Yes, Jack Lemmon had already won a Best Actor award for Save The Tiger (1973, the same year as the Chilean coup) and a Best Supporting Actor award for Mister Roberts (1955), but he deserved the Best Actor prize for Missing. He was much better than Ben Kingsley, who also portrayed a real person in the title role of Ghandi, and Dustin Hoffman, who was great in Tootsie. Paul Newman was wonderful in The Verdict, and Peter O'Toole played the drunkard Alan Swann to perfection in My Favorite Year (probably because it was literally a mirror version of himself). I still think Lemmon was the best that year; his performance has stood the test of time, even better than Hoffman in Tootsie or Paul Newman in The Verdict, and they were astonishing.
The great irony here is that Kingsley has given many great performances in his career, among them an absolutely stunning one in Death and the Maiden in 1994; in this film he plays a former military sympathizer to a fascist dictatorship (actually a doctor) who, among others, tortured and raped a young law student (Sigourney Weaver) at a military prison in order to make her confess where her lover/later husband (Stuart Wilson) was hiding. She maintained her innocence, never revealed his whereabouts, and was eventually released after several months but remained permanently traumatized by the ordeal, unable to listen to her favorite composer, Schubert, whose most famous piece "Death and the Maiden" was played continually during her brutal interrogations.
Although the victim was blindfolded and bound to a slab enduring weeks of horrific pain and agony (including electroshock to the genitals) and never saw her captors in prison, she recognizes the distinctive voice of the guilty party twenty years later when a stranger drives her husband home on a rainy night after his car blows a tire. The stranger, Dr. Miranda, befriends the husband who allows Miranda to stay the night at their beach house. When the culprit is asleep on their couch, she turns the tables on her former adversary, knocks him out, ties him to a sitting position in a chair, gags his mouth, and proceeds to subject him to her brand of payback, which involves severe verbal abuse, although he deserves much more. When the wife, whose maiden name is Paulina Lorca, wants to put Kingsley's Dr. Death on trial (she being the only prosecutor, judge, and jury) and then give him her version of the death penalty (a quick bullet in the brain), the husband strenuously objects.
Death And The Maiden proceeds at a brisk pace thanks to great direction by Roman Polanski and awesome acting by all three stars. Stuart Wilson is downright excellent as the lawyer husband who gives the villain some benefit of his doubts, but both Kingsley and Weaver deserved Oscar nominations and didn't get them because they were overlooked in a great year with too many blockbuster films. I do, however, believe that while Sissy Spacek in Missing did not deserve the Oscar for 1982's Best Actress as much as Meryl Streep did for Sophie's Choice, Sigourney Weaver was ten times better than Jessica Lange (the 1994 winner for Blue Sky) in Death And The Maiden for her role as Paulina Lorca Escobar.
The country in which Death and the Maiden takes place is obviously Chile, although it is never mentioned in the movie, which was based on the critically acclaimed masterwork by the superb playwright Ariel Dorfman, a very close friend of Salvador Allende. Unlike the martyred President, Dorfman narrowly escaped the bombing of the Moneda (Santiago's Presidential Palace) on that September 11, 1973 day when the Allende government was brutally overthrown, and he was lucky to get out of the country because there was a price on his head. It obviously left a terrible psychological scar from which he never fully recovered.
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