And the Oscar goes to ...

I'm preparing a speech to make at a conference on Monday.  This thread may appear in what I say.  Or not.

If you want to win an Oscar in the leading man or leading woman categories it does you no harm to 'do' disability.  Eight out of 58 women since I was born have played characters with disability.  Twelve out of 58 men playing characters with disability in the same period have won.

Only two of the actors, both women, have had a disability.  That's 10% of characters with disability were played by actors with disability.  Less than 2% of all 116 of those Oscar winning roles have been played by actors with disability.

Oscar winners - Best Actress

• 1957 Joanne Woodward in Three Faces of Eve playing a paranoid schizophrenic
• 1986 Marlee Martin in Children of a Lesser God as a deaf cleaner.  Marlee Martin was deaf.
• 1993 Holly Hunter in The Piano playing a mute Scottish woman.  Holly Hunter is deaf in one ear.
• 1994 Jessica Lange in Blue Sky playing a mentally ill army wife.
• 2002 Nicole Kidman in The Hours playing Virginia Woolf.
• 2004 Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby playing a quadriplegic former boxer.
• Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, playing Margaret Thatcher during her years with dementia.
• 2014 Julianne Moore in Still Alice playing a university professor with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

Oscar Winners - best actor

• 1968 Cliff Robertson in Charly playing a man with intellectual disability.
• 1969 John Wayne in True Grit, playing the one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cockburn.
• 1977 John Voight in Coming Home playing a paralysed veteran of the war in Vietnam.
• 1988 Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man playing a man with an autism spectrum disorder.
• 1989 Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot playing Christy Brown an artist with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
• 1992 Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman playing a blind retired army general.
• 1993 Tom Hanks in Philadelphia playing a man with AIDS.
• 1996 Geoffrey Rush in Shine playing David Helfgott, a concert pianist with a history of mental illness.
• 1997 Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets playing a writer with compulsive-obsessive disorder.
• 2004 Jamie Foxx in Ray playing Ray Charles, blind musician.
• 2014 Matthew McConauchey in Dallas Buyers Club, playing Ron Woodroof who died of AIDS.
• 2015 Eddy Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, playing Professor Steven Hawking who has Motor Neurone Disease.