Do you think that the women who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award end up living longer than average lives? To answer that question I've gone through all the women who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and calculated out their average lifespan.
Only the women who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress who have passed away were used in the study. Also women like Shelley Winters who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award multiple times were only counted once.
In total, there are 33 women who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and have passed away. Do you think the 33 women lived longer than average lifespans for a female due to their winning the Academy Award?
In theory, winning such a prestigious award should give a woman a huge boost in life and help her to live a longer lifespan than average. Certainly winning an Academy Award virtually guarantees a woman that she will be much richer than the average woman and studies have shown that wealthier women live longer than average but is that true for Academy Award winners?
Does all that add up to a longer than average lifespan? The answer is surprisingly no.
Do Best Supporting Actress Academy Award Winners Live Longer than Average Lives?
- Average lifespan of a woman in the United States is 81.6 years
- Average lifespan of a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award winner is 78.15 years
The 33 women in the study who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and have passed away lived to an average age of 78.15 years vs 81.6 years average life expectancy of a woman in the United States today. That's almost a full 3.5 years less than the average woman for the Academy Award winners.
A few notes. Life expectancy for a woman in the United States has risen over the years and many of the Best Supporting Actresses in the study died when life spans for women were less. But survivor-ship bias is in full effect here as all the women who won the Best Supporting Actress award survived well into adulthood while some females in the overall life expectancy of 81.6 years did not. Some female babies and girls do not reach adulthood while all the Academy Award winners did.
For the women in the study I rounded off their ages. If a woman was 80 years old and 180 days I counted her as 80 years old. If a woman was 80 years old and 190 days I counted her as 81 years old.
The oldest woman who won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award and passed away is 95 years for Celeste Holm. The youngest age a woman who won the award passed away at is 47 years for Alice Brady.
There are five Best Supporting Actress winners who are still alive who are well beyond the average age. Eva Marie Saint is 95 years old while Dorothy Malone is 92, Cloris Leachman is 91 and both Lee Grant and Estelle Parsons are 90 years old. Counting those five actresses in the study the average age moves up to 79.86 which is still over 1.5 years less than the average lifespan for a woman.
The results of the study are pretty clear. Winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress does not increase the average lifespan of the woman who wins the Oscar.
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