He’s said he put you through several rounds of auditions before you got the part.
To commemorate Harden’s unanticipated 20-year-old victory and the “magical” night that followed, we talked about the road to the Oscars, what the milestone meant to her, and the one nominee who wasn’t so happy with her win. It paid off: Her performance is the heart of the film, which marked Harris’s directorial debut. “I am that girl who would say, ‘I don’t understand why a red dot in the middle of a white painting is considered art,’ so I wanted to learn why,” she explained during a recent phone conversation. To portray Lee Krasner, the tough-minded painter who married Jackson Pollock shortly before he produced his most famous works, Harden studied the history of abstract expressionism. “What a thrill,” Harden said when she arrived at the podium.
The other women in the category - Judi Dench ( Chocolat), Kate Hudson ( Almost Famous), Frances McDormand ( Almost Famous), and Julie Walters ( Billy Elliot) - had higher profiles, and so did their movies. She hadn’t been nominated for a Golden Globe or Screen Actors Guild Award that year, and Pollock, for which she won, was an intimate Ed Harris passion project that opened nationwide a mere two days before the ceremony. When Nicolas Cage declared Marcia Gay Harden the winner of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 2001, no one could believe it - especially not Marcia Gay Harden. Photo-Illustration: by Vulture Photo by Sony Pictures Classics