Gary Cooper in the 1927 World War I aviation film “Wings” had a small role that launched his career
Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects.
The Green Mile seemed to really put both Sam Rockwell and Michael Clarke Duncan on the map, so to speak.
ETA: and even included Graham Greene.
Nm. Duplicate post
In Bardem’s case, of the international public. In Spain he went from being “Pilar Bardem’s youngest boy” to people knowing him by name with Jamón, Jamón.
Now many people, including some of my parents’ generation, refer to Pilar as “Javier Bardem’s mother”.
Isn’t that the movie that also put Penélope Cruz on the map ?
I saw it when it came out in a very small theater with perhaps a 30 persons in attendance. Both actors were completely unknown to me at the time but I made sure to check out their names during the end credits. They only made it big internationally about 10 years later but I immediately recognized them.
Sonny Tufts got his first film role in a supporting part in So Proudly We Hail. His performance turned him into a star (although it was a short-lived stardom and he eventually became a punchline).
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were supporting players in Flying Down to Rio, with little to do with the main plot of the movie. It seemed to work out well for them.
Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted, which was intended to be a Winona Ryder vehicle.
Meryl Streep eclipsed pretty much everybody in Manhattan. As Michael Murphy pointed out, “That was the first and last time I got higher billing than Meryl Streep.”
Geena Davis had a brief but memorable debut in Tootsie.
How big a deal was Jodie Foster before Taxi Driver? I think she was the Coppertone commercial girl and had some memorable appearances in Partridge Family and Tom Sawyer.
Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter”?
Maybe Amy Adams in the indie film “Junebug.”
Jack Palance was nominated for “Best Supporting Actor” three times in his career: in 1952 (Sudden Fear), 1953 (Shane)…and 1991 (City Slickers, for which he won, arguably on a “career total” basis). In between 1953 and 1991 there was a whole lot of unremarkable (or at least unremarked) work; **City Slickers **catapulted him back into the limelight. While his post-CS work wasn’t exactly remarkable either, he certainly got much better billing after the Oscar win.
Sandra Bullock in Speed.
Yes, but since it happened to be her first you can’t say she went from being “a minor actress” to a big name. She’d only been in several videos for Mecano, the group of her at-the-time boyfriend Nacho Cano*. IMDB gives a credit from one episode of a French series but I suspect that if she hadn’t made it big her name wouldn’t even be in the lists for the series.
- Cano had believed the age she’d given him when they’d met; definitely underdeveloped, but that’s pretty normal for young dancers; kind of on the shy side, but ok, overprotected, whatever. Then he wanted to have her in one of their videos and it turned out she needed parental permission and reduced hours due to her age. Once he recovered from being completely freaked out, they skipped having her on that one, but she did appear in some of their videos once she was old enough to sign her own contracts.
He’s not that much older, would have been college age at the time they met, but she’d said 16 and nope.
Um, she was a lead actor, hardly a supporting role. Was credited third, after Keanu and Dennis Hopper. The first is reasonable, the second is presumably because Hopper was a well known actor. She won several secondary awards for best actress, not best supporting actress. The main movie before this where she was a supporting character and got a lot of notice was Demolition Man.
Wikipedia: “Bullock had a prominent supporting role in the science-fiction/action film Demolition Man (1993), followed by a leading role in Speed the following year. Speed took in $350 million at the box office worldwide”
Speaking of Tommy Lee Jones, I think that ‘The Fugitive’ changed his career. I think he was mostly a supporting actor before that, but it led to a long series of starring roles.
I completely agree. He went from total unknown to the de facto movie drill sergeant overnight
In terms of comebacks, you could say Frank Sinatra in “From Here to Eternity”. He had big roles in musicals in the late 1940s in such films as “On the Town”. But his career faded for a few years until his dramatic role in “From Here to Eternity” and also signing with Capitol records. No horse’s heads were involved.
Boris Karloff in “Frankenstein” although the Universal monster pictures he subsequently made weren’t big in their time. Like the Three Stooges, TV airings made monster pictures big.
John Houseman as the law professor in “The Paper Chase”. He had a whole career afterwards selling wine and stock brokerage firms after decades behind the scenes.
And he was hired as a technical adviser and wasn’t even supposed to be in the movie - the “Git Some!” door gunner was originally cast as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
Olympia Dukakis in “Moonstruck”?