Remember Jaye Davidson? Twenty years ago, the Riverside, CA native was front and center in the 1992 Oscar race, nominated as Best Supporting Actor for the role of Dil in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game. He wound up losing to Gene Hackman’s evil Unforgiven sheriff.

The bulk of Awards Line managing editor Anthony D’Alessandro’s 20th anniversary look-back is about how producer Stephen Woolley and Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein miraculously managed to get the press to keep the film’s gender-bending plot twist a secret. But there’s also this tidbit:

Davidson never plotted an acting career in the first place. A prolific role as the sun god Ra in MGM’s scifi film Stargate followed. At one point during Cannes 1998, it was announced Davidson was attached to a Steven Seagal action title Cousin Joey opposite Mickey Rourke (which was never made).

Largely, Davidson remains MIA with IMDb reporting his last acting credit as a Nazi photographer in the 2009 short The Borghilde Project. Per Woolley, “I think he’s in Paris. The last I heard, he was really happy.”

This is not a knock on Riverside per se. But if we’d started out in that corner of California and wound up in the City of Lights, we’d be pretty happy too. Read D’Alessandro’s full piece here.

[Photo courtesy Miramax]