40 Fun Facts About Saturn Awards

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for Ghost and again decades later for The Substance?

Demi Moore's two wins came 34 years apart, the widest gap between wins in the category. The second time she beat Winona Ryder's return in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Which Star Trek actor hosted the 1978 Saturn Awards and performed a much-parodied version of Rocket Man?

William Shatner delivered the Elton John hit seated on a stool with a cigarette, and the clip became a staple of comedy parodies. It was the first Saturn ceremony shown on television.

Sigourney Weaver, nominated four times as Ellen Ripley, won her only Saturn Award for Best Actress for which film?

Aliens won eight Saturn Awards that night, and the same performance earned Weaver the first Best Actress Oscar nomination ever given for a science-fiction film.

Natalie Portman won both the Saturn Award and the Academy Award for Best Actress for which 2010 film?

Black Swan made Portman the first actress to win both prizes for the same film. She had already taken the Saturn four years earlier for V for Vendetta.

Which Tom Hanks film, set across decades of real American history, won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film?

Forrest Gump beat The Lion King and The Mask to the fantasy prize, and Gary Sinise won Best Supporting Actor as Lieutenant Dan.

Anthony Hopkins won both the Saturn Award and the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing which character?

Hannibal Lecter made Hopkins the first actor to win both lead prizes for one role, and The Silence of the Lambs was also named Best Horror Film.

On the Saturn Award statuette, what object forms the ring around the planet?

A film reel circles the planet on the statuette, which was introduced for the first televised ceremony in 1978. Before that, there was no trophy at all.

Which True Lies star shared the Saturn Award for Best Actress with Speed's Sandra Bullock in a rare tie?

Jamie Lee Curtis shared the category's first tie, then won outright more than two decades later for returning to Halloween as Laurie Strode.

Which action star earned seven Saturn Award nominations for Best Actor between 1984 and 2000 without ever winning?

Arnold Schwarzenegger has the most Best Actor nominations of anyone who never won. Even Terminator 2, which took Best Science Fiction Film, did not bring him the prize.

Margot Kidder won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing which reporter in the 1978 film Superman?

Lois Lane brought Kidder the prize in a year when Superman was also named Best Science Fiction Film, and she was nominated again for the role in Superman II.

Who won both the Saturn Award and the Oscar for Best Actress as laundromat owner Evelyn Quan Wang?

Michelle Yeoh won both for Everything Everywhere All at Once, more than two decades after her first Saturn nomination, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Daryl Hannah won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing a mermaid named Madison in which comedy?

Splash was the first film released under Disney's grown-up Touchstone Pictures label, and Hannah beat Linda Hamilton's first turn in The Terminator to the award.

Sandra Bullock won her first Saturn Award for Best Actress for Speed and her second for which film?

Gravity gave Bullock a second win from only her second nomination, 19 years after Speed. The film was also named Best Science Fiction Film.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing Sidney Prescott in the 1996 slasher Scream?

Neve Campbell beat Frances McDormand, who won that season's Best Actress Oscar for Fargo. Scream was also named Best Horror Film.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing the Bride in Kill Bill: Volume 1?

Uma Thurman won for the first film and was nominated again for Kill Bill: Volume 2, when the prize went to Blanchard Ryan for the shark thriller Open Water.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for a fully computer-generated character, Neytiri in Avatar?

Zoe Saldaña's win was a rare one for an all-CG character, and Avatar took home every one of the ten Saturn Awards it was nominated for.

Charlize Theron won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing Imperator Furiosa in which film?

Mad Max: Fury Road won where its prequel could not: Anya Taylor-Joy was nominated for playing the younger Furiosa nine years later but lost.

Gal Gadot won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for which 2017 superhero film directed by Patty Jenkins?

Wonder Woman beat Sally Hawkins of The Shape of Water to the prize, in the season that fantasy romance won the Best Picture Oscar.

Who won the first Saturn Award for Best Actress on Television for playing Dana Scully in The X-Files?

Gillian Anderson took the television prize in its first year, 1996, and was nominated in the film category two years later for The X-Files movie.

Which adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut novel won the first Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film?

Slaughterhouse-Five also won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Who is the youngest winner of the Saturn Award for Best Actress, for The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane?

