck in my throat was Brian Piccolo’s when Gayle Sayers (Billy Dee Williams) says, “I loved Brian Piccolo” in Brian’s Song (a made-for-TV movie).
Harkening back to Midnight Cowboy, there is an importance to accepting death and moving on like Joe Buck does as Ratso slumps into his seat on the Greyhound bus to Florida. We can all yell, “I’m walking here!” as we howl at the moon and push back against the inevitable. But what we really have to do is consider the movie as a critique of the American Dream, showing what happens to those who fall through the cracks. There is a gap between myth (the cowboy/masculine ideal) and reality (poverty, exploitation, loneliness and death) in modern America. And that was 55 years ago. We live, we laugh, we cry, we die and then…life goes on to repeat itself over and over again. It was midnight for the cowboy in 1969 and it will be midnight for the cowboy for years to come.