Range, the man has range!
I spotted him in Death Wish 2 on television a few months ago in that strangely-stylized gang regalia you only see in 1980s movies. However, given that he’d already had a significant role in Apocalypse Now a few years earlier I’m not sure this is entirely in line with the OP.
Neeson was in lots of movies at that time – he had pretty prominent roles in The Mission and The Bounty, but for some reason people don’t remember them.
Just checking - Krull was 1983, Bounty was 1984 and Mission was 1986 - but I’d missed that he was in Excalibur in 1981 (as was pretty much every other English actor at the time).
Alfred Molina as Indiana Jones’ treacherous guide Satipo in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I saw Excalibur recently, and I’d completely forgotten that Helen Mirren played Morgana la Fey in it!
Pretty sexy, too.
I don’t think that Paul Reubens had achieved much fame prior to his role in The Blues Brothers as the waiter at the ritzy restaurant where they go to get Mr. Fabulous.
Harrison Ford in Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round.
Someone mentioned Jane Lynch in The Fugitive, but another actress makes one of her earliest films roles. Julianne Moore was the doctor who threatened to call security on Harrison Ford. She was also Willem Dafoe’s wife in Body of Evidence. AND played the best friend of Annabella Sciorra in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.
Bill Paxton was the human in the Barnes and Barnes video for “Fish Heads,” and he and Judge Reinhold were pilots in the video to Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night.”
Another great cameo in that movie is Steven Spielberg as the Cook County assessor. He was sorta famous at the time but not quite “OMFG STEVEN SPIELBERG”- famous yet.
I can beat you on Julianne Moore. She played Frannie and her “twin cousin” Sabrina on “As The World Turns”, for YEARS before she started acting in movies. See also: Meg Ryan, Marisa Tomei.
Its a little weird seeing Harrison Ford with a minor role in Apocalypse Now, given that by the time the film came out he definitely was famous, and one would think beyond the need to do bit parts. IIRC, he was cast and filmed in Apocalypse before Star Wars came out, but the former movie took so long to finish Star Wars had already been screened and made him famous.
Hadn’t he already been in American Graffiti before either of those? He wasn’t exactly a superstar yet, but he was on the map.
Did he have a big role in American Graffiti? My memory of that movie is pretty vague.
I’m pretty sure he was still working as a carpenter when Coppala hired him for Apocalypse, so he can’t have been that famous at the time.
It’s hard to watch The Lords of Flatbush, American Graffiti*** and The Color Purple*** and remember that when these three films were released, none of the major actors had received any type of stardom!
*Perry King as Chico Tyrell
Sylvester Stallone as Stanley Rosiello
Henry Winkler as Butchey Weinstein
Paul Mace as Wimpy Murgalo
Susan Blakely as Jane Bradshaw
Paul Jabara as Crazy Cohen
Ray Sharkey as Student
**Richard Dreyfuss as Curt Henderson
Ron Howard as Steve Bolander
Paul Le Mat as John Milner
Charles Martin Smith as Terry “The Toad” Fields
Cindy Williams as Laurie Henderson
Mackenzie Phillips as Carol Morrison
Harrison Ford as Bob Falfa
Suzanne Somers as The Blonde
***Whoopi Goldberg as Celie Harris Johnson
Danny Glover as Mr. Albert Johnson
Oprah Winfrey as Sofia[3]
Margaret Avery as Shug Avery[4]
Rae Dawn Chong as Squeak
Larry Fishburne as Swain
My wife was in a class in college with Glenn Close, so we went to see her on Broadway in a Sherlock Holmes play “Crucifer of Blood.” This was before she was in Garp.
My daughter was in a commercial for Hess Toy Trucks with Lacey Chabert (who was not a lead performer in it) before she was on Party of Five.
Not big, but more than a walk on. He was a sort of nominal villain, the guy who Paul Lemat drag raced against at the end.
According to his wiki, he still kept working as a carpenter until he got Star Wars, so I guess he couldn’t have been that big before then. It’s kind of an interesting story, though:
Note: he had been an actor before he was a carpenter, and done several bit parts on television. The carpentry was to pay the rent, but it looks like he lucked out getting to work for Lucas.
Definitely. The story goes that Lucas’s original intent was to use actors with whom he had not worked before for Luke, Leia, and Han (and, as he had previously worked with Ford on American Graffiti, that would have made Ford ineligible). Apparently, after seeing dozens of actors reading for the part of Han, Lucas never saw anyone he really liked, but he did like Ford’s interaction with Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher, and was won over.
Michael Cera was Gordo’s kid in Frequency. He’s about 11 or so.
My favorite though is probably Sergeant Paine from The Third Man. The guy that’s actually a fan of Holly’s pulp westerns and helps him out of a couple of tight spots. He went on to become a little more well known as M.
For me, one of the wildest “before they were famous” moments was seeing Dennis Franz playing a singing/dancing thug in Popeye. I had seen the movie as a kid and watched it with my daughter a couple years ago and had to back it up to confirm if I had actually confirm what I had seen. I still didn’t believe it had to go check IMDB. Much different from all of the cops he played over the years.
Gwyneth Paltrow played the young Wendy in Hook. She was also uncredited as a student in Higher Learning.