His turn as the lion-tamer uncle who ‘shocked the shit’ out of a young Spielberg has earned the 87-year-old an Oscar nomination. Is he about to beat Anthony Hopkins’ record for oldest actor ever to win?
‘I must tell you that I feel very inadvertently lucky,” says Judd Hirsch of his Oscar nomination for Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans. “The great respect for Steven, and the fact that it’s written very well and acted beautifully, I believe turns people’s minds to say, of me, ‘He had something to do with this. He was an important element in this movie.’ This is what I hope they thought. Instead of saying, ‘Well, he is old enough now, let’s give him an Academy Award nomination. It’s been 42 years since the last one’.”
Last nominated in 1981, in fact, for Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, Hirsch will be 88 by the time the Oscars roll around next month. If he wins, he will be the oldest actor to win, beating Anthony Hopkins, 83, who won for The Father two years ago. The Academy likes its oracle figures, and as Uncle Boris, the cracked lion-tamer who wanders in from the Arizona desert to impart words of advice to the teenage Sammy in Spielberg’s autobiographical coming-of-age tale, Hirsch commands every second of his 10 minutes on screen.
