I was very surprised today when I watched American History X and recognized a hugely obese man who played the character Seth. I seemed to recognize him as the friend to the lead character in the movie Blow named Tuna.
Turns out this actor’s name is Ethan Suplee and when I looked him up on IMDB, I was shocked to see that he has lost about 200 pounds. Just take a look at his following picture:
That reminded me of the actor who played Neuman on Seinfeld. His name is Wayne Night. You can’t really see a huge weight loss in the following picture. But you can see a large one. I have read that he has in fact lost a huge amount of weight.
This got me to wondering how many other extremely obese actors have shed the weight and how many have not.
Is the explanation just as simple as follows?
If they didn’t shed the weight, any hugely obese person stands little chance of living much past 40.
But then I’m reminded of the actor who played “The Fat Man” in all those Humphrey Bogard movies. His name was Sydney Greenstreet.
He played in The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, Christmas in Connecticut (a great movie with Barbara Stanwick), Conflict, Passage to Marseille and Cassablanca as well as many others.
He was hugely obese but never lost any significant weight. He lived to 75 years old and died from complications from Diabetes. I’ve seen him in many movies and he always appears to be close to 300 pounds.
Very hard to understand him living that long. Of course, I suppose there are always statistical flukes.
But I’m just wondering how many other actors who were hugely obese either died at a young age or shed the weight and lived a long time?
Oliver Hardy lost a lot of weight near the end of his life. I’m not sure if it was intentional or due to illness.
And sometimes fat people do live long lives. Leon Askin, whom played the fat General Burkhalter on “Hogan’s Heroes”, lived to be 97. And Al Molinaro from “Happy Days” is still alive at 94, though I haven’t seen any recent pictures of him.
I forgot to mention John Pinette. He was the actor on Seinfeld who was found dead in a hotel room at age 50.
The above story says he played a “pivotal role” in Seinfeld. But it looks like he only appeared in a single episode. So how pivotal could that be? Anyway, I can’t see any reason for his death. It said “natural causes”.
Wikipedia says morbid obesity reduces life expectancy by ten years. So as u say, most obese people can expect to live long past 40, even if they do tend to die earlier then their more svelte peers.
I haven’t seen a recent enough picture of Kevin Smith to know if he’s thin-again or fat-again, but his weight has to have swung by triple digits since he’s been in the public eye.
Not an actor, but John Popper of Blues Traveler lost over 200 pounds after some form of bariatric surgery.
I read something only a few days ago about a movie directed by Ron Lester who was 508 lbs when he played Billy Bob in Varsity Blues. According to IMDB he lost 348 lbs in 2 years due to surgery.
UK comic actress Dawn French recently lost a lot of weight, but then gained a chunk of it back again. On balance she’s still better off than she was, though.
Jerry O’Connell was a fat kid but grew up to be a fit handsome guy. I don’t know how much of that was a lifestyle change and how much was growing to be 6-2.
It was pivotal because it was the final episode which still gets discussed and dissected today. And his character being mugged was the plot point which lead to the rest of the plot. The pivot if you will.
Roger C. Carmel, who I suspect most people on this Board will recognize as Harry Mudd from two TOS Star Trek Episodes, seems to have been heavy most of his career – he was heavy not only as Harcourt Fenton Mudd, and as Roger Buell on the sitcom The Mothers-in-Law (until replaced by Richard Deacon), but at the end of his life when he played “Senor Naugles” on TV commercials for the Mexican fast-food restaurant Naugles. But in between he seems to have lost a LOTR of weight a couple of times. He was extremely thin as accountant Doug Wesley on The Dick Van Dyke Show, for instance.
According to Wikipedia, he was only 54 when he died, of congestive heart failure.
Stephen Furst was a blimp - and so named - in Animal House. He was still quite heavy in the early seasons of Babylon 5, but by the final season and following movies he had shed quite a bit of weight and hardly looked the same.
Laird Cregarwas a very large actor who had a promising career as a villain (literally “heavies”) in dramas and in horror movies. Among other roles, he played the “Jack the Ripper”-type serial killer in Hitchcock’s 1944 picture The Lodger, and also the “Jekyll and Hyde”-type schizophrenic (in the Hollywood split personality sense, not the medical sense) in the 1945 Hangover Square.
However, he wanted to break away from the villain roles and become a leading man. To that end, he embarked on a medically questionable weight-loss program, dropping from 300 to 200 pounds in a period of months. This drastic shock to his system caused serious health problems, and he died following emergency abdominal surgery at 31.
He was considered an excellent actor, and, if had stayed with the villain roles, he could have had a career path similar to that of his good friend Vincent Price. His death was a major loss to the industry; many actors of the day cited him as a significant influence.
He probably would be dead by now if he didn’t. His father died of diabetes complications. Stephen started having severe complications from diabetes at a very early age. If he hadn’t changed his lifestyle and lost weight his health would have continued to deteriorate. He has been an outspoken advocate for diabetes education for decades.
This was referred to in an episode of Raising Hope three years ago. Ethan Suplee was a guest star and this happened, as noted by me in a thread about the show:
