And The Oscar Goes To...

Winning Best Actor in someone else's story.

An earlier version of this piece appeared in January with a connection to investing. This is the version I've since wanted to write.

Plus, it’s Oscar Sunday.

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“The third spear carrier from the left should act as if the play is all about the third spear carrier from the left.”

— Sir Laurence Olivier

In 1992, something rare happened at the Academy Awards, a moment that holds the keys to meaningful living.

To understand why, let’s rewind.

Laurence Olivier was renowned for his work on the stage, helping shape modern British theater in London’s West End, before turning his attention to film. One of the most celebrated actors of the twentieth century, he received an Honorary Academy Award in 1947 for Henry V, recognizing his achievement as actor, director, and producer, and then won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1949 for Hamlet.

Olivier treated acting as a discipline, not a temperament. He obsessively marked up scripts and planned movements with surgical precision. Yet something less visible, but more important, sustained Olivier’s success: humility. The man who rose quickly to center stage as Romeo, Hamlet, and Richard III understood the production was larger than himself. Even before becoming a director, Olivier held a reverence for the whole, recognizing that the collective effort gives each role its meaning. He cautioned that the moment the central figure believed the stage existed to serve them, the entire performance began to thin.

In the early 1960s, a young Welsh actor, Anthony Hopkins, joined Olivier at the Royal National Theater in London. Eager and deeply serious about the craft, Olivier took Hopkins under his wing, becoming both mentor and model. Hopkins absorbed Olivier’s devotion to preparation, discipline, and technical mastery. Like Olivier, he embraced humility, but he accessed it through vulnerability shaped by insecurity and self-doubt.

As film rose to prominence for the generation that followed Olivier, Hopkins recognized that the camera didn’t reward effort in the same way the stage did. What played as power in a theater could register as excess on screen. In response, Hopkins cultivated restraint. He embraced silence and mastered stillness. Through a held breath, an unblinking gaze, or a perfectly timed pause, he evoked emotion and created tension that lines of a script could never deliver. “The less you show,” Hopkins said, “the more you allow the audience to do the work.”

Hopkins was the consummate role player, building a foundation of excellence alongside giants like Hepburn, Connery, and Hackman. Yet, after two decades, he still hadn’t broken through to the lead roles that define a career. “I have resigned myself to becoming a respectable actor in London’s West End and the BBC for the rest of my life,” he remarked.

Even so, Hopkins kept at his craft, continuing to hold his spear as if it were all that mattered. In 1991, the ground shifted. He was cast as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. A young FBI trainee, Clarice Starling, played by Jodie Foster, is assigned to interview the brilliant but imprisoned psychiatrist in hopes Lecter will help her catch another killer known as “Buffalo Bill.” A psychological cat-and-mouse game unfolds between two locked minds, where power shifts not through action, but through restraint and what isn’t said.

Even though Hopkins appears on screen for only sixteen minutes of the film’s 118-minute runtime, he never loses sight of Olivier’s charge: to act as if the film is all about him. He barely moves. He rarely blinks. He pulls everything inward and bends the room toward him. His stillness becomes more predatory than his rage ever could.

Audiences are left to wonder: was Hopkins playing Lecter, or was Lecter playing Hopkins?

When the Academy Awards were presented in 1992, the industry witnessed something rare. Despite appearing on screen for only sixteen minutes of a two-hour film, Anthony Hopkins took home not the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, but the Oscar for Best Actor.

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The Actors of Ourselves

The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to believe the real story isn’t about who leads. It’s about who loves.

We all live, in some sense, as the leading actor of our own story. We wake up inside our own mind. We feel our hopes. We wrestle with our fears. We dance with our excitement and our worries. No one else occupies center stage in the interior life we alone inhabit.

Outside of Hollywood, I suspect few arrive at the end of their days wishing for a mantle of Leading Actor hardware. Instead, I imagine most of us hope to have carved a mountain of meaning.

That’s my hope, at least.

For me, meaning isn’t found by staying inside my story. It’s found by stepping into someone else’s story. Maybe that’s what Olivier was getting at when he said the performance would begin to thin.

It’s my experience that meaning is made in the role of supporting actor. It’s made when we rotate the stage of our lives to sit in heavy silence and listen to someone’s grief. It’s made when we write a note of gratitude and when we knock unannounced. And when we offer forgiveness, seeing someone anew.

Meaning is made when we give ourselves away.

But giving carves only half the mountain.

The other half is made when we receive the giving of others. It’s made when we receive loving presence in the darkness of our grief. It’s made when we let in gratitude even as we want to deflect, and when we welcome the unexpected visitor. And when we are forgiven and imagined anew.

The alchemy of meaning might be as simple as holding a spear on the stage of others, while they hold a spear on the stage of us. Maybe the hope is to arrive at the end of our days with a single piece of hardware on our mantle: the Oscar for Best Actor in Someone Else’s Story.

That’s my hope for all of us.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​