Not only is he one of the greatest rock guitarists EVER, but he and his dad hand-made the guitar that Brian still plays back in the 1960s when he was just a teenager. So we can add “instrument maker” to his list of credits too. He’s also written or co-authored several books on astrophysics.
Newman also won a Golden Globe for directing Rachel, Rachel – which was up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, getting him an Oscar nomination as producer.
And, speaking of Paul Newman, Robert Redford of course famously went from being an Oscar-nominated actor to being an Oscar-winning director – and then, in his Sundance Film Festival days, to being an Oscar-nominated producer.
I left a few things out. He also has a degree in Economics and worked as a financial analyst before his writing career took off. Also, from the New Yorker:
Since someone already said Steve Martin, I’ll throw out Rupert Holmes. Known to most people (if known at all) as the singer of the song they love to hate, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”, he was also the creator and writer of the television show Remember WENN, wrote the musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the play Say Goodnight, Gracie, the libretto of the shows Curtains and First Wives’ Club, AND wrote a novel called Where the Truth Lies.
A multi-talented guy, to be sure, and as someone who had the pleasure of meeting him, I can say he’s also very gracious and sweet.
Isaac Asimov: Professor of Biochemistry, prolific writer of science fiction, mysteries, and non-fiction, covering diverse subjects of science, history, religion, Shakespeare, poetry (well, limericks), etc. He was also well known as a populariser of science.
Richard Feynman: Nobel prize-winning Physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project. He also was a much beloved teacher at Caltech in the years I was present. He had art exhibits, he regularly played the Bongos in campus stage productions, he taught informal classes on safe cracking and lock picking, he was infamous for his practical jokes, and his physics lectures have been required reading at many schools. He also conducted (informal) research on psychedelic drugs, and was a critic of what he perceived as math illiteracy among biologists and social scientists (he claimed that the state of the soft sciences was a shambles due to a total misunderstanding of basic math and statistics by members of those fields). Before Sagan, he was THE science guy, the person who could take almost any scientific concept and put it into terms that even a layman could understand.
And oh yeah, he solved the mystery of the Challenger disaster shortly before his death from cancer.
Are these not all highly related?
Well, Shakespeare was an actor, playwright and poet. Christopher Marlowe was a playwright, poet, and translator.
Not really. I can’t think of very many actors who are also playwrights, especially in recent times. Gene Wilder comes to mind, but his plays are not nearly as celebrated as Shepard’s. Not only that, but his plays tend to be quite complicated and cerebral; a far cry from, say, Baby Boom.
Do we get to count Lin-Manuel Miranda?
DonG lover is the best.
Ha, well I’m not the OP, but if I were then I would say no. A play is very different than a musical, and even if it weren’t, I would still maintain that writing a show and acting in it is very different than writing a novel and a song and a play. Or, in Shepard’s case, writing plays but acting in films.
Harrison Schmitt: Ph.D. in geology, Apollo astronaut, U.S. Senator, adjunct university professor (of engineering physics, not geology), probable photographer of one of the most famous images ever taken.
Nick Offerman - actor, woodworker, author
Hollywood kept trying to buy Sylvester Stallone’s ROCKY script, but he kept turning them down so long as they planned to cast someone else starring in the lead role. And so the picture eventually got made the way he’d hoped – with him picking up Oscar nominations for his performance and his screenplay – and he then started playing actor/writer/director for the blockbuster ROCKY II. And then again for the bigger blockbuster that was ROCKY III; and again, for the even bigger blockbuster that was ROCKY IV; and he did it again for ROCKY BALBOA, too.
(With plenty of other credits as actor or writer or director too, of course.)
Author Andrew Vachss has led a life that would be considered “unreal” if it were fiction. Freedom fighter, attorney for children accused of sex crime, an expert in sexual predators, founder of a therapy dog program to help sexually abused children, and author of 33 books.
Plus The Rutles.
Clint Eastwood: Actor, director, producer.
Mike Nesmith: Singer, songwriter, author.
Davy Jones: Actor, singer, songwriter.
Micky Dolenz: Actor, singer, songwriter, woodworker.
Peter Tork: Singer, musician, songwriter, teacher.
-MMM-
^ Clint Eastwood: add pianist and soundtrack to the list.
Plays jazz drums, too.
Bumping this thread to add Linn-Manuel Miranda to the list. Is there any creative thing he does not do and do well?