Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award

Irving G. Thalberg Award Header

The Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, an Oscar statuette, is voted by the Academy’s Board of Governors and is presented to “a creative producer whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”

The award is named in honor of the man who became head of production at the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. at the age of 20 and three years later was vice president and head of production for Louis B. Mayer. A year later, Mayer's studio became part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) with Thalberg assuming the position of vice president and supervisor of production. Over the next eight years MGM became Hollywood's most prestigious film studio, with Thalberg personally supervising the studio's top productions. Thalberg died of pneumonia in 1936 at the age of 37. The following year, the Academy instituted the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

The Thalberg Award is not given each year. In earlier years, some individuals were honored more than once; but for the 1962 (35th) Awards (and continuing to present day), the Board voted that “no individual shall be eligible to receive the Thalberg Award more than once.”

As with other awards presented at the Academy Awards ceremony, the year listed here is the awards year. The Thalberg Award to Dino De Laurentiis, for example, was presented at the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony, held on March 25, 2001.

THE FACES OF THALBERG

Shortly after Thalberg died in 1936, the Academy established its first named testimonial award in his honor. The first recipient was Darryl F. Zanuck at the 1937 Academy Awards ceremony (held in 1938). The award featured a small and somewhat delicate Thalberg “head,” designed by sculptor Bernard Sopher, resting on an attractive column of green marble. Three other honorees subsequently received that design between 1939 and 1942: Hal B. Wallis, David O. Selznick and Walt Disney.

But Thalberg’s widow, the actress Norma Shearer, evidently had objections to this rendering of her husband’s head, so she commissioned a new sculpture at her own expense. She went so far as to send the new version to all the previous winners – which explains why, in 1995, the Academy received three Thalberg Awards from the Hal Wallis estate, though he had been voted the award only twice. Wallis had two different versions of the 1939 trophy. His third trophy was the one he had received in 1944, when he became the second “official” Academy recipient of “Norma’s design.” (Rules have since changed so that an individual can receive the Thalberg Award only once.)

The Shearer-commissioned design, executed by a sculptor whose name at this point has been lost to history, had a somewhat larger head fixed on two rectangular solids of black marble. Ceremony photos indicate that the Academy used this design until 1966, when William Wyler became the first recipient of a third version of the Thalberg Award.

This time around, Thalberg’s head was rendered more flamboyantly, and with a higher gloss. The trophy was also considerably heavier. The head alone weighed seven pounds, making the award top-heavy – as Steven Spielberg learned when his threatened to topple over on the podium at the 59th awards ceremony.

For many years, the origins of that third design were a mystery to current Academy staff members, although there were clues – including file photographs of the clay model in which the mark “57 Rocchi” was visible at the back of the neck. The photos were in an envelope addressed to 1955–1958 Academy President George Seaton from Norma Shearer Arrougé, but there was no indication as to whether she had initiated yet another redesign, or had simply been allowed to review the new model as a matter of courtesy.

In 2002 some historical gaps were filled in unexpectedly when a letter arrived from Gualberto Rocchi, still very much alive four decades after sculpting the third design. He had come across the Academy’s web site, and was dismayed to find his work credited to Bernard Sopher. Executive Director Bruce Davis called to assure Rocchi that the Academy knew better, leading the artist to explain how the third design came about.

Rocchi’s work included sculpted portraits of many European and Middle Eastern royalty as well as Hollywood celebrities and political figures, nearly all sculpted from life. Thalberg, apparently, was an exception. Norma Shearer had commissioned Rocchi to do a life-sized head of her husband for the lobby of the MGM Thalberg Building in Culver City (now part of the Sony Pictures Studios lot). When Rocchi delivered it, Shearer liked it so much that she asked him to produce another rendering, identical but small enough to serve as the Thalberg Award. This time around though, she apparently did not feel obligated to send the newest version to all the previous Thalberg recipients.

It’s still unclear why the third design was not used until 1966, when the clay model had been crafted by Rocchi in 1957. Perhaps the Academy simply wanted to exhaust an existing inventory of awards.

Although the Rocchi design was in use from 1966 to 2023, there were several variations over the next three decades. The heads ranged in color from coppery to an almost Oscar-like gold, and the bases sometimes consisted of two blocks of black marble, sometimes only one. These inconsistencies are thought to have been simply at the whim of the trophy company used at the time.

In 2023, the Board voted to replace the Rocchi-designed head with the classic Oscar statuette, creating consistency across the design of all Governors Awards.

 

Year Winner
1950 (23rd) Darryl F. Zanuck
1951 (24th)  Arthur Freed
1952 (25th) Cecil B. DeMille
1953 (26th) George Stevens
1956 (29th) Buddy Adler
1958 (31st) Jack L. Warner
1961 (34th) Stanley Kramer
1963 (36th) Sam Spiegel
1965 (38th) William Wyler
1966 (39th) Robert Wise
1967 (40th) Alfred Hitchcock
1970 (43rd) Ingmar Bergman
1973 (46th) Lawrence Weingarten
1975 (48th) Mervyn LeRoy
1976 (49th) Pandro S. Berman
1977 (50th) Walter Mirisch
1979 (52nd) Ray Stark
1981 (54th) Albert R. Broccoli
1986 (59th) Steven Spielberg
1987 (60th) Billy Wilder
1990 (63rd) David Brown, Richard D. Zanuck
1991 (64th) George Lucas
1994 (67th) Clint Eastwood
1996 (69th) Saul Zaentz
1998 (71st) Norman Jewison
1999 (72nd) Warren Beatty
2000 (73rd) Dino De Laurentiis
2009 (82nd) John Calley
2010 (83rd) Francis Ford Coppola
2018 (91st) Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall