Five years ago, it was widely expected that Delroy Lindo would be nominated for an Oscar for his role in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. In the event, he was overlooked by the Academy, just as he had been by the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild.
Speaking to The Independent at the time, Lindo remained good-humored. “I would say that various reality checks I have received in the last few weeks or so have only enhanced my desire to remain circumspect about awards,” he remarked coolly.
His patience has paid off. This year at the age of 73, the London-born actor who became a fixture of American cinema, has been nominated for an Oscar for the very first time. The honor arrives a full 50 years after he made his screen debut playing a drug kingpin in the Canadian thriller Partners.
In the decades since, he has excelled in roles both large and small but has never stopped working. “Find ways of staying the course,” Lindo recently told The Wall Street Journal when asked what advice he would give someone trying to persevere in a long career. “And I say ‘find’ ways, because it’s not an easy thing.”
Lindo’s nomination is well-deserved for the strength of his performance as the harmonica-playing Delta Slim in Ryan Coogler’s hotly-tipped vampires ‘n’ blues horror Sinners. For the many fans who have followed Lindo’s work for decades, it seems a fitting nod for his dozens of high-calibre performances since he earned mainstream success in Lee’s Malcolm X in 1992.
While recognition for Lindo may have been a long time coming, he’s far from alone in being celebrated by the Academy only in later life. A little over a decade ago, J.K. Simmons was nominated for an Oscar for the first time at the age of 60 for his performance as an unforgiving drum teacher in Whiplash. He went on to win Best Supporting Actor.
Going back a little further, cigar-chomping comedian George Burns was 80 in 1976 when he won an Oscar after being nominated for the first time for The Sunshine Boys. Jessica Tandy was also 80 when she won Best Actress in 1990 at the first time of asking for her performance in Driving Miss Daisy. A couple of years later, she was back, nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Fried Green Tomatoes.
Christopher Plummer had a long and storied film career that included such disparate favorites as 1965’s The Sound of Music and 2019’s Knives Out. However, he was only recognized by the Academy after he became an octogenarian, earning a first nomination at 80 for playing Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Last Station. He finally won Best Supporting Actor in 2012, at the age of 82, for his role in Mike Mills’s Beginners.
At the time, Plummer was not just the oldest first-time Oscar winner but the oldest ever winner in an acting category. He was outdone in 2021 by Anthony Hopkins, who was 83 when he won for his work in The Father (almost three decades after he had first won for The Silence of The Lambs in 1992). Plummer did however earn the distinction of being the oldest actor ever nominated for an Oscar when he was recognized again for his performance as J. Paul Getty in All The Money In The World in 2018, when he was 88.
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The oldest actor to be nominated for the first time was Gloria Stuart, who earned a Best Supporting Actress nod for her role as the elderly version of Rose in Titanic and was 87 when she attended the Oscars in 1998. Amour star Emmanuelle Riva was just a little younger: she celebrated her 86th birthday at the Oscars in 2012, where she was pipped to the Best Actress prize by Jennifer Lawrence.
Outside of the acting categories, the oldest first-time Oscar winner ever was James Ivory, who was 89 when he took home Best Adapted Screenplay in 2018 for Call Me By Your Name. He had previously been nominated three times as a director for 1986’s A Room with a View, 1992’s Howards End and 1993’s The Remains of the Day. The French New Wave filmmaker Agnès Varda was also 89 when she earned a nomination for the first time in the Best Documentary category for 2017’s Faces Places.
Age, then, is no barrier to success at the Academy Awards. When Lindo looks out at his fellow Supporting Actor nominees, he’ll note that Stellan Skarsgård, also recognized for the first time, is even older at 74. They will be hoping good things really do come to those who wait.
