Jean Smart’s incredible record, which makes Emmy Awards history
By winning her fifth Emmy for Hacks, she became the first actress to be awarded for each season of the same series.
Jean Smart has just done something that no actress had achieved before her at the Emmy Awards.
For her performance in season 5 of Hacks, the actress won the trophy on Monday evening for the third year in a row, but also the fifth Emmy for best actress in a comedy for the role of Deborah Vance. It is above all the first time that an actress has won the trophy in each season of the same series.
Hacks ended last May after 5 seasons and each time, its star was crowned. Called on stage by Zendaya, who presented the prize, the 75-year-old actress received a real ovation before saying, amused: “Only the men stay standing. The girls can sit down.”
She then joked about the pain her colleagues have to endure to pay tribute to her:
“Every time it happens, I think of the girls who are like, ‘I was finally settled, why did she have to…?’ You have your girdle, your corset, your plaster, your shoes that cut off your toes and you say to yourself: My God, she’s not that good. You got up because she is old.”
Before her, only one actor had managed to win an Emmy for each season of his series: Bill Cosby, awarded three years in a row for I Spy, from 1966 to 1968. Jean Smart therefore became the first woman to achieve this feat and the first performer to do so over five seasons.
This new trophy also brings her total to 8 Emmy Awards, which allows her to equal the record held by Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the greatest number of Emmy Awards victories by a performer, men and women combined. A record that she also shares with Allison Janney, also crowned last night (Best Supporting Actress) for the eighth time, thanks to The Diplomate.
Before Hacks, Jean Smart had already been rewarded twice for her role in Frasier, in 2000 and 2001, then for Samantha who? in 2008. She has also been nominated for The District, 24, Harry’s Law, Fargo, Watchmen and Mare of Easttown.
