"Titanic" was the first movie in which two actors earned Oscar nominations for playing the same character.
The 1997 movie Titanic set a lot of records, both at the box office and at the Academy Awards. And while most viewers remember its wins for Best Picture and Director, one tidbit is less well known: It’s the first movie for which two actors received Oscar nominations for playing the same character. Kate Winslet received a Best Actress nod for her performance as Rose DeWitt Bukater aboard the doomed ship in 1912, while Gloria Stuart was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for playing Rose in the late 20th century.
Though neither Winslet nor Stuart won, the film itself took home 11 statuettes — a record shared by Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (Winslet went on to win an Oscar for her performance in 2008’s The Reader, while co-star Leonardo DiCaprio eventually won for 2015’s The Revenant.) The two-nods-one-character rarity was repeated in 2001, once again involving Winslet, when both she and Dame Judi Dench received Oscar nominations for playing novelist Iris Murdoch in the aptly named Iris. It also occurred in 2022, when Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley were both nominated for playing the same character in The Lost Daughter. And though it happened in different movies — namely The Godfather and The Godfather Part II — Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro accomplished a similar feat by both winning Oscars for playing crime boss Vito Corleone, aka the Godfather himself.
In 1898, American author Morgan Robertson published Futility, a novel in part about the world's largest ocean liner — one described as “unsinkable” until colliding with an iceberg. And the eerily prescient similarities didn’t end there. In the book, the Titan is traveling at a speed of 25 knots at the moment of impact, whereas the Titanic was going 22.5; 3,000 passengers were aboard the fictional ship, 2,200 on the real one. Both ships were British, crashed into their respective icebergs at around midnight in mid-April, and sank in the North Atlantic precisely off Newfoundland. Robertson even had to deny being clairvoyant, saying, “I know what I’m writing about, that’s all.”
