Everyone likes to win awards, right? And while you may have a box full of Little League and youth soccer participation awards kicking around in a closet somewhere, let’s be honest, you aren’t busting those awards out anytime soon to impress people. But what if you have some seriously impressive awards to display? How would your mantle stack up against those who have won more awards than anyone else in their fields?
Most Academy Award Wins
Katherine Hepburn, a Hollywood legend, won four Oscars for Best Actress, making her the most winning actress of the Academy Awards. Throughout her career she was nominated a total of 12 times.
Meanwhile, living legend Meryl Streep has three academy awards, two for Best Actress and one for Best Supporting Actress, but has been nominated a whopping 18 times, making her the most nominated actress (or actor) ever at the Oscars!
Jack Nicholas, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Walter Brennan are tied for three Oscar wins apiece.
Walt Disney won or earned 26 Oscars throughout his life (including one posthumously), the most in Academy history. He also won the most Oscars in one year, with four in 1954.
Grammy Awards Wins
The record for the most Grammy Awards won in a lifetime is held by Sir Georg Solti, a Hungarian-British conductor who conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for twenty-two years. He has won a total of 31 Grammy Awards out of 74 nominations.
Alison Krauss has, as a solo artist, collaborator and producer, won 27 Grammy Awards, making her the winningest woman in Grammy history.
U2 holds the record for most Grammy Awards won by a group with 22 awards. Their album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb holds the record for most honored album having won nine awards (an honor they share with Supernatural by Santana).
Professional Sports Awards
The New York Yankees probably have more championships under their belt as a franchise than any other team in any other sport with 26 World Series wins.
The Boston Celtics have won 17 NBA championships in the franchise’s history, making them one of the most successful franchises ever.
The Nobel Prize
Four people have received two Nobel Prizes. Marie Curie received the Physics Prize in 1903 for the discovery of radioactivity and the Chemistry Prize in 1911 for the isolation of pure radium, making her the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences. The Curie family has won 5 Nobel Prizes altogether.
The Pulitzer Prize
Robert Frost and Eugene O’Neill have won a Pulitzer Prize four times in the same category. Robert E. Sherwood has also won four awards, three in Drama and one in the Biography category. Carol Guzy is an American photographer for The Washington Post who also won the Pulitzer Prize four times for photojournalism.