William Shatner shall now and forever be known as T.J. Hooker.
Jeffrey Jones, for all his awesome film work, will forever be known as the Kiddie Porn Freak.
Interestingly, Ned Beatty has had no trouble finding good work since his inauspicious debut in Deliverance.
And my hat’s off to the many actors who have weathered numerous overshadowing roles: Patrick Stewart, Harrison Ford, Basil Rathbone, Martin Sheen, Al Pacino, George Clooney.
Most people who starred in Stanley Kubrick movies, if they weren’t major stars already (i.e. Jack Nicholson in “The Shining”). Especially Malcolm McDowell as Alex in “A Clockwork Orange” and Kier Duella in “2001: A Space Odyssey”.
I think that Jesus guy hasn’t gotten any work since the whole crucifixion thing. I thought there was supposed to be a sequal to that.
This summer prepare yourself for…
THE SECOND COMING
starring Jesus Christ, Vin Diesel, and Hayden Christensen as Judas
Try as you might at being diabites man, Wilford Brimly, you will always be the Quaker Oats man.
No matter how many times people disagree or ‘attempt’ to provide sham evidence…
It wasn’t Columbo reading to the little boy. Columbo was never married nor had children. He couldn’t be a grandpa.
Columbo was constantly making references to his wife. They even made a TV show about her, called, naturally, Mrs. Columbo. She later became Captain Janeway.
No. No! NO!!!
Columbo didn’t wear a wedding ring. You never saw his wife. It was just something he did to help bring up things in his conversations with the bad guy.
The guy wasn’t married. {The cruise ship episode be damned!}
The Mrs. Columbo show was done by someone who didn’t understand this.
One killer even tried to off Mrs. Columbo with poisoned preserves. Columbo was at her fake funeral.
Larry Linville and Gary Burghoff
The entire cast of Leave it to Beaver. Even some 30 years later in Airplane, it was June Cleaver speaking jive. I don’t even remember Hugh Beaumont working after the show.
Don Knotts. Even in Three’s Company, he was Barney to me.
**Margaret Dumont ** will always be the upper-crust but perplexed dowager and foil to Groucho Marx.
**Boris Karloff ** will always be the Monster.
Charles Laughton will always be Captain Bligh.
While Adam West and Burt Ward have been nominated, I think anyone who played a villain/villainess on the '60s Batman tv series is worthy of a mention; especially Cesar Romero and Burgess Meredith. I think both actors have had respectable decades of acting, and only appeared in a HANDFUL of Batman episodes. Yet, I recall the news announcements of their deaths, BOTH gentlmen were referred to in the " … perhaps best known for his role of _____ on the Batman tv series" vein.
I was just about to mention “An Exercise in Fatality,” in which Columbo goes on a cruise with his wife. You had to spoil the fun, however, by saying:
Darn you.
Oh, and one more thing… He was indeed married! So there!
Pardon me, ma’am, but… I just realized that I screwed up. The name of the episode was “Troubled Waters,” not “An Exercise in Fatality.”
Alan Alda has done losts of stuff other than MAS*H. He was in Same Time Next Year , my favorite movie. And that movie where he played the shrink that was nuts and went after someone with a golf club. And he’s now on Scientific American on PBS.
Andy Robinson. I have seen him in bunches of TV guest star and movie roles but he will always be Dirty Harry’s Scorpio Killer to me.
John Hurt will always be that who had the alien burst out his chest in “Alien”. Even though he scored an Oscar nomination for “The Elephant Man”—it’s the chest-bursting scene he’ll be remembered for.
He’ll always be Winston Smith to me.
Clearly you and I live in different realities. Burgess Meredith will always be Mick from Rocky.
The entire cast of Gilligan’s Island. While I don’t think that Bob Denver, Natalie Schafer and Alan Hale were exactly the equals of Montgomery Clift, Agnes Moorehead [a terribly underrated actress, imo] and Peter Sellers in terms of talent and versatility, they were nevertheless probably deprived of more lucrative careers by the typecasting of that show. Dawn Wells, otoh, is quite good- I saw her on stage as the wildly manic virago mother in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds and she was excellent, but the local paper covered the play as “TV’s Mary Ann to perform in local theater”. (She’s also a major looker.) I’ve no idea if Tina Louise is or was as talented as she thinks she is or was, but she certainly loathed the typecasting and felt it derailed her career, while Russell Johnson had a fairly varied career before that was majorly slowed. Jim Backus didn’t do a whole helluva lot other than Magoo and TV guestwork afterwards, but otoh he was neither young nor healthy for many of the years after GI.
Steven Railsback turned in a phenomenal chilling performance as Charles Manson in the 1976 miniseries Helter Skelter that may have been too good; he has rarely had any role that came anywhere close to that type of opportunity since. Likewise, Powers Booth exceptional performance as Jim Jones may have been a bit too intense too early.
As far as “events”, I think the queen would be Joan Crawford. Regardless of the validity of Christina’s claims (about which no hijacking debates please) the book Mommie Dearest and the subsequent camp classic film will always be more remembered than some absolutely powerhouse performances. Likewise, Marilyn Monroe will always be more remembered for being “found in the nude” or for her affair with JFK/RFK than for any of her screen roles.
Fatty Arbuckle will always be remembered more for the sex/rape/manslaughter scandal in which he was involved (although evidence is near conclusive that he was 100% innocent of the charges) than for his film career (most of his films having long ago disintegrated or exploded anyway).
In spite of a long and varied career in film, TV and stage, Ned Beatty will always be remembered for being nekkid and squealing like a pig (though admittedly that’s how most of us thought of him even before Deliverance).