Academy Award for Best Actress

Academy Award for Best Actress
The 2023 recipient: Emma Stone
Awarded for	Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Country	United States
Presented by	Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)
First awarded	1929
Most recent winner	Emma Stone, Poor Things (2024)
Most awards	Katharine Hepburn (4)
Most nominations	Meryl Streep (17)
Website	oscars.org

The Academy Award for Best Actress is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It has been awarded since the 1st Academy Awards to an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance in a leading role in a film released that year. The award is traditionally presented by the previous year's Best Actor winner.

The Best Actress award has been presented 97 times, to 79 actresses. The first winner was Janet Gaynor for her roles in 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. The most recent winner is Emma Stone for her role in Poor Things (2023); she had previously won the award for her role in La La Land (2016). The record for most wins is four, held by Katharine Hepburn. Frances McDormand has won thrice, while thirteen other actresses have won the award twice. Meryl Streep has received the most nominations in this category—seventeen—and has won twice. Deborah Kerr holds the record in this category for most nominations (six) without a win—albeit in 1993, she was an Honorary Oscar recipient. At the 41st Academy Awards, Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn received the same number of votes and thus tied for Best Actress (the only time this has occurred). Italian actress Sophia Loren became the first actor, in any category, to win for a foreign language performance in Two Women (1960).