Why these artists have more than earned their honorary Oscars

Born Sept. 13, 1946 in Glendale, California, Frank Marshall found his way to filmmaking in the late 1960s as an assistant to then up-and-coming director Peter Bogdanovich on the low-budget thriller “Targets” and the coming-of-age classic “The Last Picture Show." He also assisted Orson Welles on the set of the legendary filmmaker’s final, posthumously completed movie, “The Other Side of the Win." “I was fired frequently,” said Marshall in a recent interview. “I’d wait until he said, ‘Where’s Frank? Get Frank!’ — as if I’d somehow just wandered off.”

Marshall started racking up producing credits in the 1970s thanks to his continued association with Bogdanovich. He also collaborated with director Walter Hill on the existential car chase flick “The Driver” and the rough-and-tumble street gang classic “The Warriors." But his filmmaking career didn’t truly blast off until 1981 when he hooked up with Steven Spielberg for the tale of a relic-pilfering archeologist named Indiana Jones. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” grossed $212 million that year and launched one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood history.

Kathleen Kennedy was born in Berkeley, California on June 5, 1953. Her father was a judge and her mother a theater actress, but it didn’t take long for Kennedy to realize what she absolutely had to do was make movies. She majored in film and telecommunications at San Diego State University in the early 1970s and entered a “cinephile phase” that turned her on to the iconic work of, among others, David Lean, Francois Truffaut and Federico Fellini. By the end of the decade, she’d moved to Hollywood and landed a gig as an assistant to screenwriter John Milius while he was working on “1941” with Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was immediately impressed by Kennedy and hired her away to serve as his assistant on “Raiders of the Lost Ark."

With one runaway blockbuster under their belt, Spielberg, Kennedy and Marshall decided to make a sustained go of it by forming Amblin Entertainment and, in the process, collectively redefined escapist entertainment for an entire generation. “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial," “Gremlins," “The Goonies," “Back to the Future” — these films captured the upbeat ‘80s zeitgeist and dominated the box office. Throughout the entire decade, Amblin was a four-quadrant, hit-making machine. Its films didn’t always connect (“Young Sherlock Holmes," “Innerspace” and “*batteries not included” underperformed relative to expectations), but for every stumble there was another smash (e.g. “An American Tale," “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and “The Land Before Time”).

Marshall and Kennedy got married in 1987 and broke away from Amblin in 1992 to launch their own production entity, The Kennedy/Marshall Company.  Their blockbuster instincts were as sharp as ever: “The Sixth Sense," “Signs,” “Seabiscuit” and the Jason Bourne franchise are the clear standouts. But what’s more remarkable is the paucity of duds throughout the company’s 26-year history. They might hit home runs every time at the plate, but they rarely go down swinging.

In 1990, Marshall tried his hand at directing with the enormously entertaining “Arachnophobia." Though the film wasn’t quite as popular as had been expected (the newly formed Hollywood Pictures bafflingly mismarketed it as a “thrill-omedy”), it was a confidently directed mainstream entertainment that suggested Marshall could give his producing partner a run for his money in the blockbuster department. Curiously, Marshall has directed only three more films (“Alive," “Congo” and “Eight Below”). With the exception of the gorillas-and-lasers misfire, the movies have worked on their own modest terms.

Kennedy has thus far resisted the call of the director’s chair, preferring instead to pursue her mogul-ish ambitions as the president of Lucasfilm Ltd. Under her watch, the company bounced back from the unevenly received prequels with “Star Wars: The Force Awakens," which currently stands as the highest grossing film in U.S. box office history. Though her attempt to branch out with the “Star Wars Story” brand fizzled out with 2018’s “Solo," the franchise has never been healthier. Fan excitement for J.J. Abrams’ return to the series with the follow-up to “The Last Jedi” is through the roof.

Born in Harlem on Dec. 19, 1924 to West Indies immigrants, Cicely L. Tyson got her start as a fashion model before disobeying her mother’s wishes to pursue a career in acting. (Tyson was forced to move out of her parents’ house, and the two did not speak for a couple of years.) Though Tyson’s success was far from overnight, she worked steadily on television throughout the 1960s in series like “East Side/West Side” with George C. Scott and “I Spy." She made her film debut in the 1957 B movie “Carib Gold," but the big screen breakthrough wouldn’t arrive until the 1970s.

The cultural impact of Martin Ritt’s 1972 family drama “Sounder” cannot be overstated. Pauline Kael called it “the first movie about black experiences in America that can stir people of all colors," and hailed Tyson’s fierce Rebecca Morgan as “the first great black heroine on the screen." In an interview for Elle with Viola Davis, Tyson said, “That movie was, for me, the first acknowledgment that I could do something that would move people.” Amen. Her performance as a woman holding her sharecropper family together in the face of unrelenting prejudice was more than worthy of a Best Actress nomination.

Tyson went four years without a major film role after the triumph of “Sounder," and the big screen’s loss was television’s gain. In the TV movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Tyson turns in a tour de force performance as an African-American woman who experienced slavery as a child and the civil rights movement of the 1960s at the age of 110 (her old-age makeup courtesy of f/x wizards Rick Baker and Stan Winston). She won two richly deserved Emmys for this portrayal.

Tyson has kept busy over the years in both film and television, appearing in “Fried Green Tomatoes," “The Help," “Last Flag Flying” and episodes of “How to Get Away with Murder." She also won a Tony Award for portrayal of Miss Carrie Watts in “The Trip to Bountiful." She’s still plugging away at the age of 93, as brilliant and indefatigable as Miss Pittman herself.

The fuse was lit in Buenos Aires, Argentina on June 21, 1932, and composer Lalo Schifrin has been burning brightly ever since with explosively propulsive scores for movies and television. Schifrin began receiving classical training at the age of 6 but nearly gave it all up for a law degree. He eventually got back on the musical track and was granted a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. His jazzy predilections drew him into the orbits of giants like Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Xavier Cugat, but Hollywood got its hooks into him in 1964 when he composed his first film score (for the eminently forgettable “Rhino!”).

Hollywood’s embrace in the 1960s of more modern musical styles played perfectly to Schifrin’s strengths. In 1966, he delivered one of the most iconic and enduring action cues with the funky, 5/4-time main theme for CBS’ “Mission: Impossible." Schifrin revisited the unusual time signature when he scored Stuart Rosenberg’s “Cool Hand Luke." Suddenly, Schifrin was all the offbeat rage, which earned him gigs on such classics as Peter Yates’ “Bullitt," Don Siegel’s “Dirty Harry” and Bruce Lee’s breakthrough “Enter the Dragon."

Schifrin’s specific sound fell out of favor as the 1970s drew to a close. He continued to work steadily with Clint Eastwood (until the conclusion of the "Dirty Harry" series in 1988 with “The Dead Pool”), but he was something of a musical anachronism until Brett Ratner brought him back with “Money Talks” and the “Rush Hour” movies. For whatever reason, Schifrin’s rhythmically sophisticated scores were a perfect match for the boisterous comedic antics of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. 

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to traverse the Universal Studios backlot in the San Fernando Valley, it’s possible you crossed paths with a short, elderly but still 100-percent-with-it publicist named Marvin Levy. And if you had a message to relay to Steven Spielberg, you couldn’t have found a more reliable courier than the man who’s served as the filmmaker’s publicist since 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Levy is the man between The Man.

But Levy is much more than an ace publicist. Since the 1990s, he’s served as Spielberg’s point man on the implementation of the director’s Holocaust education initiatives. He’s also run numerous awards campaigns for his top client, which paid off in Best Director Oscars for “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan." No one has performed this flesh-pressing errand with as much grace and bonhomie as Levy. Publicists don’t often win honorary Oscars, but if a practitioner of this discipline ever deserved to shelve one on the mantel, it’s Mr. Levy.