What Does Steven Spielberg Completing EGOT Really Mean And Why It’s A Big Deal

Hollywood’s EGOT Club is rare, exclusive, and hard to enter. Artists struggle their whole career to come close and still come up short. At the 68th Grammy Awards, filmmaker Steven Spielberg became the 28th

member to join. The Disclosure Day director had previously won an Emmy, Oscar, and a Tony, and with his win as producer on his long-time collaborator John Williams’ documentary, Music By John Williams, he finally completed the elusive honour by winning a Grammy Award for Best Music Film. Interestingly, the EGOT club is divided into two categories: the competitive winners and the non-competitive winners. Only one man, Robert Lopez, has won all awards twice. We explain the workings of this starry club that can take decades to gain entry.

How Steven Spielberg ticked off the EGOT boxes

The newly minted EGOT winner, Steven Spielberg, has had a long and hard road to the achievement. He has been one of the most successful Hollywood filmmakers of all time, beginning with Jaws (1975), which started the trend of summer blockbusters at the box office. Spielberg has racked up a slew of award nominations across industries, but many forget that the director was frequently snubbed in the early years of his career, including at the Oscars.

Spielberg's road to EGOT began with the Oscars. The 1993 film Schindler’s List was the film that finally got him recognition at the Academy Awards. After five nominations, he took home the trophies for Best Director and Best Picture for the Holocaust drama based on the life of Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson. Spielberg won Best Director again in 1999 for the war drama Saving Private Ryan, starring Tom Hanks and Matt Damon.Up next was the Emmys. Spielberg began his career on television, directing classic shows such as Night Gallery and Columbo and breaking through as one to watch with the TV film Duel (1971). His first Emmy win came in 1996 for producing the cult animated series A Pinky & the Brain Christmas. In the 2000s, he picked up three more Emmy wins for producing the limited series Band of Brothers, Taken and The Pacific.On Broadway, the veteran filmmaker has produced the musicals A Strange Loop, Water for Elephants, and Death Becomes Her. He won the Best Musical Tony as co-producer for Michael R. Jackson's production A Strange Loop, starring Jaquel Spivey as a queer Black man trying to write a play.

And finally, with his first Grammy nomination for the Disney+ documentary, Music by John Williams, the 79-year-old filmmaker has entered the club that contained only 27 members until his win. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau, the 2024 documentary follows the life and career of John Williams. It is fitting that the filmmaker won for producing a project that showcases the work of his friend and composer who gave Hollywood a number of its iconic theme tunes. The legendary composer has scored for several Spielberg films, including Jaws, the Indiana Jones series, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, Catch Me if You Can, Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds.

Competitive winners of EGOT

The first 'member' of this special club was composer and producer Richard Rogers who completed EGOT in 1962. Since then, 21 members have joined him in the competitive EGOT category. The members include actresses such as Audrey Hepburn, Viola Davis and Whoopi Goldberg, comedian Mel Brooks, singer Elton John and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. At 87, director John Gielgud is the oldest member, while Frozen songwriter Robert Lopez, at 39, is the youngest person. Lopez also holds the honour of being the only person to win all four awards twice. Composer-lyricist Benj Pasek and his music partner Justin Paul, who were also 39 when they achieved EGOT with their joint Emmy win for scoring a song from Only Murders in the Building, but they achieved it in the shortest span: seven years. The longest span belongs to actor-singer Harry Belafonte, but he won his in the non-competitive category.

Non-competitive winners of EGOT

The list of the non-competitive winners is shorter with legends such as Barbara Streisand, Liza Minnelli, James Earl Jones, Harry Belafonte, Quincy Jones and Frank Marshall. They all received a special award by the Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys to complete the "grand slam" of Hollywood. The Way We Were star Streisand was the first to achieve this status in 1970 after receiving a special lifetime achievement Tony honour. The most recent entrant on the EGOT non-competitive list was director and producer Marshall, who was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 2019.

The veteran producer and another longtime Spielberg collaborator completed EGOT in just four years after receiving his honorary Oscar. In 2022, he was co-producer alongside Spielberg on A Strange Loop and won his first Tony. In 2023, he received a Grammy Award for producing Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story in the Best Music Film category and won the Sports Emmy Award for Outstanding Long Documentary with The Redeem Team. At the year's Grammy Awards, he picked up his second Grammy for Music by John Williams.

When did the EGOT craze begin?

The acronym for EGOT was first introduced by actor Philip Michael Thomas in 1984. The Miami Vice actor first spoke about his desire to win all the awards within five years. Sadly, he never achieved it. In pop culture, the term became more widely used after the NBC comedy 30 Rock, created by Tina Fey, featured a plotline in which character Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) tries to achieve an EGOT.

Artists on the EGOT watchlist

Now that Spielberg has finally entered the elusive club, all eyes are on who's next. Some of the high-profile Hollywood names include actor Hugh Jackman,actresses Cynthia Erivo, Kate Winslet, Julie Andrews, actor-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, and artists Adele, Common and Eminem, who are all one win away from EGOT. While Jackman needs an Oscar, Andrews, Winslet, Common and Eminem all require a Tony to complete the awards honour. Who will be the next member of this elite Hollywood club?