Emmy Countdown : Who Says Winners Never Lose? : Surprising Also-Rans and History-Making Choices Populate the Emmys’ Past

With the 51st annual Emmy Awards on tap for this Sunday on Fox, it’s the perfect time to look at some of the strange, fun factoids in the history of the awards.

* Angela Lansbury isn’t quite the Susan Lucci of the prime-time Emmys--but close. The star of the classic mystery series, “Murder, She Wrote,” was nominated for best actress in a drama series for her role as Jessica Fletcher 12 times. She never won. Lansbury didn’t have any better luck when she was nominated four other times in different categories.

* “Dynasty”: The popular ABC series, which starred John Forsythe, Linda Evans and Joan Collins, received 24 nominations during its run. It may have been a hit with viewers, but it never took home a single Emmy.

* Jackie Gleason was always a best man and never the groom when it came to the Emmys. Nominated twice for the award, once for “The Jackie Gleason Show” and once for “The Honeymooners,” he saw his co-star Art Carney take home three statuettes--one for “The Honeymooners” and two for “The Jackie Gleason Show.”

* Ted Danson was nominated seven times for best actor in a comedy for “Cheers” before he finally won in 1990 on his eighth attempt. The Sam Malone role brought him a second Emmy in 1993.

* Lucille Ball took home the 1952 Emmy for best comedienne for “I Love Lucy.” But she lost the Emmy that year for most outstanding personality to Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who appeared on the short-lived DuMont network. The other diverse nominees in the category were Jimmy Durante, Arthur Godfrey, Edward R. Murrow, Donald O’Connor and Adlai Stevenson.

* Harry Belafonte was the first African American performer to win an Emmy. He won in 1959 for outstanding performance in a variety or music program or series for CBS’ “Tonight With Belafonte, the Revlon Review.” He had received two nominations four years earlier--for best male singer, which he lost to Perry Como, and for best specialty act, single or group, which went to Marcel Marceau.

* Bill Cosby was the first African American to win best drama series actor. He won in that category for three years running in the ‘60s, with the first in 1965. Only two other African American actors have since won in that category: James Earl Jones won in 1991 for “Gabriel’s Fire,” and Andre Braugher took home the statuette last year for “Homicide: Life on the Street.”

* Westerns have long kicked up the ratings dust on TV. “Gunsmoke” is the first and only western to have won the Emmy for best drama series. It won in 1957, beating out “Lassie,” “Maverick,” “Perry Mason” and “Wagon Train.”

* What will winning an Emmy do for a show? Sometimes not much. Consider NBC’s “My World and Welcome to It.” The show took home a best comedy series Emmy in 1969, its first season, a particularly fortunate win given the network’s decision that the show’s first season would also be its last.

* While movie sequels rarely do as well at the box office, in at least one case, Emmy gold repeated. “Eleanor and Franklin” won outstanding special in 1976. The sequel, “Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years” won in the same category the following year.

* The award for the most unusual Emmy category could arguably go to Jack Benny’s 1957 Emmy for “best continuing performance in a series by a man who essentially plays himself.” The other nominees were Steve Allen, Sid Caesar, Perry Como and Jack Paar.

* Rarely do spinoffs of popular series succeed. But “Frasier” has broken that jinx, winning the Emmy for best comedy an unprecedented five times in a row--and it’s in the running again this year. It was the first spinoff series of an Emmy Award-winning comedy (“Cheers”) to win in this category.

* Ingrid Bergman won an Emmy for her first dramatic TV performance for 1959’s “The Turn of the Screw.” She also won an Emmy for her final small screen performance in the 1982 syndicated miniseries, “A Woman Called Golda.”

* Jack Lemmon is nominated for an Emmy this year for his role as a Clarence Darrow-esque lawyer in Showtime’s revival of the classic, “Inherit the Wind.” Eleven years ago, Jason Robards won an Emmy for the same role in NBC’s acclaimed version of the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee play about the Scopes “monkey trial.”

* In 1985-86, all the nominees for outstanding guest performer in a comedy series appeared on “The Cosby Show”: Roscoe Lee Brown, Earle Hyman, Danny Kaye, Clarice Taylor and Stevie Wonder. Brown won.

* “Peter Pan,” with Mary Martin, won the best single program of the year Emmy in 1955.

* In 1969, Ned Glass (“Julia”), Hal Holbrook (“The Whole World Is Watching”) and Billy Schulman (“Teacher, Teacher”) were all nominated for outstanding supporting actor. Apparently there was no best performance because no winner was chosen.

* Lee Grant won for outstanding single performance by a lead actress in 1971 for the NBC movie, “The Neon Ceiling.” She competed against herself in that same category for her performance in the NBC “Columbo” movie, “Ransom for a Dead Man.”

* Masterpiece Theatre’s “Elizabeth R” won outstanding new series and outstanding drama series Emmys in 1972. Glenda Jackson also won two Emmys for the series--outstanding single performance by a lead actress in the “Shadow in the Sun” episode and as outstanding actress in a drama series.

* Geraldine Page won an Emmy in 1967 for outstanding single performance by a lead actress in drama for the “ABC Stage ‘67” drama, “A Christmas Memory,” based on the Truman Capote story. The following year, she won the Emmy in the same category for the sequel, “A Thanksgiving Visitor.”

* Mary Tyler Moore won best comedy actress five times, twice for “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and three times for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

* Valerie Harper won three consecutive best supporting comedy actress awards for her role as Rhoda on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” She subsequently won best actress of 1974-75 for her spinoff, “Rhoda.”

* Cloris Leachman won outstanding single performance by a supporting actress in a comedy or drama series for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1974-75. That same year, she also won outstanding supporting actress in a variety or musical for the “Cher” show.