Thank you Agrippina, I remember that story about Kaufman now that you mention it.
Didn’t Woody Allen continue a weekly gig playing the clarinet at some small Manhattan venue? IIRC, he cited it as the reason he never was able to attend the Academy Awards.
(Geez, I’m answering my own OP).
You know, I never caught that until you just said it.
And the barn-building scene in Witness.
Funny thing is, Ford was on The Daily Show sometime back and Stewart asked him about being a carpenter, and Ford said he hated it and would never do it again, for any reason. He doesn’t even like to fix things around the house.
A couple of posts here that are more mocking than the rest are asking why anyone would want to turn away from the limelight, and declaring that they’ll come crawling back only to find a forgetful audience.
What about performers who enjoy their craft, and enjoy non-acting life as well? Are they holding their breath, waiting for the world to notice them again? I say, absolutely not.
Harrison Ford may detest carpentry but he’s a licensed and active helicopter pilot. He went and Rescued Lost Hikers with his rig a few years back. Hardly a publicity stunt, I assure you.
Meryl Streep has been busy raising her kids, and not acting much. Ditto for other performers.
James Earl Jones lives up my way. Acts a bit, sometimes locally. Works around the house. Enjoys his family. Ritchie Havens lives up near Woodstock. Dotes over his grandson ( I met them both a few years ago, at a function having nothing to do with him ).
It’s a wee tad snarky to presume that someone who has acted and had some or tons of fame, is a hollow shell of a human when not basking in the fame. He’s interested in being a cordwainer, eh? Right on.
Oh, and the quote is " That’s the cup of a carpenter ". 
Cartooniverse
And Ford also has a great sense of humor about it. I recall Stewart asking him if Ford would make him a table, and Ford replied that only if Stewart paid him the same amount that he gets paid to make a movie.
Regarding Witness, I don’t recall any specific line about John Book and carpentery. But I remember thinking that, given Ford’s past work as a carpenter, it made it a little more believable.
I always thought that Indy picked the wooden cup because, well, Jesus was a carpenter. Not because Harrison Ford was. 
That’s what I always thought, HSHP.
Yes, but I was always under the impression that he regarded this as more of a hobby and an excuse than a serious alternative career. (Thus he did allow a European tour with the band and a documentary to be made about it, but only at the point when his reputation about his private life was pretty much at its lowest.)
It appears that Harrison Ford worked as a carpenter in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. He was getting an occasional movie role at that point, but you can’t survive on what’s paid for a bit actor working one movie role per year. He apparently quit that job shortly after being cast in American Graffitti. In other words, he quit carpentry at the point that he was making enough from acting to be able to survive on it. Don’t forget, Ford didn’t break through as an actor with any general recognition till he was in his early thirties. This is what most actors have to do, unless they’re the rare ones who instantly break through when they arrive in Hollywood. They find a job as a waiter or something and hope they break through soon. Most never make it. They move back home or they stick around but give up acting.
Woody Allen never remotely considered playing the clarinet to be a career. If he claimed that the reason that he didn’t go to the Oscars was because he didn’t want to miss his Monday night gig with his band, he was joking. He didn’t go to the Oscars because he didn’t want to go to the Oscars.
Admittedly, Allen is a comedian (or at least used to be), so there’s an expectation that anything he does might be a joke, or at least as with Kaufman, some kind of comedy experiment.
Woody Allen despises the Oscars (and any other sort of overhyped awards) so much that after Annie Hall won the Oscar, he talked the distributers of the film into not including the words “Academy Award winner” in any ads for the film in any newspaper within 75 miles of New York, so he would never see them.