Hidden Figures’ Octavia Spencer is the 2017 Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ Woman of the Year. She will be honored in the annual parade starting in Cambridge at 3 p.m. today. Here’s a look back at the leading ladies brave enough to endure Cambridge weather and onstage roasts.
Kerry Washington (2016)
“What would Olivia Pope do?” fans of Scandal love to ask. The show’s star, Kerry Washington, was the 2016 Woman of the Year. During the event’s roast, she accepted an invitation to throw a pie at a cast member dressed as then presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Amy Poehler (2015)
2015’s Woman of the Year was Amy Poehler. The honor was a homecoming of sorts for the former “Parks and Recreation” star, who grew up in Burlington and attended Boston College. (Her “Parks and Rec” costar Chris Pratt received Man of the Year honors the same year.)
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Gertrude Lawrence (1951)
The first Woman of the Year Award is presented to the star of “The King and I” on Broadway. The first Man of the Year Award won’t be given until 1967 (to Bob Hope).
Shirley MacLaine (1963)
MacLaine receives her award 12 years before her brother, Warren Beatty, is named Man of the Year.
Angela Lansbury (1968)
Lansbury is delivered to the State House, where Governor John Volpe declares March 5 “Hasty Pudding Day.”
Liza Minnelli (1973)
The group starts its tradition of parading honorees through Harvard Square in a convertible.
Jodie Foster (1992)
During the traditional private Q&A with Hasty Pudding members, they get a nice perk: Foster stays up half the night chatting with them.
Whoopi Goldberg (1993)
Goldberg is surprised to get the award, she says, because she’d always thought of Harvard as “a bastion of Caucasian-ness.”
Jamie Lee Curtis (2000)
Egged on to do her “horror movie scream” from “Halloween,” Curtis promptly blows out the theater’s sound system.
Catherine Zeta-Jones (2005)
The parade is canceled for the first time in more than 30 years due to inclement weather. Bad weather also nixes Julianne Moore’s in 2011.
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Halle Berry (2006)
The Oscar-winning star is made to write “I will not make “Catwoman II” on a blackboard four times.
Helen Mirren (2014)
A video of the onstage twerking by 68-year-old Dame Mirren will later proceed to nearly break the Internet.
What’s with the drag?
When the Hasty Pudding Theatricals put on their first show, on Friday, December 13, 1844, Harvard was still all male, so female roles were played by men in costume. Although women are now involved in every other aspect of the production , the young men in drag still fill the stage.
Sources: Hasty Pudding Theatricals, James Patrick Fitzpatrick