‘Apollo 13’ star Kathleen Quinlan relives the 1996 Oscars, from a Whoopi wink to a Sorvino hug

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The winners of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar belong to an exclusive club. But Apollo 13 star Kathleen Quinlan can boast to membership in an equally select society — call it the Whoopi Goldberg Wink Squad.

Quinlan was inaugurated into that group three decades ago at the 68th Academy Awards, held on March 25, 1996. The then-41-year-old actress walked the red carpet outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as a Supporting Actress nominee for her role as Marilyn Lovett in Ron Howard’s space acclaimed space drama. Inside, meanwhile, Goldberg was preparing for her second appearance Oscar host, replacing the previous year’s controversial emcee, David Letterman.

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And the comedian couldn’t resist tweaking the late night host right out of the gate. “So… didja miss me?” Goldberg asked the crowd with a smile. She then proceeded to launch into her stage patter, which riffed on the proliferation of colorful ribbons at that year’s ceremony, the race between Bob Dole and Pat Buchanan to be President Bill Clinton’s Republican opponent and the surprising number of big-name actresses that played hookers that year, from Elisabeth Shue to Sharon Stone.

Oh yeah, and Goldberg poked fun at Apollo 13 — several times, in fact. Sitting towards the front of the room, Quinlan laughed at each joke that Goldberg made at her movie’s expense. And that’s when she was admitted to the Wink Squad.

“Whoopi gave me a little wink,” Quinlan, now 70, tells Gold Derby about the moment she made eye contact with the night’s emcee. And the wink wasn’t just out of appreciation for her good humor — she and Goldberg had some personal history, having acted alongside each other in the 1988 drama Clara’s Heart, also starring a young Neil Patrick Harris.

“I really liked Whoopi a lot,” Quinlan says. “She gave me that little wink and it felt very special.”

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While Quinlan took home a Whoopi Wink, she ultimately didn’t take home an Oscar. That year’s Supporting Actress statue instead went to Mira Sorvino for her breakout Mighty Aphrodite role as — wait for it — a hooker. But Quinlan had no hard feelings in the moment or now, nearly three decades later. “I was so happy for her,” she says. “It was a great performance.”

As part of our celebration of Apollo 13’s 30th anniversary, Quinlan provided Gold Derby with a personal walkthrough of her Oscar night experience.

Producer Brian Grazer with Kathleen Quinlan and Tom Hanks arrive at Universal's 35th anniversary celebration of Apollo 13 in 2005Kevin Winter/Getty Images

The road to Oscar

Two days before she turned up at the Oscars, Quinlan was swimming in the Bahamas — not for fun, but for work. The actress was in the midst of shooting the PG-rated family film Zeus and Roxanne opposite Steve Guttenberg, but was given the equivalent of a weekend pass to attend the ceremony.

“I got out of the water, peeled off my wetsuit, packed my bag and headed to L.A.,” she remembers. “Then when I got to the hotel, I put on my dress, did my hair and makeup and headed out to the show. It was otherworldly!”

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Prior to jetting off to the Bahamas for Zeus and Roxanne, Quinlan had spent months making the rounds campaigning for a Best Supporting Actress nomination with the help of her publicist, Kelly Bush. “She did an amazing job, but I was worn out by the end,” the actress says now. “You have to go everywhere and talk, talk, talk, talk.”

All that talking paid off, though. When nominations were announced on Feb. 13, 1996, Quinlan and Ed Harris were the only two members of Apollo 13’s star-powered cast to score acting nominations. To this day, Quinlan is shocked and surprised that her onscreen husband, Tom Hanks, missed the cut for his performance as the doomed spacecraft’s commander, Jim Lovell. (Howard also notably missed out on a Best Director nomination.)

“The problem is that kind of mastery is seamless,” she says of Hanks, who at that point in his career had just won back-to-back Best Actor statues for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump. “Inside the Apollo 13, Tom was always calm and didn’t touch one button where he didn’t know what it did. That kind of masterful work is maybe not so showy, but good luck mimicking it.”

The night of

After making the quick change from her travel clothes to her Oscar finery, Quinlan and her then-husband Bruce Abbott hopped into a limo bound for the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. “It was a long ride,” she recalls.

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But what waited on the other end of that ride made the trip worth it. “Stepping out of the limousine and onto the red carpet was a moment,” Quinlan says happily. “It felt like I had finally arrived in Hollywood.”

That enthusiasm started to mingle with nervous energy as she took her seat inside the theater. The run of show had the Supporting Actress statue being handed out midway through the night, a wait that Quinlan calls “nerve-wracking.” Asked whether she had a speech prepared should her name be called, the actress says that she came armed with a list of names and a general idea of what she intended to say.

“I made sure to have that list, because I could tell that everyone went blank as soon as they got up there,” she laughs.

But that list ended up going unused. Presenter Martin Landau introduced the roll call of nominees — which included Nixon’s Joan Allen, Georgia’s Mare Winningham and Sense and Sensibility’s Kate Winslet in addition to Quinlan and Sorvino — and then called the Mighty Aphrodite star’s name. Sitting next to then-boyfriend Quentin Tarantino, Sorvino took a moment to compose herself and then headed to the stage.

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As the newly minted Oscar winner left her row, she passed her proud father, actor Paul Sorvino, and the two shared a big father-daughter hug. Moments later, she addressed him from the stage, saying: “When you give me this award, you honor my father who has taught me everything I know about acting.” The cameras promptly cut back to her dad and caught him mid-cry — an only-at-the-Oscars moment that warmed the heart of everyone in the room.

“I saw her father well up and start crying when she looked at him and I thought, ‘Oh, that's a great moment,’” Quinlan says with a warm smile. (Reflecting on that moment years later, Mira Sorvino called her tribute to her father “a celebration of our love for each other.”)

Quinlan watched and enjoyed the rest of the show after Sorvino’s win and hit the party afterwards. The next morning, she was once again Bahamas bound. “I flew back to set, put my wetsuit back on and got back in the water,” she recalls.

What happened next

To date, Apollo 13 remains Quinlan’s only brush with Oscar and the 68th Academy Awards remains the only ceremony she’s attended — though not because she hasn’t been invited back. “I could go almost every year if I wanted to,” she says. “But at that time, I most wanted to go to enjoy the moment and the people.”

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As an Academy member, Quinlan does still follow the Oscar race from afar and singles out this past year’s ceremony as a particularly good show. “Those movies were, for the most part, not big money makers,” she says of a Best Picture roster that included The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez, and the eventual winner Anora.

Read: ‘What balls!’ ‘Apollo 13’ star Kathleen Quinlan on firing off notes to Ron Howard, secret dinner with Tom Hanks, and why her Oscar-nominated role was more than just ‘the wife’

“They put more money into the campaigns for the movie than they do into making the movie,” she marvels. “I don’t know how they make their money back, but they were all well-made films.”

Asked about the impact of her Apollo 13 nomination on her career, Quinlan says that it “helped somewhat” as she continued to navigate the industry. While she describes herself as “not aggressively ambitious,” she has worked steadily in the thirty years since that Oscar night, with a diverse slate of roles across television and film. “Winning an Oscar is definitely the Amex Gold card,” she jokes.

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Looking back on her Oscar experience, though, Quinlan feels like she won simply by showing up. “It was fun just to be there and have my little wink with Whoopi,” she says. "I also got to be in a great film that’s become a classic. That’s a great thing to have in my kit."

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