If you follow this blog it’s no surprise to you I follow the theater.   Which means I pay attention to the Tony Awards®, which are coming back, finally, on September 26, 2021.  One of the main reasons I pay attention to the Tony’s is the grand-slam of awards is the EGOT, when a single person has won an Emmy (television), a Grammy (recording), an Oscar (movies), and the Tony (theater). 

Since the first Grammy was awarded in 1959, all the other awards are older, only 16 people have competitively won all four awards.  There are five other individuals who have won all four awards but by what they call “non-competitively,” meaning they won at least one of the awards honorarily, like Barbra Streisand who won an honorary Tony, but competitively won the other three.  Although, Streisand is the youngest to have completed the quartet at age 28, and she also did it the quickest with only six years separating her Grammy in 1964 and her Tony in 1970.

The Tony seems to be the most elusive of the four.  There are many people who have the EGO (ironic acronym, isn’t it?), as there is a lot of cross-over from television to movie to music, all on the west coast.  Another interesting point of the list of 16 who have achieved this status is that the majority of them are not actors.  That is to say they’re composers, writers, directors, etc.  People whose names you know, but faces you might not recognize. 

This is why it’s always important to be kind to everybody.  Not just the meeting planner who booked you, but the sound person, the lighting person, and the assistant who gets you your coffee.  They are the ones who make things happen, and rightly so, deserve the awards that come with it.