Oscar Winners Get More Time on Life’s Stage
Imagine what Julia Roberts’ acceptance speech would have been if she’d known she was winning not just an Academy Award but a better chance of living to a ripe old age.
That may be what she is getting, according to a new study, which reports that Oscar winners, on average, live 3.9 years longer than non-winners of similar ages who have acted in the same movies.
Four years may not sound like a lot, but a 3.9-year increase, write the authors of the new study, is the equivalent of what would be achieved by “curing all cancers in all people for all time.” The study was published today in Annals of Internal Medicine.
Such a finding may sound ridiculous, just one more of those fanciful correlations that science turns up from time to time. One epidemiologist contacted by The Times said he has doubts about some of the methodology the study used.
But it is also possible that the finding is part of a broader message emerging from other studies. Scientists say that success, independent of money, can affect people’s health. Poor people have the worst health problems. But researchers have found that, all the way up through the social spectrum, health differences persist even among groups of people who are doing very nicely in life.
One message conveyed by much of the research is that competition breeds stress while success brings relief.
Dr. Donald Redelmeier, lead author of the Academy Awards study, said he hopes the public will not jump to erroneous conclusions from his paper, in which he and a student analyzed every Oscar awarded for acting (except those of 2001) since the Academy Awards began in 1929.
“We are not saying that Academy Awards should be prescribed by physicians,” said Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. “We are not saying people should take acting lessons to increase their longevity.”
Redelmeier said he got the idea for the study while watching the Academy Awards a few years ago. Most studies on health disparities focus on the poor, he said; what about a study on one of the most privileged groups of people on the planet?
He and his student, Sheldon Singh, set about collecting birth and death data for the 762 actors and actresses who had ever been nominated for an Oscar in the categories of best actor or actress and best supporting actor or actress.
For comparison, Redelmeier and Singh picked other people of the same sex and of similar ages who’d acted in the same films. A total of 1,649 actors were included, of which 772 had died by the time the study was conducted.
Analyzing the data, the pair found no differences in the rates at which Oscar winners and non-Oscar-winners died of diseases such as cancer and heart disease.
But they found that, on average, Oscar winners lived to be 79.7 years old while non-winners lived to be 75.8 years old--a 3.9- year difference in life expectancy.
Merely getting nominated wasn’t enough, the study found: Nominees who missed the final prize lived no longer than those who never were in the running. And people who won more than one Oscar lived longer, on average, than those who were awarded just one.
Dr. Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at England’s University College London, said, “3.9 years is a huge effect--it’s huge.” Marmot’s own work on health disparities arising from socioeconomic differences garnered him a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II last year.
Marmot said he wasn’t familiar enough with the study’s methodology to comment on it. “And I have no insight at all into how mega-rich movie stars live,” he added.
But, he said, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suppose that the effect, if real, has something to do with a person’s perceived position in the pecking order. Oscar winners are at the top, whereas those who have not won--even if they’ve been nominated--may still feel as if they’re striving for success and recognition.
Marmot’s own long-term work on thousands of London office workers--all of them financially comfortable--has revealed big differences in people’s health, according to the status of their job within the office. In one study of 18,000 men, those in the most subordinate positions were three times more likely to have died during the time the study was being conducted.
The quality of health care was similar for everyone studied. And differences in patterns of unhealthy behavior such as smoking and drinking could only account for about 30% of health differences observed.
A subsequent study on another large group of workers suggests that the cause of these disparities is linked to levels of stress in people’s lives, Marmot said.
In primate studies, animals that are lower in the social pecking order are measurably more stressed, he said. And stress affects the body’s health through hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol, elevating blood pressure and lowering the ability of the immune system to fight diseases and cancers.
“I think it’s really interesting,” said Nancy Adler, professor of medical psychology at UC San Francisco, of the Academy Awards study. Adler’s own work has shown that women who perceive themselves as low on the social ladder have a higher heart rate and higher levels of stress hormones in their blood.
“What a fascinating thing,” David Thomson, a San Francisco writer on film, said of the study. Thomson, author of “A Biographical Dictionary of Film,” said that actors don’t tend to be short on ego and thus are likely to be especially sensitive to their position in the pecking order--and sensitive to the blow of defeat.
Should the study be believed?
“My sense is that there are some problems with the analysis of the data,” said Hal Morgenstern, professor of epidemiology at UCLA’s School of Public Health. The longer people live, the more chance they have to win an Oscar--and in Morgenstern’s view the scientists did not properly adjust their numbers to take this simple explanation into account. “How that affects their results I can’t say for sure.”
Redelmeier said this was considered but made no difference.
