I know there are hundreds of One Hit Wonders as far as music goes, but have there been any for the movies? Any actors/actresses, directors, or writers?
Katharine Houghton comes to mind. She played Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s daughter in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”. After that she descended (for some strange reason) into a spiral of low-quality “B” horror flicks and her career was quickly extinguished. Houghton is, incidentally, Hepburn’s niece.
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I think you need to define ‘one hit wonder’. It doesn’t mean they made just one record or movie, but that they only had one major it, and the rest of their work is obscure and not widely known.
So… Maybe Paul Hogan? Crocodile Dundee II might be too well known to qualify.
David Caruso?
Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction. True, he had Resevior Dogs, but most people thought of that in PF’s retrospect. What has he done since?
Charles Laughton is a sort of a one hit wonder. While he appeared in dozens of films as an actor, he only directed one, Night of the Hunter.
It doesn’t really fit the one-hit wonder category, but the best example I can think of of someone making a major cinematic contribution and then following it with an endless stream of crap would be Sylvester Stallone (Rocky was and is fantastic).
The folks from Blair Witch are looking pretty fluke-y too–perhaps a better fit with the OP?
Sticking to just writing and directing, the biggest that have come out so far are: Four Rooms (The last segment), From Dusk To Dawn, and Jackie Brown.
He also had True Romance between RD (His best movie, IMO, though Four Rooms is great) and PF, though I’m not sure how ‘big’ that one is.
The first person to come to mind was Harold Russell.
He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in The Best Years of Our Lives.
Granted, there aren’t too many roles for a man without hands though.
Christopher Atkins
Remember “Blue Lagoon” - nobody else does either…
A director that comes to mind is Michael Cimino, who directed The Deer Hunter and then followed up with Heaven’s Gate. As I used to say on AOL sooo many years ago: Cya!
Troy Duffy. He wrote and directed The Boondock Saints, one of my favorite movies. He hasn’t done anything movie-wise before or since according to the imdb.
Mark Lee, the guy who played oposite Mel Gibson in Galipoli.
Great movie, and he did a bang up job, but it seems more than his character died at the end.
I suppose another one might be the guy who played his real life character in The Killing Fields- Haing S. Ngor. He did so well he won an Oscar.
Unfortunately, after making out of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, he died in an LA garage- murdered.
But oh yeah, what a cult popularity he has in The Pirate Movie! Ahem. 
Carry Snodgress. Got raves as a great new young star in “Diary of a Mad Housewife,” but seemed to have vanished after that.
Jo Ann Pflug. Again, great notices as Lt. Dish in the movie “MAS*H,” but went nowhere.
Louise Rainer. Won, not one, but two Oscars, but is now completely forgotten. When Alfred Hitchcock was angry that the academy passed him over, his wife calmed him by saying, “Remember, Louise Rainer won two.”
Abraham Polonski was sort of one: a first-class film noir, “Force of Evil” in the 40s. Then he was blacklisted and didn’t direct until “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” in 1969 (which was pretty bad).
Dalton Trumbo, though a successful screenwriter (despite the blacklist), only directed one film – the horribly preachy and obvious “Johnny Got His Gun.”
Harve Presnell should be considered with an asterisk: He starred in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” his first film, and his career sunk soon afterward. However, he made a comeback as a character actor 30 years later, starting with “Fargo.”
Being a one hit wonder in film is different than in music. In music, all you need is to write or have someone give you one song with a catchy melody that grabs everyone for a moment in time.
In a film, you have to be in a relatively popular film, but then either see your career decline because either you didn’t want it to (like Harold Russell) or because some outside event affected it (like blacklisted artists).
A lot of child stars who would be one hit wonders, mainly because they didn’t want to pursue acting when they became adults.
Nick Apollo Forte.
He costarred with Woody Allen in “Broadway Danny Rose.” That was his first and only film appearance.
F. Murray Abraham. He won Best Actor for his portrayal of Salieri in Amadeus, and has since appeared in unremarkable films, a bunch of them foreign. His last appearance was in the horrible Thirteen Ghosts.
Well, Terrence Malick ALMOST qualifies. In the early 1970s, he got a lot of critical acclaim for “Badlands,” and was hailed as the next “genius” of cinema. But he followed up with the unsuccessful “Days of Heaven,” and fell off the face of the Earth.
Of course, he came back a few years ago with “The Thin Red Line.”
Nitpick: Tarantino wrote the screenplay for True Romance but did not direct it; it was directed instead by Tony Scott, brother of Ridley. Compare the love scenes in True Romance and Top Gun; Tony likes the blue light special.
And so many thanks to SkipMagic, who brought back such wonderful adolescent memories of Chris Atkins in The Pirate Movie. Can you believe there was a time in my life I wanted to be Kristy McNichol?
Among actors, the two that come to mind are Jennifer Beals (Flashdance) and David Naughton (An American Werewolf in London).