Who has appeared the most with whom in Oscar nominated movies? – this and other results

The following movie analysis post was driven out of curiosity. I distinctly remember that when I was watching the movie Joy starring Jennifer Lawrence, and Bradley Cooper’s character appeared, I wondered about the exact number of times that these two actors have actually appeared together. I know they were together in Silver Linings Playbook, Serena, as well as American Hustle.  While pondering about that, I continued to wonder which other actors in Hollywood have often appeared together and exactly how often. So this year, I finally got around to doing the analysis and satisfy my curiosity. This post shares some of the analysis results. The analysis code and data are available on github.

Data collection 

As the number of movies is enormous and I did not want to go through every movie that has ever been made in Hollywood, I restricted the analysis to only movies that have received an Oscar nomination in the predominant categories of Best and Supporting Actor and Actress and Best Director and Producer, from the time the Oscars have been awarded, i.e., 1928 to 2017. Of course this restriction removes certain actors that I know appear frequently together like Adam Sandler with David Spade, Rob Schneider or Luke Wilson,  or Vince Vaughn, with Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell,  whose movies are usually not nominated for Oscars.

So first a list of the Oscar nominated movie titles in each of the 6 categories (i.e., Best Actor / Actress, best supporting actor / actress, best producer, best director ) was automatically collected from Wikipedia into a csv file along with the year of nomination. In total, I had 1,266 movies in the dataset (Data available here).

Then, with that movie title and year, I wrote a R script to search Google and extract the IMDb URL of the movie, with the aim of getting the IMDb ID of each movie.

Next, with the URL and another R script, I extracted the ID and searched the IMDb page of the movie to get the full cast of the movie.

Lastly, With the full cast data set, I was thus able to explore the data and answer my curiosities. This is what I found out:

Results

Meryl Streep has appeared 23 times in Oscar nominated movies

In total, 15,689 actors have appeared in these movies. From the analysis, I found that Meryl Streep is at the top of the list with the highest number of appearances in Oscar nominated movies, with 23 appearances.  Of these 23, she has won an Oscar on 3 occasions, for the movies Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Sophie’s Choice (1982), and The Iron Lady (2011).

Bette Davis (deceased) comes in second with 19 appearances. I also noticed that some of my favorite actors such as Robert Duvall, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Ed Harris, Tom Hanks, Cate Blanchett, and Leonardo DiCaprio are high on this list.

In addition,

Meryl Streep has also the highest appearance with other actors

Not surprising, Meryl Streep has acted with a lot of actors. The analysis shows in total that she has acted with 437 other actors.

Among those actors that Streep has appeared the most with in the Oscar nominated movies, Margo Martindale appears to be at the top. They appeared together in the movies Marvin’s Room (1996), The Hours (2002), and August: Osage County (2013).

Although Streep has the most appearances, she is not the one leading the list of those who have worked with the same actor the most. There are a total of 23 actors such as Anna Q. Nilsson (deceased), Beah Richards (deceased), Eric Phlmann (deceased) –  who have acted with one actor 5 times, 5 being the highest. As a possible explanation, these actors were in movies in the early part of the 20th century – where the number of actors and actress was not as large as it is currently. Thus of those 23 actors, only two are still alive, Hal Holbrook and Jane Alexander.

Bradley Cooper has worked the most with Jennifer Lawrence in Oscar nominated movies.

With my original curiosity, I got to confirm that in total Cooper and Lawrence have appeared together 3 times in Oscar nominated movies.

As a side note, Cooper did not win an Oscar in any of those three movies, Lawrence however did win for Silver Linings Playbook.

So that’s it, my curiosity for now is satisfied. All code and datasets are publicly available here. If you notice something that I did wrong there or reported here, please drop me a line. Otherwise, if time allows, I might extend this analysis to also include directors. I know for instance Leonardo DiCaprio has collaborated often with Martin Scorsese“, as well as Tom Hanks with Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, and there might be other co-appearances with directors that might be interesting for some future post.


Also published on Medium.