At this year’s Academy Awards, Edward Berger’s twisty Vatican drama “Conclave” has eight nominations, including for Ralph Fiennes (Cardinal Lawrence) for Best Actor and Isabella Rossellini (Sister Agnes) for Best Supporting Actress. But this is hardly the first time that stars playing priests and nuns have been Oscar contenders. For Rossellini, it’s not even the first time it’s happened to someone in her family.
The Catholic history of the Oscars began in 1937. In those early days, the Oscars were a luxe banquet for the Hollywood elite, hosted at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles; the televised ceremony wouldn’t arrive for almost 20 years. The 1937 Oscars were historic for introducing the Best Supporting Actor and Actress categories, but they also marked the first time that an actor was nominated for playing a Catholic religious: Spencer Tracy as Father Tim Mullin in “San Francisco” (1936).
Two years later, Tracy became the first actor to win for playing a priest: this time the historical Father Edward Flanagan in “Boys Town” (1938). That same year, “Angels with Dirty Faces”—about childhood friends who grow up to be a gangster and a priest—earned several nominations (although not for Pat O’Brien, who played the priest).
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The 1940s saw a dominant period for Catholic stories at the Oscars, with Catholic-themed films receiving 34 total nominations from 1944 to 1946 alone. Jennifer Jones won Best Actress for playing the titular role in “The Song of Bernadette” (1943), becoming the first actress nominated for playing a nun. Gladys Cooper and Charles Bickford were also nominated, as another sister and the abbot.
In 1945, Bing Crosby earned a Best Actor nomination for playing Father Chuck O’Malley, the golden-voiced priest from Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way” (1944). In 1946, Crosby won for the same role in the sequel, “The Bells of St. Mary’s” (1945). It was the first time an actor was nominated twice for playing the same character. “Going My Way” took home seven Oscars in total, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Barry Fitzgerald, who played Father Fitzgibbon. (He was also nominated for Best Actor; the only time an actor has been nominated twice for playing the same character in the same film.)
That same year, Ingrid Bergman was nominated for playing Sister Mary Benedict in “The Bells of St. Mary’s” and Gregory Peck for playing a priest in “The Keys of the Kingdom” (1944). A few years later, Bergman would marry Italian director Roberto Rossellini (following a brief and scandalous affair), and they had three children—including Isabella Rossellini.
In these films and others of the time, priests were portrayed as “virile, athletic, compassionate, wise,” according to Charles R. Morris in American Catholic. The fact that they were celibate didn’t prevent them from being inspirational figures, played by some of the most famous (and desirable) men in Hollywood. The films portrayed religious life as one of immense sacrifice and meaning. “These are talented, attractive people who have made big sacrifices for the love of God,” Morris writes, “and they are better than the rest of us for it.”
This mid-century popularity of Catholic films in Hollywood occurred thanks to several factors, including the still-exotic nature of Catholicism to majority-non-Catholic audiences and the dynamically cinematic elements of Catholic religious practice. It is also meaningful that this period coincided with the heyday of the Production Code, a censorship document that determined what got made in Hollywood. In American Catholic, Morris (in line with other scholars) suggests that the deluge of positive Catholic films may have been an attempt by the studios to stay in the good graces of the Production Code Administration’s vigilant and pugnacious director: devout Catholic Joseph Ignatius Breen.
Catholic films actually did appear less frequently at the Oscars as the Code’s power waned, particularly following Breen’s retirement in 1954. In 1950, Loretta Young and Celeste Holm were nominated for playing nuns in the 1949 comedy “Come to the Stable,” but it would be another five years until the next “clerical” nomination: Karl Malden in 1955 for Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront” (1954), playing Father Pete Barry, inspired by the real “Waterfront Priest,” John “Pete” Corridan, S.J.
Deborah Kerr was nominated for playing a nun in “Heaven Knows Mr. Allison” (1957), and Audrey Hepburn for “The Nun’s Story” (1959), but the 1950s closed without an Oscar win for an actor or actress playing a religious. These last two films are also notable for depicting their vowed religious characters as human beings with doubts and desires. Hepburn’s Sister Luke even leaves the convent at the end of the film.
Things were changing in Hollywood and the church. The Production Code was retired in 1965, just as Catholics began to reckon with the challenges and invitations of the Second Vatican Council. In 1967, Julie Andrews and Peggy Wood were nominated for playing Maria and the Mother Abbess in “The Sound of Music,” and Anthony Quayle received a Best Supporting nomination in 1970 for playing Cardinal Wolsey in “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969); neither was a massive departure from the Catholic-themed films that competed for Oscars previously. But from that point forward, Hollywood movies began to take a more skeptical view of the church’s role in the modern world and the tensions between an ancient faith and a society constantly in flux. This was especially apparent in the Catholic films that earned Oscar recognition.
In 1974, “The Exorcist” (1973) was nominated for Best Picture, with Jason Miller receiving a Best Supporting Actor nomination for playing the younger, Vatican II-influenced Jesuit priest, Father Damien Karras. Anne Bancroft and Meg Tilly were nominated for playing the central nuns in the thorny, faith-and-reason murder mystery “Agnes of God” (1985). A decade later, Susan Sarandon became the second actress in Oscar history to win for playing a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J., in “Dead Man Walking” (1995). In a sign of the times, she was also the first actress nominated for playing a nun in modern dress.
The few times that actors or actresses have been nominated for playing Catholic religious in the 21st century, it has been in films that wrestled with present upheavals in the church. John Patrick Shanley’s searing “Doubt” (2008), which netted nominations for Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams, was set during the period of Vatican II, but unmistakably resonated with the sex abuse crisis of the early 2000s. In 2020, Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins were nominated for playing Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI in Fernando Meirelles’s “The Two Popes” (2019). That film and “Conclave” (the first with any religious acting nominations since) ask similar questions: What should the church’s mission and leadership look like in today’s world?
Perhaps most telling of all is the fact that the most recent Catholic-themed film to win Best Picture—“Spotlight” (2015)—didn’t feature any Catholic religious as major characters at all, despite being deeply concerned with them. After lavishing the church with good press during the Production Code era, today Hollywood seems unafraid to interrogate the church’s institutional failures and the flawed human hearts beneath the vestments.
Some Catholic commentators are quick to cry anti-Catholic prejudice about this shift, but it is worth remembering that it happened in response to the very real sins of the church and its leaders. Whether “Conclave” will take home any statuettes, and whether films about Catholic religious will ever again be awards season juggernauts, remains to be seen. But as history teaches us, the stories about Catholics that Hollywood tells—and awards—has as much to do with what is happening with the church off-screen as what is shown on-screen.
[‘Conclave’ explainer: Could that twist ending really happen?]
