Steve Martin.
I thought Tom’s chicken was Mom’s favorite.
Peter Tork
I really, really hope Keanu Reeves was just acting.
I suppose Suzanne Somers had a more successful career than one would have guessed after leaving “Three’s company”
Sonny and Cher probably count…at least until Sonny decided to go skiing.
I read Richard Burton’s diaries and was astonished at the size and depth of the books he took with him when making films. I would have guessed it would be booze and women, although he had plenty of time for it.
Anson Williams had a long career as a TV director when his first claim to fame was playing a guy named Potsie. I came across an article guessing his net worth at $1.8 million. Chicken feed to Ron Howard but Erin Moran wishes she had that much in her trailer home.
Famously, the guy who played the original Green Hornet was dumb as a bag of hammers. Bruce Lee, who played Kato, on the other hand. . .
Andy Devine played the dumb hick sidekick “Jingles” to Guy Madison in TV’s The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok. He also played essentially the same characters in hundreds of other movies. He was likely smarter than most of the leading men in those movies, having attended several colleges.
The entire cast of Gilligan’s Island.
I never considered him playing dumb, except maybe series 1 of Blackadder. He seems incredibly sharp on Seasons 2-4, though. I guess Johnny English is a kind of dumb, but more incompetent than anything. Mr. Bean is just awkward and self-centered.
And his comedy routine is pretty intelligent, too.
Stan Laurel was quite intelligent in real life; he devised many of the gags for the team.
Marilyn Monroe was reported to be highly intelligent. Certainly her roles as a sexual innocent flew in the face of her personal life.
Dick Martin of Rowan and Martin was smart enough to carve out a very good career as a TV director.
Max Baer was fairly successful as a producer and director, though he’s best known as Jethro on “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
I don’t know that either of these is accurate (although definitely well-repeated). I couldn’t find a single contemporary reference to her ability to speak five languages. And even if one exists, I still don’t buy it, if the only source for it is something she or a publicist sayd.Maybe she studied five languages at various times, but that’s not the same thing. And, yeah, she did claim to have a 160ish IQ, but so what? Maybe she did, and maybe not. But if all we have is her word to go on, I don’t know that it’s relevant. I have no reason to believe she was as ditzy as the characters she portrayed, but neither to I see any reason to assume she was a genius of some sort.
I don’t know if Hedy Lamarr (“Hedley!”) was seen as dumb, per se. But the roles she often took aren’t known to require much intellectual capacity. But she invented the precursor to spread-spectrum communication, used in many of the devices you probably have in your pants.
That’s often the case with comedy teams; the one playing the clown/dummy is usually the brains and driving force of the duo IRL. Laurel, Costello, Lewis, Chong, etc.
I’m not sure if you would say he plays dumb on Community or just bizarre and weird but Ken Jeong is certainly not dumb. He is a medical doctor and internist. I have heard but didn’t confirm that he still maintains his certifications.
All the villains to Adam West and Burt Ward.
Cheech Marin didn’t exactly play smart against Tommy Chong. He also beat Anderson Cooper on Jeopardy.
Frank was a good hiker.
Imho, it takes brains to act stupid. When I was in acting class, stupid people trying to act stupid came off as totally fake.
At his peak before most of you were even conceived of, Paul Winchell (the ventriloquist) seems like an honest-to-goodness genius - among other things, he invented the first artificial heart, on which Jarvik would later base his well known, and now eponymic, device.
Some of you may remember the unique, and I think wonderful, 1960’s TV series “The Wild Wild West”. Ross Martin who co-starred in it as an extremely resourceful if not brilliant Secret Service agent, actually was brilliant IRL. He spoke seven languages, was a concert violinist, graduated magna cum laude as an undergraduate then, subsequently, took a law degree from the Law School of the not too shabby George Washington University. Go figure.
Michael McKean (“Lenny” to David Lander’s “Squiggy”) wiped up the floor with the other players on Celebrity Jeopardy.
Tim Robbins was/is just a wee bit smarter than ‘Nuke’ Laloosh.