No Country for Old Men Trivia Quiz

Answer: Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood (b. 1930) first came to prominence as a star alongside Eric Fleming on the TV series "Rawhide". However, when Fleming turned down a part in some film called "A Fistful of Dollars", directed by Italian nobody Sergio Leone, Eastwood took the part. Eastwood played "The Man with No Name", a mysterious cowboy, in that film, as well as its two sequels in the "Dollars Trilogy": "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly". The films spawned the popular spaghetti western genre. In the '70s, Eastwood starred in arguably his most famous role: cynical hardline police detective Harry Callahan, beginning with "Dirty Harry" (1971). That film had three sequels, too.

Despite success in the box office and critical acclaim, though, Eastwood never even sniffed an Oscar nomination until 1992, with "Unforgiven", a film he also directed and produced. The result? A win for Best Picture and Best Director, but Eastwood lost out on Best Actor to Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman". The same thing happened in 2004. Turning away from the Western genre, Eastwood directed Hillary Swank as a female boxing champ in "Million Dollar Baby". He didn't win an acting Oscar for that one either; Jamie Foxx took home the garlands for "Ray". Still, Eastwood, who was born in 1930, set a record for oldest Oscar-winning director, at the age of 74, with the win.

Answer: Max von Sydow

Max von Sydow's (b. 1929) film career began with a bang. He portrayed Antonius Block during the Black Death in Sweden in one of Ingmar Bergman's first artistic triumphs, "The Seventh Seal". In the film, Block participates in a chess game with Death, attempting to forestall his life, which he succeeds in doing by knocking over the chessboard and cheating. Regardless, the von Sydow/Bergman combo was off to a good start, and the actor would take a role in ten more Bergman films, including "Wild Strawberries" and "Through a Glass Darkly".

Von Sydow would move beyond Bergman, earning critical acclaim for his role as Father Merrin in "The Exorcist", Jesus in "The Greatest Story Ever Told", and Ernst Stavro Blofeld in "Never Say Never Again". Still, it wouldn't be until 1987 that he was first nominated for an Academy Award at all, for another Scandinavian-set film, "Pelle the Conqueror." He was nominated again in 2012 for his role in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", the tale of a brilliant nine-year-old struggling to cope with his father's death on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center.

Answer: Helen Hayes

Helen Hayes (1900-1993) didn't wait long for her first acting Oscar: it came in 1931 with "The Sin of Madelon Claudet". She portrayed a loving mother who is unjustly imprisoned, and then resorts to thievery and prostitution to provide for her illegitimate son.

She went on to star in adaptations of literary works by Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, "Arrowsmith" (1931) and "A Farewell to Arms" (1932). However, it was the stage with which Hayes found the most acclaim, winning a Tony for Best Actress in 1947's "Happy Birthday".

In 1953, she won an Emmy for an appearance on "Schlitz Playhouse of Stars". She completed the quartet, becoming a member of a select company of entertainers indeed, when she won a Grammy in 1976. But first, in 1970, Hayes returned to the silver screen when she portrayed an elderly stowaway aboard a Boeing 707 in the midst of a terrorist attack, in "Airport".

Answer: Jack Nicholson

Though somewhat younger than the other celebrities in this quiz, Jack Nicholson's (b. 1937) resume is equally impressive. He was nominated for an Oscar in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and 2000s, and his 2002 nomination for "About Schmidt" was his twelfth, a record among any actor. He won three of those. He was declared Best Actor in 1975, for his memorable performance as Randle Patrick McMurphy in the adaptation of Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". In 1984, he won Best Actor for "Terms of Endearment", and fourteen years later, at the age of 61, he won laurels again for portraying an obnoxious novelist in "As Good as It Gets".

Nicholson is also responsible for two of the most memorable quotes in film history. He raved, "Here's Johnny!" while slowly succumbing to violent insanity in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining". As a completely different kind of villain, he gave Tom Cruise's character the talking-to of his life, beginning, "You can't handle the truth!" in "A Few Good Men".

It would be difficult to mention all of Nicholson's starring roles, though "Chinatown", "Five Easy Pieces", and "The Departed" would be relevant here, too.

Answer: Emmanuelle Riva

Emmanuelle Riva's (b. 1927) first Oscar nomination in 2012 for "Amour" came at the ripe age of 85, which broke the previous age record among Best Actress nominees. Before that, she had been best-known for a 1959 film in which Riva played a French woman engaged in conversation with a Japanese survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Riva, who has enjoyed some stage success in her native France, does not speak English, but "Amour" earned the rare distinction of a Best Picture nominee entirely in a foreign language. The film is about Riva's character Anne, who suffers a paralytic stroke rendering her mute and incapacitated. Anne's husband George, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, cares for her out of the deepest "Amour".

