Darn, I came in for Courtney Cox and Master’s of the Universe but somebody beat me to it!
I distinctly recall David Morse in a TV commercial for Lenscrafters way back when. He played a guy whose glasses kept slipping off while doing carpentry work and glad to discover Lenscrafters had spring frames that would stay on tight.
About a million actors on MAS*H. Patrick Swayze as the soldier with Leukemia, Jason Alexander as some private, Ed Begley Jr. as Private Conaway, the wanna-be chef, James Cromwell, Brian Dennehy, Laurence Fishburn, Teri Garr (also remembered from the Star Trek episode with “Gary Seven”), John Ritter as Private Carter, Shelly Long as a hot nurse, George Wendt… The show was a veritable breeding ground for stars.
These are certainly in the spirit of the OP, people who really stood out for me at the time rather than “Oh yeah I do remember seeing him/her in X”… now I do plead guilty to being perhaps taken by looks as much as talent but I’m only human.
Johnny Depp as the interpreter in Platoon - didn’t have 21 Jump Street where I was so this really was my first exposure to him - I think I had more empathy with his character than with Charlie Sheen’s.
The guy who played Johnny Depp’s younger brother in What’s eating Gilbert Grape i.e. Leonardo di Caprio, amazing acting. I saw the film on video but it was waaaaay before Titanic.
I do remember Keanu Reeves in Parenthood too but that was definitely just his looks.
I also remember thinking that the girl inCandleshoe was cool, so was Tallulah in Bugsy Mallone but at that age it was less the actress, Jodie Foster, than the roles she was playing.
Emmanuel Lewis - Burger King commercial.
“…great big juicy whopper!”
Maggie Wheeler as George’s blind date (I missed my period) long before she was Janice on Friends.
A lot of the ones I can think of have been taken … like Sarah Jessica Parker in Square Pegs sigh
The reason I tuned in to the Friends pilot was because Matt LeBlanc was in it – I’d like him in MWC and had also watched his short-lived show with Joseph Bologna. It was later that I discovered the episode of Red Shoe Diaries that he did …
When Adam Sandler first started becoming more “known” I said, "Hey! It’s that bit player on Remote Control (the VH1, or was it MTV, quiz show about television). RC also had Colin Quinn as a side kick.
I watched every episode of The Duck Factory, then was surprised to see him as this zany comic on In Living Color.
Reason I tuned in to ER the first time … I’d fallen for George on Sisters; didn’t remember him from Roseanne and FOL. Then it turned out he’d cut off all that lovely dark thick hair for that awful Caesar cut. 
Re: Bernie Koppell – when he showed up on Love Boat I was so happy to see Ann’s neighbor from That Girl.
Oh here’s one … when I saw Andie McDowell in the Tarzan remake, my friend and I said, almost simultaneously, “It’s that girl from the L’Oreal commercial!” It was for nail polish and she had a great line about things that “chip me off.” “And I’m not a cranky person!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUKwp9FIdC4, at about the 5:00 mark.
I first noticed Sarah Jessica Parker in LA Story (1991), with Steve Martin. I thought she was hot! She looks sort of like a horse these days.
(Bolding mine.)
To me, he will always be Stretch Cunningham from All in the Family. Only three episodes, according to IMDb, but enough to make an impression.
I also remember seeing Helen Hunt on The Marry Tyler Moore Show.
I remember Helen Hunt from that god-awful TV movie about angel dust or whatever it was. I also remember Kim Fields from the Mrs. Butterworth commercial. (My mom was not too happy when I stuck my finger in the syrup bottle and licked it off.)
I remember George Clooney from some bad TV show where he played a janitor or something for a woman with a talking baby. Looking it up on IMDB it has to be Baby Talk.
I also remember him from Sisters, which I loved. I also remember Paul Rudd from that series, he played Ashley Judd’s character’s boyfriend/husband/something. When I saw him in Clueless, I was “oh, that guy!”. All my friends had a huge crush on him after Clueless… I suppose Ashley Judd was also a bit of an unknown at the time of Sisters.
I remember Michael J Fox in Palmerstown before I saw him in Family Ties.
Whats the story behind that BTW? How planned was that video? Did she already have an agent in 1984 or was it sheer coincidence that the cute girl Springsteen picked out of the crowd to dance on stage also became a big star?
Nevermind. I just looked up the video on youtube. I haven’t seen that video in 20 years. But it’s obviously staged. It looked real as a 12 year old in 1984, though.
I remember Andie McDowell, Shari Belafonte and Martha Plimpton doing a Calvin Klein commercial years before they were known (not sure if Shari was known as anything other than her father’s daughter, though). First time I noticed Debra Messing was in some hair dye commercial where she’s singing “You make me feel like a natural woman” and gets embarrassed by her husband catching her.
Count me as another who only watched Friends because I saw that Ferris Bueller’s TV sister and Courtney Cox was on it. Jennifer Aniston always wore these really short skirts on that show, so I must be one of the 2 people that watched it.
She was already pretty well-known by the time of LA Story. She was a teenager in Square Pegs.
For the SP fans out there, it’s worth it to rent/buy the DVD, there are some good present-day interviews with her, Tracy Nelson, and Jami Gertz about the experience of making the show.
Also thought of another one: Rob Morrow, before Northern Exposure in a chewing gum or mint commercial that … “Time to walk the dog!”
The earliest thing I remember Courtney Cox from is her Born in the USA video w/ Bruce Springsteen. I remember Jennifer Anniston in a horror flick with leprechauns. It might have been called … uh Leprechauns?
I remember him well from before that – Dead Poets Society.
You could categorize all these reponses as either:
- Saw the person in a role, noticed the same person in a role soon after as the person began getting famous.
- Happened to see the person in a role, the person later became famous, you remember the original appearance, but you didn’t put two and two together – “oh, that was X!” – until years later.
For me, Philip Seymour Hoffman is an example of #1. A #2 for me would be Viggo Mortensen, whom I saw in Witness (1985), later followed his career, and didn;t realize the two people were one and the same until quite recently.
Ross from Friends (can’t be bothered to look up his name right now) had a multi-episode story arc in The Wonder Years - he courted, then married the sister, and took her away to Alaska never to be seen again (since the actual location of the show was never revealed, we can only conclude from the father’s reaction it was NOT Alaska).
Also, Oprah Winfrey hosted the morning talk show “People are Talking” and the mid-day news on Channel 13 in Baltimore when I was in college there. I heard she went on to make a name for herself, but I am not sure, does anyone know whatever happened to her?