Booker Prize: Five other times awards have been shared
This year’s Booker Prize is not the first time an arts award has been given to multiple recipients. …
Image copyright Getty Images For the third time in its 50-year history, the Booker Prize has been shared between two authors.
Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo were named joint winners on Monday and will each receive half of the £50,000 prize money.
The award was previously shared in 1974 and again in 1992, after which the rules were changed to prevent another tie.
Yet this year’s judges chose to overrule their own regulations and split the prize between Atwood’s The Testaments and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other.
Here are five other notable occasions when more than one party ended up being crowned the victor in an arts and entertainment contest.
Academy Awards, 1969
Ingrid Bergman was as surprised as anyone when she opened an envelope on 14 April 1969 to discover the best actress Oscar would go to two people.
“It’s a tie!” she exclaimed, revealing to a stunned audience that Katherine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand would both be honoured for The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl respectively.
Both actresses received 3,030 votes each, though only Streisand was present to accept. Hepburn’s Oscar – her third of four – was accepted on her behalf by her director Anthony Harvey.
A tie had previously occurred in 1932 when Fredric March and Wallace Beery were both named best actor.
March had actually received one more vote than Berry, but the rules at the time decreed a tie would be declared if any actor came within three votes of winning.
There have been four other ties in the history of the Academy Awards, though those all occurred in less prominent categories.
The most recent took place in 2013 when the best sound editing Oscar was shared between Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty.
Eurovision Song Contest, 1969
For the first and only time in Eurovision history, the 1969 contest resulted in a four-way split.
France, Spain, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom were all named winners after ending up with the same points tally in Madrid.
At the time, each country had a jury consisting of 10 members who each awarded one point to their favourite song. An unlikely turn of events caused four countries to gain 18 points each.
Since there was no rule at the time to cover a tie, all four were declared winners and were invited to perform their respective winning songs.
Years later, Lulu called the situation “ridiculous” but admitted she was “so glad” her Boom Bang-a-Bang song had been one of the top four.
“If I’d have been five I’d have been desperate,” the Scottish singer told Australian talk show Today Extra in 2016.
Golden Globes, 1988
History was made twice at the 46th Golden Globe awards when two of its categories resulted in a three-way tie.
Jodie Foster, Shirley MacLaine and Sigourney Weaver all shared the award for best actress in a motion picture drama.
“I don’t believe this,” muttered Michael Douglas as he declared the result with his Fatal Attraction co-star Anne Archer.
Weaver, for her part, said the award should have resulted in “a five-way tie”. MacLaine did not attend the ceremony.
The prize for best actor in a comedy or musical TV series, meanwhile, was jointly awarded to Michael J Fox, Judd Hirsch and Richard Mulligan.
Empty Nest star Mulligan was the only one of the three on hand to accept his award in person.
There were three other two-way ties on one of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s more bonkers nights.
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, 2016
The judges of the UK’s only literary award for comic literature couldn’t decide between two of the 2016 nominees. So they decided to honour both.
That meant authors Paul Murray and Hannah Rothschild both had Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs named after their respective winning novels.
It was the first time the award – presented annually to the book (or books) deemed to best capture the comic spirit of PG Wodehouse – had been split between two winners.
Jurist James Naughtie said it had been “impossible to separate” Murray’s The Mark and the Void and Rothschild’s debut novel The Improbability of Love.
Interestingly, the panel that year included Peter Florence, chair of the jury that chose to split this year’s Booker Prize.
Critics’ Choice Awards, 2019
Earlier this year, Glenn Close and Lady Gaga were both crowned best actress at the 24th annual Critics’ Choice Awards.
Close was recognised for her work in The Wife, while Lady Gaga was honoured for her performance in A Star is Born.
“I was so thrilled [to tie] with Gaga,” Close told reporters afterwards. “Maybe one year everyone in the same category will all be up there together, because how do you choose?”
This was actually the second tie of the night as the award for best actress in a TV movie or limited series was also bifurcated.
“I actually can’t think of a more beautiful thing than a tie, because there really isn’t a winner when we get to do such great work and we have such wonderful opportunities,” said Amy Adams as she shared the stage with fellow winner Patricia Arquette.
Ties are relatively common at the Broadcast Film Critics Association’s awards, though this was only the second time two occurred at the same ceremony.
It was a case of mixed emotions for Gaga, who rushed from the January ceremony to “say goodbye” to her dying horse Arabella.
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