Alternative Film Guide

Sherry Lansing, the former Paramount chairman and a strong advocate for cancer research, has been voted the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lansing will receive the award at the 79th Academy Awards presentation on February 25, 2007.

By the way, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award is named after Danish-born actor Jean Hersholt, who played leads and top supporting roles in Hollywood movies from the 1920s to the 1940s, among them Erich von Stroheim’s Greed, D. W. Griffith’s The Battle of the Sexes, Edmund Goulding’s Academy Award winner Grand Hotel, and George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight.

In the late 1930s, Hersholt helped to form the Motion Picture Relief Fund, an organization to assist film industry employees in need of medical care. The Fund eventually evolved into the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, located in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills. Additionally, Hersholt acted as Academy president from 1945 to 1949.

In 1940, the Academy gave Hersholt, producer-screenwriter Ralph Block, and actors Ralph Morgan and Conrad Nagel special plaques acknowledging their efforts on creating the Motion Picture Fund. Ten years later, Hersholt was given an honorary Oscar "for distinguished service to the motion picture industry."

In 1956, the same year Jean Hersholt died of cancer, the Jean Hersholt Award was created to honor "an individual in the motion picture industry whose humanitarian efforts have brought credit to the industry."

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