These Are the States & Countries With the Most Oscar Wins for Acting (2023)

As the event draws near, suspense continues to build: Could “Black Panther” be the first superhero movie to walk away with a Best Picture in its pocket? Will Lady Gaga once again have the opportunity to let us know that there can be 100 people in a room and only Bradley Cooper will believe in you?

While those questions and more won’t be answered until the ceremony itself, we here at Wanderu decided to ease our pre-Oscars anxiety by putting together some Academy Awards trivia of our own. Specifically, we we wanted to know: What states birthed the most Oscar–winning actors and actresses?

Digging into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences database, we looked at the birthplace of every winner in the four primary acting categories since the debut Academy Awards in 1929:

• Best Actor
• Best Actress
• Best Supporting Actor
• Best Supporting Actress

Take a look at the results in the maps below.

States With Most Oscar Wins for Acting

No surprise snubs here: New York and California hold a disproportionate amount of trophies, with more than 25 percent of the total winners born in those two states. Illinois and Massachusetts are each strongly represented, with Missouri, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas rounding out the top 10.

Worth noting: Only 34 of the 50 nifty United States can claim an acting Oscar–winner, meaning that even Washington state with its lone representative, Tacoma–born Bing Crosby, can still declare bragging rights over adjacent Oregon and Idaho.

Though not technically states, we also included Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico in this ranking. With three and four winners respectively, they still surpass the likes of Arizona, Arkansas and others.

European Countries With Most Oscar Wins for Acting

While a whopping 200 Academy Award–winning actors and actresses were born in the U.S., a significant portion came from Europe—with the majority from England. That includes Daniel Day-Lewis, the only person to earn the Best Actor trophy three times. (Channel your inner DDL and explore England by bus or train, ideally in full Lincoln garb.)

Not everything depicted on the map is quite as it seems, either. Although Paul Lukas was born in Budapest, the current capital of Hungary, at the time it was actually a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dissolved at the end of World War I. The same is true for Paul Muni—his birth town of Lemberg is in modern day Ukraine (and known more commonly as Lviv), but was also part of the former Austria-Hungary.

It’s also a bit misleading to allot Israel an Oscar winner: Natalie Portman was born in Jerusalem, but primarily grew up in the U.S. The situation is similar for Lupita Nyong’o—though born in Mexico City, her parents returned to their native Kenya when she was less than a year old. The Oscars map is rife with such instances: Sidney Poitier is from The Bahamas, but was born in Miami while his parents were there on vacation; Vivien Leigh’s father was a British officer in India when she was born, yet she left for a London-based boarding school at age 6; and the list goes on.

This map is zoomed-in on Europe, but 10 additional countries from across the planet have spawned Academy Award–winning actors and actresses. See our complete list below.

Full List of Winners By Country

Feeling inspired to travel? Wanderu provides cheap fares on bus and train tickets across Europe, making it possible for you to ride from London to Edinburgh to see where Sean Connery was born.

States With Most Oscar Wins for Acting by Category

All right, Mr. DeMille, we’re ready for a close-up.

In the subsequent tables, we break down the numbers by each individual category for a slightly more nuanced look.

States With Most Best Actor Winners

Men who won the Best Actor Oscar are, again, disproportionately concentrated in New York and California. But the most compelling finding in this table is the elevation of Pennsylvania.

Although ranked seventh in our overall list, with four Best Actor winners born there (Lionel Barrymore, James Stewart, Broderick Crawford and F. Murray Abraham), it cements a position in the top three for this category.

Pocket this interesting fact for later: The only two actors to win Best Actor trophies in consecutive years are Milwaukee’s own Spencer Tracy (in 1937 and 1938) and native Californian Tom Hanks (in 1993 and 1994).

States With Most Best Actress Winners

The Best Actress category sees slightly more parity. This is the only category for which California (at eight) hoists more trophies than New York (at seven). States like Georgia and Missouri fall in step close behind at three a piece.

