Octavia Spencer adds an Emmy Award to her résumé

The Oscar-winning actress adds television’s top honor to her résumé after taking home Outstanding Narrator.

Octavia Spencer has officially added an Emmy to her already impressive collection of acting honors.

The Oscar-winning actress won her first Emmy on Saturday for Outstanding Narrator for Investigation Discovery’s “Lost Women of Alaska,” marking another major milestone in a career that has included an Academy Award, Golden Globe and numerous other accolades. The Television Academy lists Spencer as a three-time Emmy nominee and now a first-time winner.

Spencer’s win came during the first of the 2026 Emmy ceremonies at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. She was competing against an accomplished group of nominees, including Jodie Foster for “Breakdown: 1975,” Werner Herzog for “Ghost Elephants” and Sir David Attenborough, who had two nominations in the category.

For Spencer, the recognition is particularly notable because she had already come close. She was previously nominated for Outstanding Narrator in 2024 for “Lost Women of Highway 20” and received an Emmy nomination in 2020 for her portrayal of Madam C.J. Walker in “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.”

Spencer has also been open about her longstanding interest in true crime, the genre at the center of “Lost Women of Alaska.” During a Deadline event last month, she explained that her interest goes back to childhood.

“I think there are a lot of people who are very new to the true-crime genre. I’m not, I’ve been studying it,” Spencer said, according to Deadline. “I read a horrible story, a true-crime story, when I was 11 and I think it made an indelible mark on me.”

“Lost Women of Alaska” focuses on the cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the efforts to uncover what happened to them. Spencer’s narration helps guide viewers through the stories examined by the series.

Her victory also kept 98-year-old Norman Lear as the oldest Emmy winner. Attenborough, 100, had been seeking the distinction with two nominations in the same category.

But for Spencer, the night was about a milestone of her own: after decades of acclaimed work, she finally has an Emmy.