THEY'RE THINNER THAN YOU, and prettier. They have better insurance plans and private planes. They smile better, smell better, and each individually earns more money than generations of your family. To Academy Award winners go all the spoils, including, according to a report published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, life itself. Scientists at the Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Center in Toronto have discovered that actors and actresses who win Oscars live years longer than their peers.
The paper entitled "Survival in Academy Award-Winning Actors and Actresses" reports that Oscar-winning stars live 3.9 years longer than those who are nominated but lose. Oscar-nominated actors who lose, however, gain nothing in life expectancy over actors who are not nominated at all. In an interview with FEED, Donald A. Redelmeier, MD, co-author of the paper with Sheldon Singh, BSc, stressed that the Oscar effect doesn't mean actors who lose live shorter lives, it means that the winners live longer than would be expected given the average for the group.
Redelmeier and Singh accounted for the possible effects of birth year, sex, ethnicity, birth country, age at release of first film and total films in career. They showed that, regardless of these factors, being handed an Oscar is like being handed a shining little nugget of immortality. Better still, actors and actresses who win more than one Oscar live even longer, about 6 years more than their non-winning peers. As for multiply nominated actors who have never won -- it's back to the scrapheap with them. They have the same life expectancy as those nominated just once or those nominated not at all. "This is not just a wealth effect," Redelmeier said. "All the other indicators -- nominations, number of nominations, number of films, and quality of films -- would be associated with greater levels of income, and yet this survival benefit is distinct to winning an Academy Award and is not found with these other indirect measures of wealth."
So, the Oscar effect predicts that while three-time nominated Tom Cruise has the same life expectancy as one-time nominated Tom Hulce, Cuba Gooding Jr., who won the one award for which he was nominated, can expect about four more years than either. Jack Nicholson, on the other hand, gets no extra time for his eleven Oscar nominations. His three Oscar wins, however, may be the only reason the legendarily debauched actor is alive today. If you're a non-Oscar winning actor and you think this is unfair, consider this: As a group, actors have a slightly greater life expectancy than that generally prevailing in the United States. Statistically speaking, most of the Academy Award television audience has even less time available to them than the bravely smiling losers in the Shrine Auditorium.

THE IDEA OF ANALYZING death rates in Oscar winners came to Redelmeier as he watched the Academy Awards one night. "I was struck," he said, "that the people on stage didn't look anything like the patients I saw in my clinic. It was not just the clothing or the makeup, it was the way they walked and gestured and talked. They seemed so much more vivacious." It is a long established fact that social status is a major determinant of death rates. Irrespective of the cause of death, factors like income and level of education influence mortality rates. Most of the research that supports this finding is based on people living in poverty or near poverty. However, in the early eighties and nineties, two famous studies, Whitehall I and Whitehall II, examined the mortality of British civil servants. Renowned for its rigid work hierarchy and associated class divisions, the civil service provided an unparalleled opportunity for measuring the effects of social stature on health. In both studies, the male workers examined had much in common -- they worked in similar locations, they were all office bound, and they were similar in terms of income and ethnicity. Nevertheless, the rate of death was found to be inversely related to job status. The lower your job, the likelier you were to die younger. In fact, the men in the lowest tier of civil employment had a mortality rate three times higher than the men in the highest tier. Even though important differences existed between tiers, such as rate of smoking, the three-fold mortality rate existed independently of other health factors.
Because poverty effects could not explain the results of the Whitehall studies, psychological explanations were sought. The lack of personal control that workers in the lower tiers had over their jobs was thought to have a profound influence on death rate. This has been explored more recently in studies showing that lack of control in social situations can raise levels of the hormone cortisol, which can in turn lead to arteriosclerosis and depression of the immune system. As science writer Matt Ridley proposed in Genome, "cortisol levels rise in response not to the amount of work you do, but to the degree to which you are ordered about by other people."
Still, these explanations focused on the quality of life of workers with lower social status. In contrast, Redelmeier had always wanted to examine the rich for social status effects. "But," he said, "it's a more difficult task." Not only are there fewer wealthy people than poor, they also tend to zealously guard their privacy.
The very public nature of the motion picture industry made it particularly useful for testing how much, if at all, social status affects mortality in the wealthier ranks of society. The TV viewing audience for the Oscars is often said to be more than one billion people, and this, say Redelmeier and Singh, makes it one of the most "widely shared current human experiences." Whether you think they should be or not, the Oscars are a powerful determinant of social status.
The biggest surprise of the analysis for Redelmeier was not only that the effects of social status persisted for high status individuals but that the effect was so large. "If you were to cure all cancers in all people for all time in North America, you add only about 3.5 years to life expectancy," he said. Yet there is a 3.9-year gain associated with winning an Academy Award. "From a public health perspective, that's a very big number," said Redelmeier. "It amounts to an enormous difference in survival."