Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film Stalag 17 (1953) and the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for the television miniseries The Blue Knight (1973).
The roles that do stand out from his later career—those of Pike Bishop in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), TV executive Max Schumacher in Network (1976; his last Oscar nomination), and hard-drinking film producer Tim Culley in Blake Edwards's S.O.B. (1981; Holden's final film)—captured a bit of Holden's real-life ...
A versatile leading man, Holden starred in classics such as Sabrina (1954), Picnic (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and The Wild Bunch (1969). He received his final Oscar nomination for Network (1976) and won an Emmy for the television film The Blue Knight (1973).
William Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role. His acceptance speech is one of the shortest on record ("thank you, thank you"); the TV broadcast had a strict cutoff time, which forced Holden's quick remarks.
(NEXSTAR) – The Academy Award is generally regarded as one of the highest honors that an actor can receive — the keyword being “generally.” In the history of the Oscars, however, there have only been three people who refused their awards: actors George C. Scott and Marlon Brando, and screenwriter Dudley Nichols.
Death. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner's autopsy report, Holden bled to death in his apartment in Santa Monica, California, on November 12, 1981, after lacerating his forehead by slipping on a rug while intoxicated and hitting a bedside table.
In 1943, as American air attacks against Germany increased, the Nazis moved the growing number of captured American airmen into prisoner of war camps, called Stalags. Over 4,000 airmen ended up in Stalag 17-b, just outside of Krems, Austria, in barracks made for 240 men.
Sefton soon learns the identity of the real traitor: the barrack's German-born blond-haired blue-eyed security chief, Sergeant Price (played by Peter Graves), whose English is impeccable and who appears to be the “all-American boy.” Price denies it, but his cover is blown when he fails to answer a question correctly ...
“Audrey was the love of my life,” confessed Holden, whose own films included Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17. “I fell in love. She wanted to get married.”
William Holden was an American actor. Holden won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1954, and the Emmy Award for Best Actor in 1974. One of the top stars of the 1950s, he was named one of the “Top 10 stars of the year” six times and appeared on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years? 100 Stars list as #25.
Whatever the case, there are plenty of laughs and heartfelt moments in the film, and many feel it offers one of the most accurate representations of a German prisoner of war camp ever to reach the screen.
Stalag 17 is an exceptionally exciting drama, based on a play by two men who were prisoners in Stalag 17. Holden's is superb and won a Best Actor Oscar, and the rest of the cast is also excellent.
Stalag is a contraction of "Stammlager", itself short for Kriegsgefangenen-Mannschaftsstammlager, literally "main camp for enlisted prisoners of war" (officers were kept in an "Oflag"). Therefore, "stalag" technically means "main camp".
In fact, though there are those who have rejected their Oscars (Marlon Brando, Dudley Nichols), only one award has ever been revoked in Academy history — the 1969 prize for Best Documentary, which was given to Young Americans before it was determined that the film was released in 1967 and therefore ineligible.
As a result, Smith failed to follow the Oscar tradition of presenting the Best Actor award last year and won't be attending the 2024 event (or any of the next eight, unless something changes).
