Research claims that male actors who win an Academy Award, or Oscar as they are more often known, are 205% more likely to divorce during the following year than their peers.
Oscar Love Curse
Academics from the University of Michigan and the National University of Singapore studied the private lives of 808 actors between 1930 and 2005, which included 165 Oscar winners and 227 Oscar nominees who did not win.
It was their intention to find out if the “Oscar Curse” – in which actresses were understood to be more likely to divorce after winning an Oscar – actually existed. In reality, the research points to male actors rather than female actors being “cursed”.
The researchers, Dr Michael Jensen and Dr Heeyon Kim, considered overall divorce rates of Oscar winners and nominees and found that they were not all that different from other actors. However, they discovered that male actors who won an Academy Award were three times as likely (with nominees being twice as likely) as other male actors to divorce after winning the golden statuette. In contrast, female Oscar winners and nominees were far less likely to divorce than their counterparts.
Dr Jensen of the University of Michigan has said:
“Our results emphasise an important conundrum for male actors – Oscar nominations/wins can help a career but can also ruin a marriage.”
The study also found that specialising in action films increases the divorce rate of male but not female actors, and that married male actors and divorced female actors participate in more movies than divorced male actors and married female actors.
The study appears in the journal Organization Science.
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