Jodie Foster won as a teenager for playing a mysterious girl who lives alone in a small town, then took the prize again 20 years later for Contact.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark?

Karen Allen's prize was one of seven Saturn Awards for Raiders, which was honored as Best Fantasy Film. She was nominated again three years later for Starman.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress as a woman stalked by an unseen ex in The Invisible Man?

Elisabeth Moss beat Rebecca Ferguson of Doctor Sleep and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, and The Invisible Man was also named Best Horror Film.

Amy Adams won the Saturn Award for Best Actress as a fairy-tale princess stranded in New York in which film?

Enchanted won three Saturn Awards, including Best Fantasy Film, and established Adams as a leading lady. She was nominated again nine years later for Arrival.

Naomi Watts won Saturn Awards for Best Actress for The Ring and for playing Ann Darrow in which remake?

King Kong gave Watts her second win in three years, and Peter Jackson took Best Director for the same film.

Nicole Kidman won the Saturn Award for Best Actress as a mother guarding her light-sensitive children in which film?

The Others won three Saturn Awards, including Best Horror Film and a supporting prize for Fionnula Flanagan as the newly arrived housekeeper.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress as bodyguard Mace in the 1995 thriller Strange Days?

Angela Bassett played a bodyguard and limousine driver in a lawless Los Angeles counting down to the year 2000, and beat Sharon Stone and Nicole Kidman to the prize.

Katharine Ross won the first Saturn Award for Best Actress for which 1975 thriller set in a Connecticut suburb?

The Stepford Wives cast Ross as a newcomer who finds the town's women living in total subservience to their husbands. No other nominees were announced that year.

Andie MacDowell won the Saturn Award for Best Actress opposite Bill Murray in which 1993 comedy?

Groundhog Day lost Best Fantasy Film to The Nightmare Before Christmas that night, and Bill Murray missed out on Best Actor, leaving MacDowell as its only winner.

Who won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for playing Amy Dunne in the thriller Gone Girl?

Rosamund Pike beat Emily Blunt and Angelina Jolie to the Saturn, and the same role brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

Before the planet statuette arrived in the late 1970s, Saturn Award winners received a prize with what name?

Golden Scroll was a certificate, and the original name of the awards themselves. The trophy is still sometimes loosely called one.

Which film historian founded the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films and devised the Saturn Awards?

Donald A. Reed set up the Academy in 1972 because he felt genre films never got the appreciation they deserved from Hollywood's established prizes.

Which actor won the Saturn Award for Best Actor three times as one Marvel hero, starting with a 2008 film?

Robert Downey Jr. won as Tony Stark in Iron Man, Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Endgame. His first Saturn came 15 years earlier, as a man haunted by four friendly spirits in Heart and Souls.

Which director holds the record for most Saturn Award Best Director wins, ahead of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson?

James Cameron also won the award two years running, for The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and added three more wins for his Avatar films.

Who became the first woman to win the Saturn Award for Best Director, for the 1995 thriller Strange Days?

Kathryn Bigelow took the Saturn 14 years before she became the first woman to win the Best Director Oscar, for The Hurt Locker.

Martin Landau won the Saturn Award for Best Actor and an Oscar for playing which horror star in Ed Wood?

Bela Lugosi, the faded Dracula star, is befriended by the cult filmmaker in Tim Burton's film. The Saturns honored it as a lead role, while the Oscar was for Best Supporting Actor.

Which 1972 blaxploitation film about an African prince's curse won the first Saturn Award for Best Horror Film?

Blacula's box-office success sparked a wave of blaxploitation-themed horror films, and a sequel, Scream Blacula Scream, followed a year later.

Which film series won the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film three years running, from 2001 to 2003?

The Lord of the Rings beat a Harry Potter film in each of the first two years, and its final chapter went on to win all 11 Oscars it was nominated for.

Mary Steenburgen won the Saturn Award for Best Actress for which 1979 film about H. G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper?

Time After Time was Nicholas Meyer's directing debut and won him the Saturn for Best Writing. Three years later he took Best Director for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Virginia Madsen won the Saturn Award for Best Actress as a student researching an urban legend in which 1992 film?

Candyman is based on a Clive Barker short story and follows a Chicago graduate student whose thesis leads her to a hook-handed ghost.