When Victor Buono started playing King Tut on the 1960s Batman TV series, he hadn’t even turned 30.
Steve Martin had jet black hair as a featured performer on The Smothers Brothers.
I’ve never seen young photos of Ed Asner, Michael Constantine. Zero Mostel or Herschel Bernardi.
You have to go pretty far back to find young photos of Dale Evans. But once you find them, they are pretty memorable.
Jimmy Durante
I don’t know of any other roles where she’s “older”, but Jessie Royce Landis was only seven years older than Cary Grant when she played his mother in North by Northwest.
Similarly, Sean Connery, who played Harrison Ford’s dad in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, is only twelve years older than Ford.
I’ve seen photos and a few clips of a young Durante, but it’s really odd, because he was always old when I watched him as I was growing up. They tried to make a comedy team of him and Buster Keaton, but it never came off.
Clive Dunn had a hit with the novelty record “Grandad”, when he had just turned 51.
Yul Brynner was usually bald and seemed to have an indeterminate age, allowing him to play both older and young parts throughout the years. He was actually born in 1920, so when he played King Mongkut in The King and I on stage the first time in 12951, he was only 31. I saw him reprise it in 1978, and he joked at the time about not needing makeup at that time to look old. Only he didn’t really look old – he looked like Yul Brynner.
Being bald helped with that indeterminacy (although he wasn’t always bald – he had hair in the film Solomon and Sheba, and in his first go at King Mongkut he definitely had hair). And even when he played “old”, it was Tough Old Guy.
Carroll O’Connor - I was shocked when I realized that he was only 47 when he started playing Archie. I thought he was in his 60s.
Ooh, that’s a good one. I always thought he looked like he was past 40 in The Seventh Seal (not just in his late twenties). And I’ve also always felt like The Seventh Seal looks like it was shot in the fifties or earlier, not in the late sixties. Any time I see him my gut reaction is that he must be impossibly old.
Even when younger than 50, Leslie Nielsen has always looked older than 50. Color film seems to have instantly flipped him from “always 55” to “always 70” years old.
I don’t agree. Leslie Nielsen is one actor who I’ve seen a lot in his younger days, because he played the lead in Forbidden Planet, where his Commander J.J. Adams is basically James T. Kirk. I’ve seen him in a few other 1950s films, and he comes off the same way.
Once his hair turned white, though, he did seem a lot older. Even before he started doing comedy with the Zucker-Zucker-Abrams bunch, as (for instance) in Creepshow, he looked a lot older.
Similarly Redd Foxx was only 49 when Sanford and Son debuted. And Whitman Mayo, who played Grady, was only 42.
Peter Boyle. The hair loss always made him look older. He was 41 in * Taxi Driver*
Anne Ramsey, the woman who played the mother in Throw Momma from the Train. I thought she only did that one film, but she appeared in others as well. Died at 59 years of age, which means she was around 52 when she made that film!
Yeah, this guy. I turned on an old movie from the 40’s on TCM, and there he was, looking just as old as he did on Star Trek and WKRP.
Marjorie Main, probably best known as “Ma Kettle” in the Ma and Pa Kettle films of the fifties.
Peter Cushing always seemed to look older to me, probably because of his very thin face. I always found him kind of attractive in a spooky way.
Forgive me for being a little off topic but I remember that one of the reasons I went to a Willie Nelson concert in 1978 was that I believed that soon after he might be too old to tour.
Buddy Ebsen looked old as Jed Clampett, yet lived for 40 more years.
Torin Thatcher, who played Sokurah the magician in Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Pendragon in Jack the Giant Killer, Reverend Thorne in Hawaii, the prosecuting attorney in Witness for the Prosecution, and a host of TV appearances (including one in the Star Trek episode “Return of the Archons”) looked pretty old. I think it’s because he was bald in most of those. I was shocked when I realized that it was him in the British fantasy film The Man Who Could Work Miracles (1936), based on the H.G. Wells story. He had hair! He looked – young!
He was born in 1905, and died at 76 in 1981.