Hollywood Legend, Who Starred in One of the ‘50s Most Iconic Films, Turns 97 originally appeared on Parade.

For most people, to achieve a lifelong dream is to experience an overwhelming, often indescribable sense of fulfillment. For Nancy Olson, to achieve her dream was to realize that it wasn’t her dream at all.

Olson, who turned 97 on July 14, was catapulted into the Hollywood spotlight on the heels of her performance in Billy Wilder’s iconic film, Sunset Boulevard. Olson, who played the role of tenacious up-and-coming screenwriter, Betty Schaefer, starred alongside Gloria Swanson and William Holden in the 1950 film.

“I was told that I was going to play the part of Betty Schaefer and I read the script,” she told IndieWire in 2023. “It was about an aspiring young writer. And there were a lot of starlets on the [Paramount] lot, some who had finished high school and some who hadn’t, some who came from educated families, some who did not. I did, so that when I spoke, you could possibly believe that I wanted to be a writer.”

Olson’s performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. While most young starlets would place tremendous value in winning, Olson, who was 22 at the time, had very low expectations.

“I did not expect to win, and I did not win,” she said on an episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s It Happened In Hollywood podcast in 2025. “I felt very rewarded being nominated, and that was quite enough.”

Sunset Boulevard did take home three of the eleven Academy Awards for which it was nominated, but not for acting or directing. The film won for Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture, Best Art Direction — Black and White and Best Story and Screenplay.

The last surviving cast member of the now legendary film, Olson believes that Sunset Boulevard has endured all these years in part because it “reveals the truth” about the industry by which it was made.

“It was built on commodities to sell, and the commodities were the actors and the actresses, and they were made bigger than their reality. They were figures that were used to sell motion pictures. Therefore, they were made more beautiful, more desirable, more sexual than it was possible to be,” she said in the podcast.

After the success of Sunset Boulevard, Olson only continued acting in order to fulfill the rest of her contract with Paramount. She’d fallen out of love with Hollywood as easily as she’d originally fallen in love with acting.

Olson made appearances in a handful of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s and officially retired from acting in the mid-1980s, though she did make a few memorable returns to the silver screen, one as recently as 2014.

In 2023, Olson published her memoir entitled A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour. In the book, she didn’t hold back. After all, she never has— why should she start now?

Hollywood Legend, Who Starred in One of the ‘50s Most Iconic Films, Turns 97 first appeared on Parade on Jul 15, 2025

This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 15, 2025, where it first appeared.