About this chart race
Only three people have led this list since 1941, and all three are women. Bette Davis went in front in 1941 and stayed there for 27 years. Katharine Hepburn drew level with her in 1968 and led alone from 1981. Meryl Streep caught Hepburn in 1999, passed her in 2002, and has never been headed since.
No man has led this list, or even tied for the lead, since 1940. Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Denzel Washington all spent decades near the top without ever reaching it. Before 1941 the lead did change hands between men and women - Paul Muni was out in front in 1937, Norma Shearer for much of the early 1930s.
Streep is now nine nominations clear of the field: 21, against 12 for both Hepburn and Nicholson. Her run stretches across four decades, and she was nominated in seven separate years in which she did not win.
Two notes on how this is counted. Each nomination is placed in the year of the FILM, not the ceremony held the following spring, so a performance from 1993 appears at 1993. And a performer can pick up two nominations in one year in different categories - Al Pacino was nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in 1992, winning the first.
This animated ranking shows how cumulative academy award acting nominations changed across 47 series between 1927 and 2025. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2025, Meryl Streep leads with 21.
Included in this race
Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, Jack Nicholson, Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, Spencer Tracy, Paul Newman, Denzel Washington, Al Pacino, Peter O'Toole, Marlon Brando, Jack Lemmon, Geraldine Page, Richard Burton, Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson, Thelma Ritter, Paul Muni, Deborah Kerr, Olivia de Havilland, Norma Shearer, James Stewart, Irene Dunne, Gary Cooper, Fredric March, Arthur Kennedy, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Claude Rains, William Powell, Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, Wallace Beery, Ruth Chatterton, Marie Dressler, Leslie Howard, Janet Gaynor, Charlie Chaplin, Warner Baxter, Richard Barthelmess, Louise Dresser, Lewis Stone, George Bancroft, Emil Jannings, Chester Morris.
Source
Data from Wikipedia. Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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