Actor: James Whitmore

James Whitmore was nominated for Battleground and later for Give ’em Hell Harry, a one-man Truman film, which is an unusual thing to be nominated for.

He worked constantly as a character actor, in The Asphalt Jungle, Them and Planet of the Apes, and had the useful quality of appearing to have already been in a room a long time before the scene started.

Brooks in The Shawshank Redemption is the performance most people know, and the sequence of an old man released into a world he cannot navigate is the emotional centre of that film.

He also acted extensively on stage and won a Tony, and worked into his eighties.