Hayes won Best Supporting Actress for Airport, becoming the first performer to win Oscars in both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories.
At the 42nd Academy Awards ceremony on April 7, 1970, Helen Hayes won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the disaster film Airport (1970), in which she played an elderly stowaway. This win made her the first performer in Academy Award history to win Oscars in both the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories, thirty-eight years after her original Best Actress win in 1932.
This dual achievement was extraordinary not only for its rarity but for the remarkable span of time between the two honors, illustrating a career of sustained excellence across nearly four decades of American film. It highlighted her unusual versatility as a performer, capable of anchoring a film as a lead dramatic actress in her early thirties and, decades later, stealing scenes in a supporting comedic-dramatic role in her late sixties.
Hayes's achievement became a benchmark frequently cited in discussions of Oscar history, and she remained one of the few performers to hold this particular double distinction for many years afterward. Combined with her groundbreaking Tony win in 1947, this Oscar victory helped position Hayes among a very small group of entertainers whose careers spanned and dominated multiple major American performance awards, laying groundwork for her eventual recognition as an EGOT-achieving performer.