Vanessa Redgrave Reflects on Her 1978 Oscar Acceptance Speech

In this interview clip, Vanessa speaks about the night she won an Oscar acceptance speech for her role in the film Julia. The Academy president asked her to only thank individuals if she won the award. She did not comply because she wanted to speak up for what was right, even if it risked her career. At the 1978 Oscars, actress Vanessa Redgrave won the award for Best Supporting Actress. She played the title role in Julia, a film about fighting Nazism. She gave a speech that, as recently as 2019, The New York Times still considered “the most political ceremony in Academy history.” The previous year, Redgrave had sold two houses to raise funds to produce a film called The Palestinian, a documentary about the Palestinian struggle, which she narrated herself. After her Oscar nomination for Julia, a terrorist group, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), threatened the members of the Academy with repercussions if they voted for Redgrave, citing her “one-sided” film and her support for the Palestinian people. They put a bounty on Redgrave’s head and picketed Oscar night, burning her in effigy as “Arafat’s whore.” A JDL member would later go on to be convicted of the bombing of a Los Angeles theater that had been set to screen The Palestinian. So it was a grand victory that the Academy ignored the JDL’s threats and voted for Redgrave to win the Oscar. She used her speech to thank the audience. “I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks, you’ve stood firm... You have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums,” she continued, despite boos and audible gasps from the audience. She persevered: “… whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression.”