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" When newcomer Lupita Nyong&amp;#039;o glided onto the stage at Sunday night&amp;#039;s Academy Awards to accept the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress with one of the evening&amp;#039;s most heartfelt, selfless speeches, she claimed a permanent place in the history of Hollywood, regardless of where she goes next, or whether she ever makes another film at all. You will hear the phrase &amp;quot;Oscar winner&amp;quot; every time she is interviewed, you will see it on the poster and Blu-ray cover of every movie in which she ever appears. You&amp;#039;ll likely even see it sneak into the advertising for Non-Stop, the new Liam Neeson actioner that won this weekend&amp;#039;s box office and gave Nyong&amp;#039;o her second film credit. From here on out, the 30-year-old Mexico-born, Kenya-raised actress will forever be defined by those four well-deserved syllables. But exactly what she will do with them is anyone&amp;#039;s guess \u2014 and that decision may not necessarily be up to Nyong&amp;#039;o. Fellow nominees Jennifer Lawrence and Julia Roberts have already proven that they&amp;#039;ve got post-Oscar staying power, but much of the excitement surrounding Nyong&amp;#039;o&amp;#039;s nomination in the first place was a result of the fact that she came out of nowhere to claim it. Yes, she&amp;#039;s got Yale Drama pedigree and a couple of credits (one short, one Kenyan soap opera). But as far as the pre-Oscar press surrounding her was concerned, Nyong&amp;#039;o was as non-actor an actor as Captain Phillips&amp;#039;s Barkhad Abdi. The uncertainty of what might follow Nyong&amp;#039;o&amp;#039;s zero-to-sixty rise is not without precedent. Remember Catalina Sandino Moreno and Keisha Castle-Hughes? They were both unknowns turned nominees, too. And though one&amp;#039;s chances of success might be improved by actually taking home the Ocar, for every Julie Andrews there&amp;#039;s also a Tatum O&amp;#039;Neal. So here&amp;#039;s a handful of wisdom Lupita Nyong&amp;#039;o should heed from the divergent paths of other early-rise actors. 1. You&amp;#039;ve earned the right to be picky. At the age of 11, Anna Paquin became the second-youngest winner in the history of the Oscars when she took home the award for Best Supporting Actress for Jane Campion&amp;#039;s The Piano. Though fame arrived around the same time as those awkward teenage years for Paquin, she chose her roles wisely and ended up working with some of the world&amp;#039;s most acclaimed directors \u2014 including Franco Zeffirelli (Jane Eyre), Steven Spielberg (Amistad), Bryan Singer (X-Men), Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), Gus Van Sant (Finding Forrester), and Spike Lee (25th Hour) \u2014 all before she was even legally old enough to toast her success with something stronger than a glass of apple juice. These days she&amp;#039;s still riding the X-Men franchise gravy train (there&amp;#039;s a new one due out this year), and she&amp;#039;s wrapping up what will be the seventh \u2014 and final \u2014 season of HBO&amp;#039;s True Blood. 2. Success often starts with failure. Though Nyong&amp;#039;o&amp;#039;s career thus far has, on the surface at least, seemed to be a charmed one, even the most successful actors have been forced to weather some adversity. And only in Hollywood can a person be voted off a reality show singing competition one day, and thanking the world for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar the next. After getting the boot in American Idol&amp;#039;s third season, Jennifer Hudson was cast alongside Beyonc\u00E9, Jamie Foxx, and Eddie Murphy for Bill Condon&amp;#039;s 2006 musical Dreamgirls. While the 32-year-old has kept busy in the years since, she has never quite found a role to match the critical acclaim of her debut. Nope, not even when she played the title role in 2011&amp;#039;s Winnie Mandela.  3. Play to your instincts. The most valuable information an actor can have is knowing where his or her strengths lie. A stage actress since the time she was a child, Julie Andrews was certainly not a &amp;quot;newcomer&amp;quot; in the most literal sense when she claimed the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins in 1965. But the musical kid&amp;#039;s classic was, in fact, her movie debut. And her role in it set off the kind of unique, song-and-dance-based career that doesn&amp;#039;t exist anymore (unless you try really, really hard, like Anne Hathaway). Andrews even earned a second nomination the following year, for The Sound of Music, and a third in 1982 for Victor/Victoria. Fairy tale-type stories like The Princess Diaries and Enchanted remain Andrews&amp;#039;s bread and butter, and her pitch-perfect enunciation keeps her busy as a voice actor for animated features. Andrews&amp;#039;s film trajectory is similar to that of Barbra Streisand, who was also a well-known performer when she starred in her first film \u2014 1968&amp;#039;s Funny Girl \u2014 which won her a Best Actress Oscar. Sure, there are plenty of actors who can easily move from comedy to drama, but there are just as many actors who cannot. (Sean Penn&amp;#039;s almost-starring role in The Three Stooges comes to mind.) 4. Honesty is not the best policy. Though Hollywood claims to love those &amp;quot;refreshing&amp;quot; few who aren&amp;#039;t afraid to be brutally honest in front of the camera, their favorite type of brutal honesty is the perfectly choreographed kind. (See: everything Jennifer Lawrence does.) Too much honesty proved to be a detriment for Mercedes McCambridge, who made the leap from radio actress to film actress in 1949&amp;#039;s All the King&amp;#039;s Men, and earned a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for it. McCambridge continued to work steadily in film, and earned a second Oscar nomination for 1955&amp;#039;s Giant, opposite James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor, but she wasn&amp;#039;t much for playing politics. She didn&amp;#039;t hide her disdain for Joan Crawford after the two worked together on 1954&amp;#039;s Johnny Guitar, with McCambridge famously referring to the acting legend as &amp;quot;a mean, tipsy, powerful, rotten-egg lady.&amp;quot; But tipsiness was a problem for McCambridge as well; her drinking binges were often followed by brief hospitalizations. By 1969 she was sober, but the big film role offers had dried up. Her most famous contribution during the latter part of her career is as the voice of Pazuzu, the demon in The Exorcist. 5. Avoid any drugs at all. With the recent passing of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the destructive relationship between drugs and Hollywood has become a popular topic in the news once again. But it&amp;#039;s certainly not a recent development. The kid who beat out Anna Paquin for the absolutely youngest Oscar winner? That would be Tatum O&amp;#039;Neal, daughter of Ryan, who won the award for Best Supporting Actress in 1974 for Paper Moon, in which she co-starred with her father. Though she managed to maintain her precocious kid star status for a while with films like The Bad News Bears, International Velvet, and Little Darlings, adulthood wasn&amp;#039;t as easy for O&amp;#039;Neal, who struggled with heroin addiction. Though she has continued to pop up in things over the years, including a recurring role as Denis Leary&amp;#039;s alcoholic sister on Rescue Me and a bit part in Judd Apatow&amp;#039;s 2012 film This Is 40, O&amp;#039;Neal&amp;#039;s addictions have made headlines as recently as 2008, when she was arrested trying to buy crack in New York City.  With a second movie already in theaters, and making money, and her name \u2014 at least the first one, because it&amp;#039;s easier to pronounce \u2014 on the lips of every major producer, the future certainly seems bright for Nyong&amp;#039;o. Also, The Onion didn&amp;#039;t call her a c*nt, so she&amp;#039;s already two steps ahead of 10-year-old and 12 Years a Slave co-star \u2014 and fellow first-timer nominee \u2014 Quvenzhan\u00E9 Wallis.  PLUS: Lupita Nyong&amp;#039;o, Woman We Loved Most at the Oscars &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a27592/lupita-nyongo-future/>