Late actor James Cagney’s 1942 Best Actor Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy failed to sell at auction, according to Reuters.

Nate D. Sanders, an auction house in Los Angles, put the Oscar up for sale to the highest bidder on Thursday night. The Oscar was formerly in the possession of a private collector.

Auction bidding began at $800,000, and representatives for Nate D. Sanders expected bidding to surpass $1 million — yet the Academy Award received on bids.

On Friday, Nate D. Sanders announced that they were going to attempt to sell the trophy in private.

The lack of bids came as a shock, as Academy Awards very rarely make it to the auction block.

Since 1951, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization responsible for awarding the gold statuettes, has required winners to first offer the their award for sale to the Academy for $1 before selling it elsewhere.

Indeed, previous attempts to sell Oscars have ended up in court with litigation instigated by the Academy.

Cagney was a leading man in his day, starring in White Heat (1949) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). In his lifetime, he earned three Academy Award nods. Cagney, born in 1899 in New York City, had an impressive career into the early 1960s before going into a 20-year retirement. He returned to acting in 1981 with a small role Milos Forman’s Ragtime. He died in 1986.

James Cagney’s 1942 Academy Award for Yankee Doodle Dandy, which failed to sell at auction on Thursday, was his second Oscar nomination. He was nominated for a third in 1955 for Love Me or Leave Me.