Actor: Peter Finch

Peter Finch won Best Actor posthumously for Network, the first performer to do so, playing a news anchor whose breakdown becomes a ratings phenomenon.

The mad as hell speech is among the most quoted in American film, and Finch delivers it as genuine derangement instead of rhetoric. Sunday Bloody Sunday brought an earlier nomination for a role that was unusually frank about a gay relationship in 1971. He died of a heart attack two months before the ceremony.