Researchers in Canada believe that Oscar-winners live longer than those who haven’t won the laurel
Would winning an award help an actor live longer? The question itself sounds silly, right? Okay, it calls for rephrasing the question a tad. So tell us, what would your answer be if you are asked whether an Oscar winning actor would live longer than those who haven’t worn the laurel? This one too could sound as silly as the first query. But then, there are expert researchers who believe there is much to explore within the question!
Researchers from a bunch of institutions in Canada believe that they have found evidence that would establish that actors and actresses who win an Academy Award are bound to live longer than those who haven’t. This interesting piece of finding has the potential to be discussed and debated much.
As per a paper published by the group of researchers on the open-access site PLOS ONE, what they found is true and there is evidence that leads to such a belief. It needs to be noted that a few decades ago, another team of researchers had hinted that Oscar winning actors and actresses live longer years.
Long life and the Oscar-winners
This finding was the trigger to the Canadian research group to dive deeper into the area. The Canadian researchers dwelt upon the topic in a much broader manner and collated data for 934 actors and actresses who had been nominated or won an Oscar between 1929 and 2020. The data also included their age at death if they had passed away.
A report added that the research group also collected the same type of data for actors who had appeared in the same film as the Oscar-winning actor and who were similar in age and gender as a control group. The team of researchers, in fact, explored the data of 2,111 actors, and among them as many as 1,222 whom had died.
The next task was to compare the lifespans of those who had won the Academy Award and those actors and actresses who failed to win one. The result was that they found that Oscar winners lived on average 77.1 years; those who had been nominated but did not win lived on average 73.7 years, and those who had not been nominated lived for an average of 73.6 years, the report pointed out.
Zero-stress, better lifestyle
As it is a known fact that lifespans have increased in general over the years, they sought to clarify on how long today’s actors should expect to live. For this, they deployed a statistical model so as to predict the longevity of each group of actors. The finding was that winners lived up to approximately 81.3 years, nominees to 76.4, and non-nominated actors to 76.2. But then, the question still rises on how they could determine why Oscar-winning actors might live longer.
For this, the research team suggested that eating better and living a healthier lifestyle to keep up with the increased stature after winning an Oscar could have done the magic. Further, stress levels go down once after such a prestigious laurel comes their way, and so Oscar winning actors and actresses have a stress free, good lifestyle, which in turn helped them live longer.
Do you agree with this finding? Tell us what you feel.