This is also the award for which #OscarsSoWhite is perhaps most apt. Since that debut ceremony in 1929, only one person of color has won the Academy Award for Best Actress: Cleveland-born Halle Berry for her role in 2001’s Monster’s Ball. WTF, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? Sorry, but we’re still bitter Angela Bassett didn’t win for What’s Love Got to Do With It?

And there’s no way we can skip ahead to the next section without taking a moment to bow before Katharine Hepburn. (We’re not worthy!) The Connecticut-native has the most wins of anyone, actor or actress, all time across the major acting categories with four Best Actress Oscars in three different decades.

States With Most Best Supporting Actor Winners

Frankly, my dear, this is where things get interesting.

New York has a specific knack for breeding awesome character actors. It has almost three times as many Supporting Actor winners as California, which is tied at five with New Jersey.

Heavy hitters born in Jersey include Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesci and Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, Frank Sinatra. Is it a coinkydink that Pesci won for the gangster film Goodfellas, or that Sinatra supposedly secured his award-winning role in From Here to Eternity through his mob connections, and that both hail from The Garden State?

Hey, we’re not drawing lines between New Jersey and organized crime. (The Sopranos already did that for us 20 year ago.) Just something to chew on.

States With Most Best Supporting Actress Winners

Now for the final award of the evening. Imagine a highly decorated actress slow-walking to the podium with an envelope in hand. She reads a few lines from the prompter, the crowd politely chuckles, and she opens the envelope. And the winner is…

La La Land!

Just kidding. If you put your money on New York once again, then you’re spot on: The Empire State wins out once more with 16 New York–born Best Supporting Actress winners.

Of interest here is also the high number from Massachusetts (in third place), making it the only state besides New York and California to produce more than five Oscar winners for a single acting category. (Mass-born winners include Boston’s own Allison Janney, last year’s winner for her turn in I, Tonya.)

This list also includes Gone With the Wind actress Hattie McDaniel, who in 1939 was the first African-American to win an Oscar, and the first and only winner born in Kansas. Fun Fact: A Wichita native, McDaniel famously coined the phrase, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” during her acceptance speech, later to be quoted in The Wizard of Oz.

Our fact-checkers insist that last part is a lie, but it’s on the internet now so it must be true.

City-to-City With Wanderu

If that heavy dose of Academy trivia still hasn’t scratched your Oscars itch, it sounds like you may be ready for a trip to L.A., where you can peruse the Walk of Fame, take the Universal Studios backlot tour or hike your way up to the Hollywood sign.

Of course, the next step is to book your travel, and that’s where Wanderu comes in. Compare routes, schedules and prices across major carriers and book your tickets on a single platform without paying more. Download theWanderu app to use on the go, or book directly through the Wanderu website. Either way, you’ll have all the trip information you need at your fingertips.

In fact, some of the best recent deals to Los Angeles available on Wanderu include:

• San Francisco to Los Angeles for$18
• Oakland to Los Angeles for$18
• San Diego to Los Angeles for $15
• San Jose to Los Angeles for $18
• Sacramento to Los Angeles for $39
• Phoenix to Los Angeles for $39

And with that, the orchestra has begun to play us off. Best of luck on your Oscars ballot, and let’s see how this whole “no host” thing goes!

Methodology

• From the Official Academy Awards Database, we pulled the names of every winner in the categories Best Actor in a Lead Role, Best Actress in a Lead Role, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress since the debut Oscars in 1929.
• From the Internet Movie Database, we pulled the birth cities, states and countries of all the winners.
• In calculating states, cities and countries with the most winners, we were careful not to count repeat winners twice.
• For the specific category breakdown sections, if an actor or actress won in multiple categories (for instance, Meryl Streep has Oscars for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress), they were included in the totals for each.

You are welcome to use the information and graphics on this page, crediting Wanderu. If you do so, please link back to this page, so that travelers around the world can see all the data and find out how we came up with the ranking