Women who win the Best Actress Oscar are at a higher risk of divorce than nominees who do not win. On the other hand, Best Actor winners do not experience an increase in the risk of divorce after an Oscar, a new study insists.
Tiziana Casciaro, an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the Rotman School of Management, studied the marital graphs of 751 nominees in the best actor and actress categories of the Academy Awards between1936 to 2010.
The results, which have been published under the title'The Oscar Curse: Status Dynamics and Gender Differences in Marital Survival', show that Best Actress winners have a 63 per cent chance of their marriages ending sooner than the marriages of non-winners.
The median marriage duration for Best Actress winners was 4.30 years, much lower than the 9.51 year marriage duration for non-winners. On the other hand, the difference between Best Actor non-winners (median = 12.66 years) and Best Actor winners (median = 11.97 years) was not statistically significant. The authors say that this asymmetry is consistent with gender dynamics documented in marriages among the general population.
The study was co-authored by Colleen Stuart, a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, and Sue Moon, a PhD student at the Rotman School.
One of the triggers for initiating the study was a Reuters article last year, which talked of something called the "Oscar curse." Among the actresses who have experienced break-ups after winning Oscars in recent times are Julia Roberts (2001), Halle Berry (2002), Hilary Swank (2005), Reese Witherspoon (2006), Sandra Bullock (2010). Among illustrious actresses to have undergone the divorce-after-Oscar round have been Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.
Casciaro and Stuart wanted to see if there was any theoretical merit or empirical evidence behind this suggestion. The 751 nominations comprised 265 unique individuals who were either married or in a common-law relationship (indicated by shared property or children) at the time of a nomination. Of these nominees, the researchers found, 159 (60 per cent) experienced at least one divorce after being nominated for an Oscar.
"It appears that even the marriages of Hollywood actresses at the top of their careers are not immune to the consequences of violating social norms that affect the wider population. Our results suggest that the sudden success reduces the longevity of their marriages," Stuart said.
New York divorce lawyer Paul Talbert, who had been quoted in the Reuters article, had argued that such breakups were more likely a result of long absences by one partner in a marriage. "The reality is that these women are extremely successful, hard working women who must spend months away from their families shooting and promoting their films," he had said.
The researchers themselves could only speculate about the reasons for this. They wrote, "The specific trigger for divorce, therefore, may reside in the wife and/or the husband. Our data do not allow us to adjudicate among these alternate mechanisms or indicate which might be more frequent. Future research can tackle these questions."
