Movies show us a different perspective and give us deeper meanings or new ways of looking at things we thought we already knew. They can be powerful or emotional or funny — and can help us connect to one other with empathy and understanding. One thing we love seeing is how films portray the incredibly complex moments of parenting. From inspiring conversations to heartbreaking choices to beautiful examples of true love between a parent and a child, there have been many wonderful portrayals of moms and dads nominated for Academy Awards throughout history.
Many of these parenting moments have won their stars Best Actor or Best Actress Oscars; all have influenced culture and the way we talk and think about parenting through divorce, homelessness, good times and bad. Parents are flawed, yes, but the trials they go through while still putting their kids first? It’s truly inspirational. Of course, some of these parents we wouldn’t want to be, but they do make us feel seen if we’ve had less-than-stellar parents in our own lives — and, therefore, are still powerful representations.
We’ve rounded up some of our favorite, most moving, and highly influential Oscar-nominated portrayals of parenting throughout history. These representations were truly remarkable for one reason or another, and we are still thinking about them today.
Michelle Williams in ‘The Fabelmans’
Image Credit: Merie Weismiller Wallace / © Universal Pictures / Courtesy Everett Collection Michelle Williams’ portrayal of Mitzi in The Fabelmans (2022) was so good, that it inspired her own parenting. The bohemian housewife was written after Stephen Spielberg’s mom Leah Adler in the autobiographical film, and she plays a mom who supports her son’s passion for filmmaking, until she one day decides to deal with her own unfulfilled dreams.
“When I first read the script, I turned to my husband [Hamilton director Thomas Kail] and said, ‘It’s a feast,’ ” Williams told USA Today about the role. “They really let this woman live and dance and explore and express across each and every page. And they don’t judge her for that – they see her as a full human. She’s allowed to embody her womanhood, which includes her motherhood.”
Williams, who shares a daughter named Matilda with the late Heath Ledger and two kids with Kail, added, “I miss living inside this unstoppable force of nature that was [Spielberg’s] mother. That spirit is so inspiring to me as I continue to grow my own family and think about how to create childhoods for them. And think about how to create the ability for all of us to live in our fullest expression.”
Will Smith in ‘The Pursuit of Happyness’
Image Credit: ©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) turned a common stereotype on its head with Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a struggling single dad who cared for his son (played by Smith’s real son Jaden) above all else, even while homeless in San Francisco. Smith’s powerful and emotional portrayal of a caring Black dad, based on Chris Gardner’s memoir, won him the Oscar for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role.
Robin Williams & Sally Field in ‘Mrs. Doubtfire’
Image Credit: ©20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved./Courtesy Everett Collection Mrs. Doubtfire (1993) isn’t a perfect film (why can’t dads just step up instead of trying to get us to accept their silly and immature behavior?!), but neither is divorce. And on the subject of splitting apart and trying to figure out a co-parenting routine, Mrs. Doubtfire nails it! The film, starring the late Robin Williams as the title character and Sally Field as his ex Miranda, is a realistic portrayal of this sensitive subject and how complicated it can be.
One of the kid stars in the film, Lisa Jakub, told E! News in 2018, “I think that what I’m most proud of is the fact that we really dealt honestly with the issue of divorce.” She continued, “We were talking about something that not many people were talking about at that time. The movie was very much about acceptance, and sometimes things don’t really work out the way that we expect, but it doesn’t mean that it’s bad. There are all kinds of ways of being a family.”
“People still come up to me,” Jakub continued. “Here we are, 25 years later, and people still come up to me — and they will hug me, and they will cry, and they will talk about their parents’ divorce and how much the movie helped them.”
The film won an Oscar for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
Mahershala Ali in ‘Moonlight’
Image Credit: Everett Collection / Everett Collection What is a parent, if not someone who cares for a child? In Moonlight (2016), Chiron (Alex R. Hibbert plays a young Chiron) is a misunderstood, neglected young boy growing up with a crack addict mother in 1980s Miami. But he finds companionship and guidance from a local drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali).
“The way they connect and the way he guides him is in the manner in which a father does,” Ali told NPR. “He’s able to impart a certain degree of knowledge or at least try to unlock Chiron in some of the things that he’s dealing with.”
But it’s complicated. After all, Juan is still a drug dealer — and one of his addicted customers is Chiron’s own mother. This complicated, emotional, and complex film won Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor for Ali, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Julia Roberts in ‘Erin Brockovich’
Image Credit: ©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection How do you balance saving lives with taking care of your own children? Julia Roberts’ Oscar-winning performance of Erin Brockovich in the 2000 film of the same title attempts to show how one real-life woman did both. As a single mom, Erin is just trying to stay afloat when she ends up getting a job for her lawyer and investigating the illegal behavior of a California energy company. The further in she gets in this case, the more her kids start to complain about their mom not being there for them. It’s the work-life balance movie that is still inspiring today.
Gregory Peck in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’
Image Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection Perhaps one of the most iconic examples of fatherhood in Oscar’s history (and all of cinematic history, to be fair) is Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), played by Gregory Peck. To refresh your memory, Atticus is a widowed lawyer Alabama during the Jim Crow era, who defends a Black man against a false rape charge. While preparing and defending the case, Finch takes the time to teach his kids Scout and Jem the importance of equality, compassion, and courage.
