AWARDS AND HONORS

Splendor in the Grass was nominated for two Academy Awards including Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress (Natalie Wood). William Inge won for Best Screenplay.

Natalie Wood received a BAFTA Award nomination as Best Foreign Actress for her work in Splendor in the Grass.

Elia Kazan was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for his work on the film.

Splendor in the Grass received three Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture - Drama, Best Motion Picture Actor - Drama (Warren Beatty), and Best Motion Picture Actress - Drama (Natalie Wood).

In 2002 the American Film Institute ranked Splendor in the Grass number 47 on its definitive list of the top 100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time.

Critic Reviews: SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS

"Mr. Inge has written and Mr. Kazan has hurled upon the screen a frank and ferocious social drama that makes the eyes pop and the modest cheeks burn...the milieu is generally terrific--right on the beam and down Main Street, ugly and vulgar and oppressive, comic at times and sad. Pat Hingle gives a bruising performance as the oil-wealthy father of the boy...Audrey Christie is relentlessly engulfing as the sticky-sweet mother of the girl...In the end, however, the authority and eloquence of the theme emerge in the honest, sensitive acting of Mr. Beatty and Miss Wood. The former, a surprising newcomer, shapes an amiable, decent, sturdy lad whose emotional exhaustion and defeat are the deep pathos in the film...And Miss Wood has a beauty and radiance that carry her through a role of violent passions and depressions with unsullied purity and strength. There is poetry in her performance, and her eyes in the final scene bespeak the moral significance and emotional fulfillment of this film. The production is in excellent color and is scenically superb." - The New York Times

"In this picture...a relatively simple story of adolescent love and frustration in a small Midwestern town has been jargoned-up and chaptered-out till it sounds like an angry psychosociological monograph describing the sexual mores of the heartless heartland...The show, of course, is slick, exciting, professional in every detail--trust coony old Kazan for that every time. Actress Wood is quietly adroit and appealing. And Actor Beatty, who at 24 is playing his first screen part of any account, should make the big time on the first bounce...he has a startling resemblance to the late James Dean, and he has that certain something Hollywood calls star quality." -- Time Magazine

"Sentimental sudser by William Inge about emotionally broken girl rebuilding her life." - Leonard Maltin, Movie and Video Guide

"Elia Kazan's production of William Inge's original screenplay, directed by Kazan, covers this forbidden chunk of ground with great care, compassion and cinematic flair. It is an extremely intimate and affecting experience, a drama fashioned expressly for the screen and that, in turn, benefits enormously from compatibility with its medium...Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty...are the lovers. Although the range and amplitude of their expression is not always as wide and variable as it might be, both deliver convincing, appealing performances. The real histrionic honors, though, belong to Audrey Christie, who plays Miss Wood's mother, and Pat Hingle, as Beatty's father. Both are truly exceptional, memorable portrayals, and will be worth serious Oscar consideration when the time comes for such matters." -- Variety

"Dazed moviegoers who emerge from Splendor in the Grass may be perplexed as to who deserves their chief thanks for one of the richest American movies in recent years. For simplicity, the thanks can be directed to Elia Kazan. Acting as chief coordinator between a large cast and an original screenplay by William Inge, he has directed a movie about small-town Kansas in the '20s which brings out into the open Inge's unique talent for sympathetic satire in a dramatic story; boasts the largest array of vivid characters of any movie in years; bursts with startling and revealing humor, and sweeps along with an agonizing sense of inescapable tragedy." -- Newsweek

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume