7 Oscar Winners Who Almost Quit Acting

The Oscars are perhaps the most prestigious awards in cinema, and winning one (or two, or more) is often the highlight of an actor’s career. Some past Oscar-winners, however, have either stepped away from the limelight having won an Academy Award, or, conversely, have almost walked away from the movie-making business before experiencing a career turnaround, and achieving the industry’s highest honor. Ten Oscar-winning performers who went through precisely those ups and downs are explored here.

Brie Larson
Daniel Kaluuya
James Stewart
Jane Fonda
Kieran Culkin
Ray Milland
Daniel Day-Lewis

Brie Larson

Brie Larson memorably took home the 2015 Best Actress Oscar for her role in Room—but almost walked away from the film industry after years of near constant rejection, not long before being cast. “I threw in the towel a lot,” she later explained. “I couldn’t take the no’s over and over.”

The turning point was the comedy-drama series United States of Tara, in which Larson appeared as Tara’s teenage daughter, Kate, alongside star Toni Collette, from 2009 to 2011. Initially, however, she missed out on the role, which was given to Mr. Robot star Patricia Doubleday at first; the rejection was enough to lead Larson to contemplate giving up acting and taking up studying marine biology instead. When the show’s producers chose to go in a different direction with Doubleday’s character, they gave the role to Larson instead, which was just the springboard she needed to go on to achieve Oscar greatness just a few years later.

Daniel Kaluuya

Just a matter of years before he became one of the youngest Best Supporting Actor winners in Oscar history in 2021, Judas and the Black Messiah star Daniel Kaluuya stopped acting for over a year, due to a lack of roles and opportunities for black actors in the industry. “I had stopped acting for like a year and a half,” he later explained. “I checked out, because I was just like, this isn’t working. I wasn't getting roles because racism and all this kind of stuff.” Just as he was stepping back from the movies, though, the script for Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror Get Out landed. The role made Kaluuya a star, and four years later, he won his first Oscar.

James Stewart

In February 1941, 32-year-old James Stewart both enlisted in the US Army and won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in George Cukor’s romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story. A month later, he was drafted, and despite the Oscar win, World War II would see Stewart take a four-year break from acting. And when the war was over, Stewart’s wartime experiences left him wondering whether he wanted to return to the industry at all.

The role that changed his mind was It’s a Wonderful Life, but even after production had begun, there were whispers on set that Stewart might still drop out. “There was a lot of insecurity on set,” Stewart’s co-star Donna Reed later recalled, “because Jimmy wasn’t sure if he wanted to act anymore. He thought it was too frivolous.” Happily, he was talked round not just to continue with the film but with the acting profession itself, and went on to star in classics such as Harvey (which also earned him an Oscar nod), Rear Window, and Vertigo.

Jane Fonda

Incredibly, given how much of a Hollywood mainstay she has been across seven decades, Jane Fonda almost walked away from making movies after only her first film. The film in question was 1960’s Tall Story, the filmmaking experience on which was enough to have Fonda decide to “quit while I was ahead,” as she later put it, as she “didn’t enjoy the experience.” (The situation reportedly wasn’t helped by film’s director, Joshua Logan, advising the 23-year-old actress to get brutally invasive cosmetic surgery “so your cheeks aren’t puffy.”) Happily, Fonda reconsidered and went on to win the first of her two Oscars, for the psychological thriller Klute, in 1971.

Kieran Culkin

In fairness, Kieran Culkin didn’t really look to quit acting, but rather quit the role for which he went on to win an Oscar.

Culkin had already been signed on to appear in Jesse Eisenberg’s 2024 comic drama A Real Pain for over a year when filming for his role in TV’s Succession overran, leaving him with no break between shooting schedules in which to catch up with his family. Not wanting to miss out on a break at home, Culkin “had a panic,” as he later put it, and looked to step away from the role, which was imminently due to begin shooting in Poland.

Luckily, some pre-shoot coaxing by his then-girlfriend, the film’s producer (and two-time Oscar winner herself), Emma Stone, led him to reconsider. In the end, schedules were realigned to allow Culkin’s family to join him in Europe for part of the shoot. It all ultimately worked out well—very well, in fact, as Culkin went on to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for the role.

Ray Milland

Perhaps not as well remembered today as some of the other stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Welsh-born actor Ray Milland (one of the first Brits ever to win an Oscar) picked up the Academy Award for Best Actor for his role as an alcoholic writer in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend in 1945. After his Oscar win, however, Milland’s career fluctuated, and he almost walked away from acting several times. After stepping behind the camera to direct a handful of films in the 1950s, Milland gave up acting altogether, but the hiatus only lasted six months. “My wife told me I’d better get a job of some kind because I was making her a nervous wreck … hanging around the house,” he later explained.

The project he came back to (a short-lived detective serial called Markham) wasn’t well received, however, and Milland again walked away from acting, this time to retire to the French Riviera. Despite now living the good life, Milland soon became bored and returned to the industry. He continued acting until the mid 1980s, before he died in 1986 at the age of 79.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Perhaps the most famous “quitter” in Best Actor Oscar history, three-time winner Daniel Day-Lewis has stepped away from acting on several occasions (including a famous stint in the mid 1990s—not long after his first win, for My Left Foot in 1989—in which he retired to northern Italy to work as a shoemaker).

He ostensibly retired from acting after his role in 2017’s Phantom Thread, which he later explained had left him feeling “hollowed out” and in need of an extended break, but at no point has he ever fully quit acting and has always been tempted back to the industry. “I never intended to retire, really,” Day-Lewis said in 2025, having been tempted to return to acting once again to appear in his son Ronan’s directorial debut Anemone, “I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work.”