One of the most famous quotes from the film, based on the 1960 book by Harper Lee, is still relevant to today: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Peck won Best Actor for this role, and the film also won Best Writing and Best Art Direction.
Brie Larson in ‘Room’
Image Credit: George Kraychyk/©A24/courtesy Everett Collection Even in the worst moments of her life, Joy Newsome “Ma” (Brie Larson) was only thinking about making life better for her son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) in Room (2015), based on the book by Emma Donoghue. They play, tell stories, and have a loving life together while trapped inside a tiny 10-by-10-foot room. The strength and resilience Larson shows as Ma — both inside and outside the room — is truly remarkable to behold.
While filming, Larson channeled her own mother, which ended up being an emotional experience for her. “There were many times over the course of the movie where I felt humbled to the point of being on my knees, crying, calling my mother, saying, ‘I am so sorry, I am so sorry I didn’t understand, I am so sorry I talked back to you as a teenager because you said no to me, I am so sorry for not knowing,’” she told Vulture at the time. “I felt like there are some real magical, mysterious ways of being a mother that even I cannot express — I was able to touch upon it in this movie, but since I’m not a mother, I cannot expect it to be a perfect representation.”
She also shared how powerful this movie shows a relationship between a mother and a child. “That’s a lot of what I think this movie is: to see the different ways we can be human beings in relation to one another, and the unbelievable amount of work and expectation that’s required of a mother to explain what the world is, and to do it the right way at the right time, and to know what’s right for your child at every second of the day — it’s impossible,” Larson said. She added, “But I am blown away that my mom even tried, and she did a pretty damn good job. It’s unbelievable. After doing the movie I’m like, I’ve got to give props to her every day of her life. Just to say, like, yeah, I’m going to have a kid and try — that’s a lot.”
Taraji P. Henson in ‘Hidden Figures’
Image Credit: Hopper Stone/ TM & copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved. / Courtesy Everett Collection Based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures (2016) is about three Black mathematicians and moms — Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) — who work at NASA. Katherine is a single mom to three daughters who must juggle her work performing calculations for historic space missions while facing discrimination, then go home and parent her daughters. (The other women have husbands, but that doesn’t necessarily make their home or work lives any easier.)
In a 2017 interview with The Cut, Henson opened up about her own experience as a single, working mother to son Marcell, 20, with the late William LaMarr Johnson, who died in 2003. “It wasn’t easy being a single mother in Hollywood, but I guess the one thing it did do to me is it kept me focused,” she said. “I heard a lot about people going out to network. ‘Oh, you gotta go network!’ Well, network where? ‘Well, they’re having this party etc.’ To me, no business is getting done with people drinking. I just knew that. I just thought, that sounds like a party, I’ll wait. Being a single mother, I was broke, I couldn’t afford a babysitter, so I couldn’t do that kind of networking. But what I could do is audition. I could go in and I could make those words pop off the page. That was the way I networked.”
Her hard work paid off, and she made it in Hollywood much like Johnson made it in NASA. “If I give up on my dreams,” Henson told The Guardian in 2017, “what am I teaching [my son]?” We are so thankful for Henson, Johnson, and all the other amazing moms in history who didn’t give up on themselves while raising kids!
Shirley MacLaine in ‘Terms of Endearment’
Image Credit: ©Paramount/Courtesy Everett Collection Mothers and daughters don’t always get along, and Shirley MacLaine famously highlighted this in Terms of Endearment (1983). Aurora Greenway (played by MacLaine) and her adult daughter Emma Horton (Debra Winger) are in almost constant disagreement about their lives and the people in them in this emotional and gutting film. Art imitates real life in this one, as the actresses famously didn’t get along (read more about their feud in this Vanity Fair article). This realistic and often heartbreaking portrayal of a demanding mother can feel deeply personal for those of us who’ve experienced the same; yet, its underlying themes of love and the unique bond between moms and their kids reassures us at the same time. This complex part won MacLaine an Oscar for Best Actress, and the movie also won Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Jack Nicholson, and Best Director and Best Writing for James L. Brooks.
Adam Driver & Scarlett Johansson in ‘Marriage Story’
Image Credit: ©Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection The way that Nicole Barber (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie Barber (Adam Driver) show how complicated, emotional, and exhausting co-parenting is in the midst of a divorce will make you cry in Marriage Story (2019).
“I’ve felt in the past — there’s such a loneliness to being a single parent,” Johansson, who was navigating her own divorce with Romain Dauriac, with whom she shares daughter Rose, now 10, told USA Today at the time. “Obviously, it’s a lot of many different things at once, but there can be a loneliness and this constant feeling of doubt, that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and you don’t have anyone else to bounce it off of.”
“You’re also spending a lot of time alone with a child, without the company of another adult, which is hard for long periods of time,” she continued. “You maybe have doubts about your life: How did I get here? It’s not all the time … but those moments creep in, and they creep in at weird times.”
For Johansson, she was able to channel her personal life into her acting. She told the outlet she was “in a much more settled place … I wasn’t in it, which was a better place to be professionally,” when she filmed Marriage Story. “I’d processed my feelings about it so I could use them instead of being in a cloud about the whole thing.”
The performance scored both Johansson and Driver Oscar noms, and the film won Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role for Laura Dern, who played a divorce lawyer.
