Katherine Hepburn once said that "the right actors win Oscars, but for the wrong roles." Evidence for the truthfulness of this comment can be seen in the Academy Awards given to the following five actors, all of whom, if they were to only be given one statuette, deserved it for other roles.
Jimmy Stewart for The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The amiable Stewart had been nominated the previous year for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and would be nominated three more times for It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Harvey (1950), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). It can be reasonably argued that his performances in all of these except Harvey were more deserving of an Oscar than his work in The Philadelphia Story.
It could also be argued that, despite not being nominated, his finest works were as the wheelchair-bound voyeur in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and as the obsession-driven ex-police detective pursuing Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo (1958).
