Nah. She hadn’t been famous very long at that point, but she’d had her big break starring with Steve McQueen in Bullitt, a few years earlier, and was huge from there on out. I’m gonna say Gary Collins was the least known name at the time, and may still be, albeit, a lot of people probably confuse Maureen Stapleton with Jean Stapleton now.
Just thought of another really good all-star film-- The Poseidon Adventure. I wonder if another reason disaster movies like to do this is because they kill off so much of the cast. You have to have one star alive at the end.
Another interesting film, which I really enjoyed (that may not be the right word-- it’s a hard film to watch, given the subject matter), but it’s very good, anyway, which had an all-star cast of women, that was very diverse, is Paradise Road. Pauline Collins and Juliana Margulies, just to begin with, plus Glenn Close, Jennifer Ehle, Cate Blanchett, Frances McDormand and Wendy Hughes. I mean, if you list all the projects they are each most famous for, you have Upstairs, Downstairs; ER; Pride & Prejudice; Fargo; and Fatal Attraction– that’s a crazy diverse list.
I always enjoy flix starring the comedy troop whose core consists of Christopher Guest, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey and [the late] Fred Willard. Michael McKean, Chris Elliot, Larry Miller and David Cross fit in this group nicely, too. I consider them low-key All-Star comic actors in low-key B-comedies, but they hit my funny bone with a big hammer almost all the time.
Willard’s performance in Best in Show always cracks me up.
A few reasons. It gets some hate for being a bit TOO saccharine, but it’s also a victim of the “let’s look at old things through the lens of today” trap.
Colin Firth’s storyline is too rape-y and Kiera Knightly’s is too much unwanted lust/stalker vibes. I don’t pay too much attention to them, but they’re there.
I think Inception holds up: Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page and Ken Watanabe and Pete Postlethwaite and Tom Berenger had already earned Oscar nominations, sure as Marion Cotillard and Michael Caine already had Oscars; and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Cillian Murphy already had Golden Globe nominations, leaving Tom Hardy as, at the time, (a) still on the way up awards-wise, but still (b) a known quantity?
Would Glengarry Glen Ross qualify? Even though some of the awards and nominations occurred after the film came out, nearly every actor who had a speaking part in this movie is either an Oscar nominee or winner. The only exception is the woman who played the waitress in the Chinese restaurant where Roma hung out.
The Pythons weren’t individually stars when the movies came out. None of them had had a starring role in any movie before that, and only fans of the TV show would have known their names. And to the extent any of them were in movies after that, they were’t A-listers. Cleese and Palin starred in A Fish Called Wanda, but that was well after the Python films.
Are we counting Pixar and stuff? The Toy Story films are great for this. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts, John Ratzenberger, Jim Varney, R Lee Ermy, Laurie Metcalf, Don Rickles, and so on.
Wes Anderson movies tend to have pretty decent cast lists.
Grand Budapest Hotel had: Ralph Fiennes, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Jude Law, Bill Murray, F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Saoirse Ronan and Tilda Swinton.
I wonder if 1976’s Silver Streak would be included. Yes, it has Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, and Jill Clayburgh–but it also has Patrick McGoohan, Scatman Crothers, Ned Beatty, Ray Walston, and Richard Kiel. We also see Fred Willard, Lucille Benson, Clifton James, and Valerie Curtin in character roles. And it might not count, but it needs to be said: J.A. Preston, who played the dining car waiter, would go on to play the role of the judge in A Few Good Men.
For that matter, how about 1973’s The Sting? Yes, Paul Newman and Robert Redford got top billing, but those supporting were no lightweights: Robert Shaw, Charles Durning, Eileen Brennan, Harold Gould, Robert Earl Jones, Ray Walston, Dana Elcar, and Jack Kehoe. Heck, why not? I’ll even throw in Larry D. Mann, who played the train conductor at the poker game.
Larry D. Mann? You may not know him to see him, but you know his voice: he was the voice of Yukon Cornelius in 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special, and built up an impressive resume of voice and acting credits over a 40+ year career.
Robert Altman’s later films tended to be all-star affairs, mainly because actors really wanted to work with him. *Short Cuts *(1994) had Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Robert Downey Jr., Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry and Huey Lewis; A Prairie Home Companion (2006) had Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Lily Tomlin and Garrison Keillor (obviously).
And of course, there’s the greatest Robert Altman film not directed by Robert Altman: *Magnolia *(1999), with Tom Cruise, Philip Baker Hall, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Alfred Molina, Felicity Huffman, Luis Guzmán, Ricky Jay and Patton Oswalt.
They were well-known TV stars in the UK. All of them had made their names on TV shows *before *Python, and continued on TV after the series ended, as performers, writers, directors, or producers.
I thought of ‘The Towering Inferno’ which was beset with a lot of behind-the-scenes squabbling but I believe was generally well-received at the time and did well at the box office (Box Office Mojo says $116,000,000 with a $14,000,000 budget).
One amusing story is that Paul Newman was supposed to get top billing, which Steve McQueen was having none of. So a compromise was worked out that in the opening and closing credits, and the movie poster, their names were staggered so that McQueen’s name appears first from left to right, but Newman’s name is slightly higher, so he’s first from top to bottom: