Amy Madigan Is 2nd Supporting Actress Oscar Winner From a Horror Movie

With her Oscar win as the ossified witch Aunt Gladys in “Weapons,” Amy Madigan has become the second Best Supporting Actress winner from a horror movie.

Fifty-seven years ago, Ruth Gordon won the award for her scene-stealing performance, also as a colorful, manipulative witch, in 1968’s demon-seed horror-thriller “Rosemary’s Baby.”

For her performance in “Weapons,” Madigan drew inspiration from Gordon, as well as the silent “Nosferatu,” Bette Davis in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and the whole canon of horror films from the classic Universal monsters through the British studio Hammer.

“I can see all those movies indelibly in my brain,” Madigan told TheWrap last fall. “I remember my brother Jimmy and I watching scary movies on late night television in the dark. Oh, we were in heaven. There are so many great horror films, they suck you in.” 

Like Madigan, Gordon was a highly admired presence in Hollywood for decades before her Oscar win. She had been nominated once before for acting (for 1965’s “Inside Daisy Clover”) and three times for Best Original Screenplay. Writing was her day job throughout the 1940s and 50s, authoring films including “Adam’s Rib” and “A Double Life” with her husband Garson Kanin. She later wrote three volumes of memoirs.

When Gordon accepted the Oscar in 1969, she began her speech by quipping, in her chipper Boston accent, “I can’t tell you how encouraging a thing like this is!”

Gordon, who was 70 at the time of her Oscar win, would continue working for the next decade and a half, appearing in films like “Where’s Poppa” and “Every Which Way But Loose,” playing a witty murderer in a “Columbo” episode, hosting “Saturday Night Live” and delivering her most beloved performance in the 1971 classic comedy “Harold & Maude.”

And for a long time she remained the only actress to win an Oscar for a horror film, the Academy’s most neglected genre. Kathy Bates joined the small club with her leading actress win for 1990’s “Misery,” followed by Jodie Foster in “The Silence of the Lambs” and Natalie Portman in “Black Swan.”

But Best Supporting Actress has been the most fruitful lineup for genre acceptance, at least in terms of nominees.

In addition to Madigan and Gordon, other horror noms in the category include Janet Leigh for “Psycho,” Linda Blair for “The Exorcist,” Piper Laurie for “Carrie,” Toni Collette for “The Sixth Sense” and Wunmi Mosaku for this year’s “Sinners.” Of those, only Laurie and to a lesser extent Blair portrayed the antagonist in their films.

Madigan’s win comes from her second nomination, following 1985’s “Twice in a Lifetime,” a small-scale, powerful drama in which she played the daughter of Ellen Burstyn and Gene Hackman. Madigan’s 40-year gap between her first and second Oscar noms made history as the longest stretch between nominations among actresses.

She is also remembered from her appearance in the front row at the 1999 Oscars, as the date of her husband Ed Harris, a nominee that year for “The Truman Show.” They were among the attendees who refused to applaud when celebrated director Elia Kazan, who named the names of his colleagues during the Hollywood blacklist in order to protect his own reputation, was presented with an Honorary Oscar.

Madigan sat with her arms folded. She is still proud of that protest. “Somehow Ed’s picture and mine got prominently displayed,” she commented recently to the LA Times. “But there were other people in the audience who felt that way too. And fair enough if someone wanted to (applaud), but I could not disassociate (Kazan’s) naming from his work.”

Among the recent comments on the Oscars’ YouTube video of Kazan’s speech which reference Madigan was this one: “Aunt Gladys, doing the right thing.”

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