Tom Baker’s claim to fame in DOCTOR WHO came after years of missing out on title roles on film. A movie about Martin Luther? Hey, somebody has to play the Pope. Nicholas and Alexandra? Rasputin. Sinbad? Yeah, he’s not Sinbad.
(As a Brit, the guy of course had no trouble getting work if someone was adapting Shakespeare or Chaucer for the big screen – but never as a leading man.)
David Duchovny had roughly a dozen supporting roles in movies before he got famous on THE X-FILES, at which point he – got roughly a dozen leading roles in movies.
(It also convinced folks to build CALIFORNICATION around the guy, which promptly let him double his leading-man Golden Globe nominations from four to eight.)
Dammit, you are correct! Why do I try to rely on my memory for this kind of thing?
Jeremy Brett kind of started doing both, but his early film career peaked as Freddy in My Fair Lady, after which he mostly worked in television (Sherlock Holmes and D’Artagnan were big high points, though more the former than the latter) until just before he died.
Dennis Haysbert got his big break as The First Black President on 24, after decades of small roles in films – often as That Guy You Won’t Wrestle The Gun Away From, since, hey, who else do you cast as the booming-voiced homicide detective in movie after movie if the leading man he’s talking down to stands over six feet tall? Who else do you cast as the brawny henchman who towers over the criminal mastermind, or the enlisted man who towers over his superior officer – or, y’know, the Secret Service agent who towers over the President he’s guarding?
(You cast the power hitter from Major League, is what you do.)
Not to mention Twenty Bucks and Biloxi Blues and Crossing The Bridge.
At that, all six of the castmembers had been less-than-top-billed on film before hitting it big on television; heck, Courtney Cox had been in more than half-a-dozen movies, from Masters Of The Universe to Cocoon: The Return to Mr. Destiny, before Ace Ventura before Friends.
How about Damian Lewis? Gets a small part in a Pierce Brosnan movie, then earns a Golden Globe nomination for his TV work on Band of Brothers – which isn’t really his big break, as he’s soon back in theaters as the fourth-billed actor in a Morgan Freeman movie or the fifth-billed actor in a Robert Redford movie and so on.
But that’s enough to get him a starring TV role on Life as a philosophical ex-con turned millionaire detective – before, y’know, heading back to movie work, getting billed under co-stars like James Franco and Natalie Portman – and then back to being a leading man on TV, with his Golden-Globe-winning role on Homeland.