Comedic Performances That Were So Good They Even Won an Oscar

Michael Caine, known for making British crime and adventure movies in the 1960s and 1970s, tried his hand at comedy, and won the first of his two Best Supporting Actor Oscars in Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters,” a comedy about romantic complications involving three sisters. Caine has been nominated for six Academy Awards, the first in 1967 for “Alfie.”

John Gielgud was considered one of the three greatest British actors of the 20th century, along with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. Besides his storied tenure on the stage, Gielgud had a long motion-picture career that began in 1924 and ended only with his death in 2000. After receiving his first Oscar nomination in 1964 for “Becket,” Gielgud lampooned British propriety as the sarcastic butler in the comedy “Arthur,” starring Dudley Moore in the title role.

After earning positive notices for her role in the time-travel adventure “Time After Time,” Mary Steenburgen gained fame for winning for Best Supporting Actress in the movie “Melvin & Howard.” She played the wife of down-on-his-luck Melvin E. Dummar (Paul Le Mat), who claims to have received a will naming him an heir to the fortune of Howard Hughes (Jason Robards).

Long before she entertained audiences as the sardonic dowager in “Downton Abbey,” Maggie Smith won a Best Actress Oscar in 1979 for the Neil Simon-penned comedy “California Suite,” about the zany adventures of four couples in a hotel. Simon also won the Oscar for Best Writing.

The 1970s were a golden decade for Richard Dreyfuss, during which he appeared in such hits as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Jaws” (1975), and “American Graffiti” (1973). He mined Oscar gold with “The Goodbye Girl” (1977), a rom-com written by Neil Simon. Dreyfuss has been nominated for one other Best Actor Oscar, for the 1995 drama “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”