Mention of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Mickey Rourke reminded me of Diner.
The top billed actors did OK:
Steve Guttenberg
Daniel Stern
Mickey Rourke
Kevin Bacon.
Tim Daly
Ellen Barkin
Paul Reiser
According to Wikipedia, this was the first credited feature film roles for Daly, Barkin, and Reiser. Pretty early for the others, also.
As did Anna Paquin (for The Piano).
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Timothy Hutton won an Oscar for his first big-screen credit, in Ordinary People.
Kevin Costner in The Big Chill, still his best role to date.
While Titanic made Leo DiCaprio a household name, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape put him on the map & earned his first Oscar nomination.
How can we forget Charlie Sheen in Platoon? Or are we all trying to forget Charlie Sheen?
Robin Williams in The World According to Garp probably doesn’t count.
Whoopi Goldberg had only done one film before The Color Purple, and Oprah Winfrey had no screen credits.
Platoon was not close to being his debut. Along with other smaller roles that I don’t know, he was memorable in Red Dawn, Ferris Bueller and Lucas. His starring role in The Wrath was also before Platoon but I saw that after on tape. He certainly had a buzz as an up and coming young actor before Platoon.
Renee Zellweger in Jerry Maguire…I think her prior roles were pretty minor.
Carrey first came to my attention with Once Bitten - he had an obvious flair for physical comedy that wasn’t appreciated until In Living Color.
The one that gets me to this day is Angelina Jolie in Hackers. On Siskel and Ebert, Ebert raved that she was a great actress as well as gorgeous and would be big some day, and I remember thinking :dubious:. He was proven right, clearly, but I’m damned if I see anything in that performance that makes her shine.
Really? Jolie (along with Mathew Lillard, Fisher Stevens, and PENN JILLETTE) seemed to get that Hackers was a cartoon. And Jonny Lee Miller clearly did not.
How about Good Will Hunting? That was the first movie for both Damon and Affleck and may be the only movie where Affleck was really good.
Both starred in a large number of movies before Good Will Hunting. In fact, Good Will Hunting wasn’t even either’s first starring role. Affleck starred in Chasing Amy earlier in Spring 1997 and Damon starred in The Rainmaker a month before Hunting’s release.
Also, Affleck was the bomb in Phantoms, yo.
Huh. Shows you what I know about movies; I always thought it was their debuts and that they were relative unknowns. I’ll take your word for it regarding Phantoms.
Good Will Hunting wasn’t even the first movie Affleck and Damon did together. They had co-starred in School Ties five years earlier and Glory Daze two years earlier.
Christopher Reeve had only some TV credits (including a few years on a soap) and one small film role before starring in Superman: The Movie.
I thought Edward G. Robinson qualified for “Little Caesar”, but according to IMDB, he had half a dozen film credits before that. I guess it was the end of Rico, but not the start;)
Orson Welles may not have made any prior movies but he was very famous before that. Citizen Kane put his career in a different direction but it didn’t make his career.
It was their film writing debut and an Oscar win for them. They were unknowns as writers. Not even close to their acting movie debuts.