A matter of life and death? Oscar winners really live longer than mere nominees
If you could increase your lifespan by some three and a half years, wouldn't you do everything in your power to do it?
No sweat. All you need to do is win an Academy Award and an extended life can be yours.
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Indeed, a PLOS One journal study published in 2022 found that the individuals who had won Oscars lived on average 77.1 years, while those who had merely been nominated lived 73.6 years. For further context, overall life expectancy in the U.S. is 77.4 years, so Oscar winners are about on par with civilians, while Oscar losers have shorter lives. (Fun fact, there are four Oscar winners who reached 100 — Eva Marie Saint, George Burns, Olivia de Havilland, and Luise Rainer.)
To find out why Oscar winners live longer, Gold Derby reached out to study author Ian Robertson, founding director of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, and now a distinguished scientist in the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas, who has devoted an inordinate amount of time analyzing the reasons for this Oscar-winning disparity.
On the eve of the 2025 Academy Awards, Robertson, 73, explained why his findings are statistically significant, reasons for winners faring better than losers, and what he considers his version of a "mini-Oscar."
[Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]
Gold Derby: Is it possible that this disparity in age for Oscar winners vs. nominees is a mere statistical anomaly?
Ian Robertson: No, I don't believe it's an anomaly because there was a similar type of study done on Nobel Prize winners that concluded they live on average a year and a half longer than Nobel nominees, which isn't three and a half years but still an enormous difference. It's not something that any neuroscientist would've predicted.
Is even three and a half years or four years really all that statistically significant?
Oh yes, absolutely. It's really quite enormous. Four years is what you get if you managed to cure all cancers. That's how much longer the world's population would live on average if there were no longer cancer, four years.
Ian Robertson
So if that's the case, to what do you ascribe this greater longevity for Oscar winners?
If you think about it, we live in a very competitive world, and no more so than in the high-octane world of Hollywood where you're living by your wits and by how your last movie performed. We know that competitive friction in our lives makes our body generate the stress hormone cortisol — more in some people than others. And cortisol, when it's sustained at high levels, becomes a kind of corrosive of the cells in our body. Our body becomes more vulnerable.
More vulnerable to sickness and disease?
Yes. And so, if you could imagine a way of plucking a human being out of the competitive rat race completely such that these little mini-tournaments we all experience every day - the ego challenges, the criticisms, the sense of failure — and remove that from the equation. What if you could give an incredible pharmaceutical treatment to someone that greatly reduces the high level of cortisol activation that tends to surface in very competitive environments. That's what you get when you win an Oscar.
And decreased cortisol production equates to increased lifespan?
Absolutely. We cannot underestimate the negative health effects of any sense of not achieving progression toward our goals, whereas winning an Oscar encourages the cells in your body to breathe a sigh of relief. The greatest source of stress for the human mind is the fear of the negative evaluation of other people. When you are honored with a trophy like an Academy Award, that all disappears. It removes the stigma of them being only as good as his or her last movie. Suddenly, you have this badge that says to other human beings, "I've made it." You've achieved in a way that is now beyond question, in a fashion that's even more certain than starring in a blockbuster film. With a film, you have to keep repeating that success. But with an Oscar, you stand atop the mountain and can't be knocked off. It's a permanent emblem.
So if I'm hearing you correctly, by winning an Oscar, there's no longer a need to prove yourself.
Right. The pressure is off. The comparison to others is no longer eating away at you. Again, how we perceive the way other people think of us is a huge driver of our emotional and indeed physiological lives. It's all to do with the rules that human beings have invented and about how they attribute value to other human beings, and the symbolic value of achieving an Oscar win is a great reducer of stress. It's the same with a Nobel Prize, an Olympic gold medal, any acknowledgement of receiving the very top honor in your field.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but in this context going home with the Academy Award can be viewed as a matter of literal life and death.
I have to say yes.
It's interesting that the study didn't measure Oscar winners versus the general population but instead versus fellow nominees.
The thing is, no one remembers the nominees, only the winners. So that measurement really makes sense. And that's a token of the esteem that this award has in the minds of the people whose opinion they care about. It's all about whom we compare ourselves with. Oscar nominees don't compare themselves with the person who wasn't nominated. They tend to compare themselves to the person who got the thing, but for which they too were eligible. Only winning cuts the mustard to give you this kind of social immortality. No one thinks about No. 2.
There seem to be other factors at work here besides stress reduction. The study also noted that Oscar winners tended to be have healthier lifestyles and that having an Oscar "could soften a humiliating rejection or insulting review by preserving peace of mind and helping to buffer the hypothalamic-pituitary stress responses." That's a mouthful.
Yes, and what that should tell us is that we don't need to win an Academy Award to experience similar benefits in our own life. We can engineer small success experiences for ourselves, and the success doesn't have to be competitive. If you can get into an intrinsic motivation and create your own goals, you can engineer the winner effect in your own brain and be therefore somewhat protected from the negative effects of competitive comparison. The bottom line is that a strong sense of purpose generates goals, which trigger actions, which give success experiences, which build enormously positive mental and physical benefits for our brain and our bodies..
In other words, achieving satisfaction is also a way to boost your lifespan.
Well, it's about truly getting satisfaction from whatever it is you're doing — and that can be anything, even better if you have a passion for it. It could be tending your backyard garden, or playing chess but comparing yourself only to yourself — about finding something that really brings you contentment.
What gives you satisfaction?
Well, I'm as ego-trapped as most people, but at this point of my life what I love doing is music. So I sing in a choir and tried to learn jazz piano. There's no comparison going on, but oh my goodness it gives me a sense of success when I master a new scale or manage a new bit of improvisation. That's a mini-Oscar for me.
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