Disagree. I think he had just been unreliable, and they don’t want to take a risk on that. In any case, what you’re talking about is different from “canceled”, as it is used in the OP.
Actually, the OP was open to cases like Downey. But I can see your point.
Dalton Trumbo
Maybe? I remember her arrest for drunk driving with her foster kids in the car, but I don’t recall a lot of public outrage over it. She’s a pretty minor celebrity, really, so I don’t think it was on a lot of people’s radars to begin with, and she didn’t have much to be cancelled from. Looking at her wiki page, her TV work does drop off dramatically for about ten years right around her arrest, but her other work didn’t appear to have been affected. Hard to say if that was because of the scandal, or just the vagaries of showbiz, though.
Nah, nobody gets outraged over celebrities having substance abuse problems. He couldn’t get work because nobody wanted to sink a bunch of money into a movie with him in the lead, and have him unable to work because he’s getting high in the middle of the day, or in jail again, or dead from an overdose. He couldn’t get work because his addiction made him a shitty, unreliable worker.
How about some folks that had active careers and were canceled and didn’t come back? Let’s leave aside cases where the person ended up in jail.
ETA: @garygnu, yeah, probably tons of folks during the red scare.
Fatty Arbuckle.
I don’t think that Ryder was “canceled” in the early 2000s over the shoplifting conviction. If her output did slow down, it’s more likely because she was a woman in Hollywood who had the audacity to turn 30.
Kevin Spacey. Unless you count a couple low-budget foreign films as a comeback.
Note that Robert Downey Jr’s career was so in the toilet that he received “only” $2.5 million for the original Iron Man movie, but as the movies were popular and his career improved, made a whole lot more for the subsequent films.
Yeah, that’s a good one (so far – plenty of time for redemption). Even there, there were criminal implications to what he did, not just your every day racism or something.
Paul Reubens has had a modest comeback.
Does it count for musicians who were raked over the coals for some event, but not everywhere?
Jerry Lee Lewis had been married to his cousin for a while, but only when he toured Britain and the U.K. press got ahold of the story did it blow up, and I think he was persona non grata, at least in the public imagination there. Still, he was able to tour the oldies circuit for decades after his hitmaking era.
On the other side of the Atlantic, John Lennon’s “we’re bigger than Jesus” comment led to record burnings and radio bans for the Beatles in the American bible belt, but I doubt it dented their popularity much elsewhere, and they went on to some noted successes after that.
Elvis Costello got some blowback in the 70s? 80s? for using the n-word when referring to James Brown or something, while fighting with David Crosby in a bar and lost a bunch of gigs, but he’s back.
Yep. Maybe because the bar is set so low to begin with, there’s nowhere else to go but up.
The question doesn’t make logical sense. Claiming that someone is “canceled” means that they did nothing wrong and they don’t need to apologize. Typically they start marketing themselves as a very brave person who was punished for speaking the truth, and they rake in moolah from a certain type of rube. Being “canceled” is a moneymaker, why would anyone want to roll it back?
If you’re talking about people who apologized and recovered from that, there are examples. But there are precious few people who actually want to put in the work of changing and making amends to people they hurt. It’s far easier (and more lucrative) to play the role of persecuted truth-teller.
I think most of the outrage wasn’t because she was his cousin, but the fact that she was 13 years old when married.
IIRC, he talked of Ray Charles as “jive ass n****r”. His excuse was, well, drunkenness.
ETA: and I think it was a fight with Stephen Stills, not Crosby, though he might also have been present. It was at some music biz event or aftershow party, and several other well-known musicians witnessed the scene. It was in the late 70s, I think on Costello’s first US tour.
Ah, yeah, could have been Ray Charles.
First thing I thought of. He was unfairly cancelled, but cancelled all the same.
He was able to gradually return and even made a new Pee-Wee movie.
Wasn’t he contracted for all 3 Iron Man movies right up front? Possibly for the first Avengers as well?
His major money-making came from the fact that everyone loved his Tony Stark and they paid him a fortune for Avengers 2, 3, 4, and also for his appearances in movies like Spider-man.
That was what he said about James Brown. He called Ray Charles a “blind, ignorant [n-word].” It was an argument with Steven Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in a Holiday Inn lounge in Columbus, if the whole thing wasn’t tacky and 70’s enough. He was trying to be really “punk” and shocking to end the conversation (and, yes, was drunk), and says he didn’t expect Bramlett to take it to the press. He went on a huge apology tour for it, and was showing serious contrition right away. It was a supremely ugly statement, but he’s gone out of his way to make up for it.