Oscar Winners for Best female Supporting Actress

These women delivered an outstanding performance in their supporting roles and got rewarded with an Oscar for it.
Our list of the Academy Award Winners for Best female Supporting Actress in the last 20 years!

1999 – Angelina Jolie (Girl, Interrupted)

Girl, Interrupted is about a young woman in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Angelina Jolie plays Lisa Rowe, diagnosed as a sociopath. She is charismatic, manipulative, rebellious, and abusive. She has been in the institution since she was nine, and has escaped several times over her eight years at the institution, but is always caught and is brought back eventually. She is looked up to by the other patients in the ward and forms a close bond with Susanna.

2000 – Marcia Gay Harden (Pollock) 

Pollock is a biographical film which tells the life story of American painter Jackson Pollock. It stars Ed Harris, Marcia Gay Harden, Jennifer Connelly, Robert Knott, Bud Cort, Molly Regan and Sada Thompson, and was directed by Harris. Marcia Gay Harden won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for portraying Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife. 

2001 – Jennifer Connelly (A Beautiful Mind)

A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 American biographical drama film based on the life of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics. in the film, Nash begins to develop paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while watching the burden his condition brings on wife Alicia (Jennifer Connelly) and friends.

2002 – Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago)

Chicago is film based on the stage-musical of the same name, exploring the themes of celebrity, scandal, and corruption in Chicago during the Jazz Age. The film stars Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. Chicago centers on Velma Kelly ( Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger), two murderesses who find themselves in jail together awaiting trial in 1920s Chicago. Velma, a vaudevillian, and Roxie, a housewife, fight for the fame that will keep them from the gallows. 

2003 – Renée Zellweger (Cold Mountain)

Cold Mountain is based on the bestselling 1997 novel of the same name by Charles Frazier. It stars Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renée Zellweger with Eileen Atkins, Brendan Gleeson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Jack White, Giovanni Ribisi, Donald Sutherland, and Ray Winstone in supporting roles. The film tells the story of a wounded deserter from the Confederate army close to the end of the American Civil War, who is on his way home to the woman he loves.

2004 – Cate Blanchett (Aviator)

The Aviator is a film based on the 1993 non-fiction book Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, the film depicts the life of Howard Hughes, an aviation pioneer and director of Hell’s Angels. The film portrays his life from 1927–1947 during which time Hughes became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable. Cate Blanchett plays actress Katharine Hepburn, who helps to ease the symptoms of his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

2005 – Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener)

The Constant Gardener is a political thriller film directed by Fernando Meirelles. The screenplay by Jeffrey Caine is based on the novel of the same name (2001) by John le Carré. The story follows Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes), a British diplomat in Kenya, as he tries to solve the murder of his wife Tessa (Rachel Weisz), an Amnesty activist, alternating with many flashbacks telling the story of their love.

2006 – Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)

Dreamgirls isa movie adapted from the 1981 Broadway musical of the same name by composer Henry Krieger and lyricist/librettist Tom Eyen, Dreamgirls is a film à clef, a work of fiction taking strong inspiration from the history of the Motown record label and one of its acts, The Supremes. The story follows the history and evolution of American R&B music during the 1960s and 1970s through the eyes of a Detroit, Michigan girl group known as the Dreams and their manipulative record executive.

2007 – Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton)

Michael Clayton is a film written and directed by Tony Gilroy and starring George Clooney, Tom Wilkinson, Tilda Swinton, and Sydney Pollack. The film chronicles the attempts by attorney Michael Clayton to cope with a colleague’s apparent mental breakdown and the corruption and intrigue surrounding a major client of his law firm being sued in a class action case over the effects of toxic agrochemicals.

2008 – Penélope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona)

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen. The plot centers on two American women, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), who spend a summer in Barcelona, where they meet an artist, Juan Antonio, who is attracted to both of them while still enamored of his mentally and emotionally unstable ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).