I remember reading an article a few years back that likened the L&O franchise to welfare for New York actors. Whatever else may not be happening, an actor with some chops can usually count on L&O for a couple of days work.
One not from IMDB but that leaped out of the credits at me a while back. There was on HBO, back when HBO used to show filmed performances of plays, a production of Sherlock Holmes with Frank Langella c. 1981. His little Baker Street Irregular was Christian Slater.
He was also Egg in The Hotel New Hampshire with Jodie Foster.
OK< now I’m hooked on this too…
I’d forgotten about that one!
Also in that movie, the Hispanic “cool guy” who’s name I can’t remember was played by Gerardo. Yes, the same Gerardo who would go on to sing “Rico Suave” a few years later.
Y’all stole mine - Alfred Molina!
I still can’t believe he played the guy in Raiders, the uptight English lawyer in Enchanted April, and Angel in Maverick. He is versatility embodied!
She also played a “Bernice Goetz” style subway shooter in an early episode of Law & Order, as well as Mozart’s duplicitious maid in Amadeus.
Here’s a fun one that has recently surfaced:
The guy who played Michael J. Fox’s rival Mick McAllister in Teen Wolf catches for the N.Y. Mets. There is some debate over whether this checks out or not (he used a different name).
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/writers/pete_mcentegart/07/23/ten.spot/
Also, something I learned on Fark today:
The hot girl from Cecil B. Demented and Cybill Shepherd’s daughter from her sitcom, Alicia Witt, was Alia in Dune. Fark has some lovely pictures of her from Stuff magazine.
And she played Jenny Anderman, the girlfriend in 1986’s The Manhattan Project…which also featured a young Robert Sean Leonard. 
I was surprised to find out that Albert Brooks and “Super Dave” Osbourne are brothers. Also, their original last name is “Einstein”, so Albert Brooks’ real name is Albert Einstein.
Cromwell, one of my favorite character actors, has turned up in a lot of interesting places. He was the nerd father in “Revenge of the Nerds”, and was also the inventor of warp drive in “Star Trek - First Contact”.
OK, this is a little obscure and tortuous, but here goes:
On the old TV program “Sanford and Son,” most of Fred’s cronies on the program were either real-life cronies, or guys he had met a long time ago, and included them in roles on his program to get them a paycheck.
Two of his friends were “Leroy” and “Slick Skillet.” Leroy Daniels played Leroy, and Ernest “Skillet” Mayhand played Slick Skillet. In real life, they formed a little-known comedy duo of “Leroy & Skillet.”
When Debby Boone’s timeless classic “You Light Up My Life,” hit #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, she became the first person to have three generations in a family hit #1. Her dad hit #1 five times during his career, and her maternal grandpa, Red Foley, hit #1 a quarter century earlier with "Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy.
And to tie them together, the writer of “Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy” write the song after watching shoe-shiner extraordinaire. . . Leroy Daniels!
I was surprised to see that Tim Curry of Rocky Horror fame does voicework for many of my favorite cartoons, most noteabley The Wild Thornberry’s Nigel. Nigel is easily my favorite cartoon character voice, and to find out it was Tim Curry behind the cartoon was delightfully surprising.
If you ever happen to take another look at Hitchcock’s Psycho, watch for a brief scene of a cop standing in a hallway after Norman Bates is in custody. He has no lines at all, but he faces the audience and gets a pretty good close-up. The cop is played by . . .
none other then Ted Knight, better known as pompous newsman Ted Baxter on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” You can’t miss him. When I saw this in a theater some years ago, the audience burst out laughing, completely ruining the mood of the film.
I was scrolling through Jack Black’s filmography and imagine my surprise when I saw he was in The Jackal, Waterworld and Demolition Man.
Cynthia Nixon’s the babysitter in Baby Day Out too.
Which Dune are we talking about for Alicia Witt? The little girl with the superpowers (if thats Alia) in the David Lynch one was Virginia Madsen, of Candyman, and Michaels sister, when she was a little kid.
I saw Madsen in Wargames too. He looks well different.
Virginia Madsen plays Princess Irulan in Dune. She does the voice over at the start of the movie. IIRC, for the rest of the movie she just stood there… Alicia Witt plays Alia, Paul’s sister, who was born a Bene Gesserit when Lady Jessica drank the water of life while pregnant with her.
The one that got me recently came when I wayched my new copy of A Night at the Opera on DVD. I went to IMDB to look up the other things the actors had done and found that Siegfried “Sig” Ruman, who played Bad Guy opera director Hermann Gottlieb was Seargent Schultz in Stalag 17 !!:
The ones that continue to floor me are movies that you see years later and find that some minor character is now famous, and you can’t help noticing the face. It changes the movie. Examples:
Bananas – in this Woody Allen comedy, Sylvester Stallone plays a thug who mugs someone next to Woody in a subway car.
Creepshow – In the segment with Leslie Nielsen, who revenges himself upon his cheating wife, the other cheater is played by a pre-Cheers Ted Danson.
House of Wax – Vincent Price’s silent assistant Igor (Yes! Igor!!) is played by Charles Bronson, under his real name Charles Buchinsky. (I just watched this on DVD, too).
Mad magazine did a satire of Kramer vs. Kramer in which they have the kid stumbling across a naked lady in the middle of the night (an actual scene from the film) making some line about how unlikely it was that hus Dustin Hoffman father ended up with a “hottie” like her. They drew some generic naked lady, not noticing (as I hadn’t) that she was played by JoBeth Williams, of Poltergeist et al. I only learned about this because she wrote a letter in, thanking them for calling her a hottie.
What kills me now is that Cromwell played the chauffeur to James Coco’s Hercule Poirot clone in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death. Again, now I can’t watcjh the film without think “That’ll do, pig”, or some other line by him in a famous film.
Gotcha. My bad, I haven’t seen it in ages.
Speaking of Full Metal Jacket, Animal Mother ("If I’m gonna get my balls blown off for a word, my word is poontang. ") was played by Adam Baldwin, who played Jayne in “Firefly.”
Speaking of “Scrubs,” R. Lee Ermey did a guest spot as the aforementioned Janitor’s father.
John C. McGinley (Dr. Cox) played a Marine in both The Rock and Platoon.
Christa Miller, who plays his wife on “Scrubs,” had two different guest appearances on “Seinfeld.”
Bryan Cranston, the dad on “Malcolm in the Middle” was Dr. Tim Whatley, the dentist.
Larry Thomas, the Soup Nazi, played “himself” on “Scrubs,” when J.D. swears that he looks just like the Soup Nazi.
I better stop, I could go all day.