Heard of the Oscars Curse? No, it has nothing to do with that swan dress Bjork wore way back when... It seems whomever takes home the bald golden man also takes with her a curse that will affect her married life.
Silly as it sounds, researchers at the University of Toronto trawled through the vaults (to the year 1936), and found that leading leading ladies historically paid the piper in her personal life for winning the accolade.
In fact, Best Actresses were 1.68 times more likely to divorce than those who did not win, even though the romantic lives of their male counterparts weren't significantly affected either by a nomination or a win. Dubious? Consider Reese Witherspoon, Kate Winslet, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Hilary Swank and Halle Berry...
The high divorce rate among cream-of-the-crop actresses would seem to suggest households don't adjust well when the lady of the house plants a gold statuette on her mantle. (Add to that the fact that in this year's Oscars, women comprised a meagre quarter of all nominations.)
Researchers involved in the study attributed the double standard to "the general social norm that kind of requires a man to have higher professional and economic status over the wife. So whenever that social norm is violated, both husband and wife may feel discomfort — could be either one of them. We know from other situations that the strain that marriages feel under that circumstance is not unusual and people try to overcome it in a variety of different ways."
Sadly for these women at the top of their game, success comes as a professional blessing and a personal curse. Even where there are inflating egos involved, few marriages can thrive amidst that level of notoriety.
We may have come along way from the days of torched brassieres, but let's not be fooled: latent sexism remains the real curse in any industry. And even on the reddest of red carpets, all that glitters is not necessarily gold.
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