Joanne Woodward's Acting Credentials: Awards and Highlights of Storied Career

Joanne Woodward won a Best Actress Oscar at the Academy Awards for her role as a woman with multiple personality disorder in 1957's "The Three Faces of Eve" just three years after her movie career began. The win kicked off a long and storied career for Woodward that also included Emmy Award-winning performances on television and roles on Broadway as well as a storybook marriage to the actor Paul Newman.

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Born on February 27, 1930 in a small town in southern Georgia during the Great Depression, Woodward fell in love with the movies at an early age, as her mother was quite a movie buff, even taking her daughter to the premier of "Gone with the Wind" in Atlanta in 1939, according to her bio on IMDB.

Woodward's career started with beauty contests as a teenager, of which she entered and won quite a few. After graduating from Louisiana State University with a drama major, Woodward moved to New York and began auditioning for and winning roles in TV shows and theater productions. It was during this time that she also met the love of her life, Paul Newman, who was also an unknown actor at the time. The two married in 1958 and had their first child in 1959. They stayed together until Newman's death in 2008 and starred together in a number of movies.

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Woodward's movie career began in 1955 when she stared in "Count Three and Pray," a dramatic western in which she played a strong-willed orphan. The movie that defined Woodward's career, however, was her Academy Award winning performance in the "The Three Faces of Eve." Here she "astounded audiences and critics alike with her stellar performance (where she) portrayed a woman with three distinct personalities — a southern housewife, a vixen, and a normal young woman — and gave each their own unique voices and gestures," according to Biography.com.

Woodward's other most famous movie roles, however, were in "Rachel Rachel" (1968) and "Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams" (1973), both of which she received Best Actress Academy Award nominations for (but she did not win the award either time). Woodward's award-winning career encompassed more than just film. She was also known for her work in television and won Emmy awards for roles in "See How She Runs" in 1978 and "Do you Remember Love?" in 1985.

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