Route 66 had quite a roster of guest stars.
See! You know who she is! She was also in The Longest Yard and Messiah of Evil. A cult film which has better cred then Invasion of the Bee Girls…famous in its own right of course thanks to Skinemax.
For starters:
The Fugitive
Combat!
Twelve O’Clock High
The Avengers
The FBI
Mission: Impossible
The Invaders
Hawaii Five-O
Last of the Summer Wine had an original main cast of Peter Sallis (also famous for the voice part of Wallace in Wallace & Gromit), Bill Owen, Brian Wilde and Kathy Staff.
As it’s a show about the antics of eccentric pensioners, it was inevitable that if the series continued long enough (and boy, it did) the original cast would eventually die. Over time, the show became a veritable conveyor belt of older actors and comedians, including, but not limited to: Burt Kwouk, Stephen Lewis, June Whitfield, Russ Abbott, Norman Wisdom, Bobby Ball, Jim Bowen, Bernard Cribbins etc
Basically anyone who had been an actor in a not-completely serious role in the past was in the lineup at some point.
Another British show which has had a host of famous names pass through is the soap opera Coronation Street (1960 - present). In some cases, it’s a famous person doing it as a bit of fun (some fella called Charles had a cameo, apparently); but there are plenty of examples where it was an early break for someone who went on to (much) greater things: national treasure Joanna Lumley; Patrick Stewart; Ben Kingsley; and so on.
Here’s a list
(ETA: click on “Other” at the end of the alphabet to display all names at once)
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I don’t know if Bonanza had more guest stars, more quality guest stars, or more “hey it’s that guy” guest stars than any other show, but its probably near the top in any list you can develop.
I looked through the IMDB list and found some unusual entries like Bob Barker, Bobby “Boris” Pickett, Scatman Crothers, and Tor Johnson, as well as a whole posse of child/teenage actors who went on to better things: Jodie Foster, Gary Busey, Lisa Eilbacher, Beau Bridges, and Ron Howard.
Oh, I had a big boyhood crush on Ms Ford. I thought she should have had, at least, a steady TV career.
The X-Files had pre-fame appearances by Seth Green, Jack Black, Jewel Staite, and Lucy Liu off the top of my head.
Whenever we’re watching a UK movie or TV show and see an actor who looks familiar to us, and we can’t pinpoint from where, we’ll look them up on imdb. 99 times out of 100 it’s from Midsomer Murders.
And long enough ago that folks are sometimes hard to recognize. I saw one a few weeks ago, and there was something familiar about one of the actresses. I couldn’t quite place her, though; had to look up the episode on IMDb.
Marion Ross
I also saw Gavin MacLeod just a couple nights ago, but but he was a little easier to spot.
With or without hair?
A quick survey of the 1500 names in the Love Boat cast list shows:
Terri Hatcher
Ray Milland
Jessica Walters
Carol Channing
Milton Berle
Melissa Sue Anderson
Peter Scolari
Parker Stevenson
Julia Duffy
Patrick Duffy
Tim Robbins
Len Lesser (Seinfeld’s Uncle Lou),
and many many more
Bald on top, with a fringe of dark hair.
There were several things that made it likely that a television show would have many appearances by (eventually) well known actors. One is, obviously, that the show lasted a long time. A second is that the show had few bottle episodes:
If each episode had few actors on it, it meant that the show didn’t have as many actors over its history. A third is that it was the kind of show where you expected minor actors in each episode to appear once and never again. One example of such a show is police and detective shows where each episode is about a single crime which isn’t mentioned in future episodes. Another example of this is shows where there is no continuing story at all. This was more common in American television from its beginning to about the mid-1960s. This was shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. There were also shows that had “theater”, “playhouse”, and the names of the sponsors of the show in the titles (which really don’t exist anymore). They were sort of like going to a different play every week at the local live playhouse where there was no continuity between the plays.
Jamie Lee Curtis does a cute bit part as a waitress in one.
I saw Margot Robbie being interviewed someplace and she attributed her ability to cry on demand to her experience on the show.
The british drama series Crown Court ran for 879 episodes over the course of 12 years. the format was 25 minute episodes and 3 episodes usually comprised a single case. It was unusual in that an actual jury decided on guilt or innocence and they scripted 2 different endings to cover this. Everybody working in british tv at the time showed up in it including future oscar winners Ben Kingsley and Brenda Fricker.
The Outer Limits, too
Donald Pleasance
David McCallum
William Shatner
Leonard Nimoy
Eddie Albert
Bruce Dern
Robert Culp (3 times!)
Adam West
Barry Morse
Carroll O’Connor
Grace Lee Whitney
and a bunch of others
One day, we will look back on the Harry Potter movies as a showcase of all the great British actors of the time and realize how lucky we were to get them in the same series.
One shame is Stephen Fry never appears in any role in the movies. He did such an incredible voice-acting job on the audio books, it’s hard to separate the series from him.
A lot of people have been on Archer, including Brian Cranston, Rene Auberjonois, Timothy Olyphant, Jon Hamm, Burt Reynolds, Anthony Bourdain, Patton Oswalt…