"Amour" won Best Foreign Film at the 85th Academy Awards, but Riva lost to Jennifer Lawrence in "Silver Linings Playbook".

Answer: Christopher Plummer

Christopher Plummer (b. 1929) made his film debut in "Stage Struck, an adaptation of Zoe Atkins' play "Morning Glory". He appeared alongside Sean Connery and Michael Caine in the star-studded adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's novella "The Man Who Would Be King". But remarkably, Plummer, who was nominated for Emmys in the '50s and '60s, didn't get a single Oscar nomination until 2009 when he was nominated for Supporting Actor in "The Last Station". Two years later, he broke the record for the oldest person, period, to win an Academy Award for starring in "Beginners". In the film, Plummer plays Hal, a father who admits his homosexuality to his adult son Oliver after Oliver's mother passes away.

Christopher Plummer might be most recognizable, though, for acting as heartless patriarch-turned-kindly-father-of-seven in the classic movie musical "The Sound of Music". Interestingly, Plummer wasn't a fan of the role. He has tried to shun the attention of the film, somewhat, not attending the cast's fortieth anniversary. Unlike Julie Andrews, Plummer did not sing in the movie; his breathtaking solo in "Edelweiss" was actually sung by Bill Lee.

Answer: Jessica Tandy

The record that Christopher Plummer broke as the oldest Oscar winner had previously been held by Jessica Tandy (1909-1994), who won her Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy" at the age of 80 years, 252 days. Born in London in 1909, Tandy saw early film and stage success, winning a Tony as the first person to portray Blanche Dubois on Broadway in Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire". Between about 1950 and 1980, she had limited filmography.

However, critics raved about the actress' performance as an elderly Jewish woman, who is chauffeured by the Morgan Freeman-played Hoke Colburn, in 1989's "Driving Miss Daisy". Even later, Tandy got a nomination for "Fried Green Tomatoes" in 1991, though lost to Mercedes Ruehl in "The Fisher King". Sadly, she passed away from ovarian cancer in 1994.

Answer: Henry Fonda

Henry Fonda (1905-1982) was young was nominated for his first Academy Award for Best Actor--the social activist Tom Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath". Near the end of the film, Fonda delivered one of his most memorable quotes:

"Then it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."

Only 35 years old, Fonda probably didn't expect that it would take nearly half a century for him to win the award, this time as a professed "knight in shining armor" in "On Golden Pond". Jane Fonda bought rights to Ernest Thompson's screenplay exclusively to cast her father Henry as Norman Thayer, the father of Jane's character, Chelsea Thayer. It wound up being Henry's final movie--he would die the following year--but he won Best Actor as a fitting conclusion to a tremendous film career.

Answer: Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn, and her British counterpart Audrey Hepburn (no relation, no matter what people say) were ranked first and third best actresses of all time, respectively, by the AFI in 1999. Katharine won an unprecedented four Academy Awards for Best Actress. The first, in 1933, was for "Morning Glory"--ironically enough, a version of the same play that Christopher Plummer made his film debut in. Hepburn would have to wait until 1967 to triumph again, though, when she gave a convincing performance pairing Spencer Tracy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner". In the film, the Caucasian couple accepts their daughter's marriage of a black man, played by Sidney Poitier.

Oscar win number three came for "The Lion in Winter", where Hepburn played Eleanor of Aquitaine to Peter O'Toole's Henry II. And finally, at the age of 74, Hepburn made movie history when she got her fourth Oscar win, as Ethel Thayer partnering Henry Fonda in "On Golden Pond".

Answer: Gloria Swanson

Gloria Swanson lost to Janet Gaynor for the very first Best Actress Academy Award, held in 1929 and honoring films from both 1927 and 1928. She went on to lose in 1929/1930, as well, and failed to garner accolades two decades later in 1950, when she portrayed aging film star Norma Desmond in "Sunset Boulevard". Regardless, that classic of the film noir genre was nominated for eleven Academy Awards in total, and its message about obsolescence in the film industry still rings true.

William Holden stars as Joe Gillis, an ambitious screenwriter who accidentally runs into the Swanson-played Norma Desmond, a silent film star who never made the transition to talkies. Joe is sucked into Norma's fantasy-land where she still gets fan mail (written by a servant, as it were) and believes that the pictures got small, not her. In the film's final scene, Norma is being interrogated by news cameras for her role in a homicide. Delusional, she believes that she has once more made the big-time, and coos, "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up."