I remember The Duck Factory.
Val Kilmer will always be Nick Rivers from Top Secret.
This may be a bit of a cheat, but Maggie Lawson (Juliet from Psych) is from Louisville, KY, of which my hometown is considered. She used to host a local kids’ show, under her actual name. It would be live-action sequences that took various cartoons into and out of commercial breaks. I’ll always think of her from that.
Similarly, Jennifer Lawrence is also from this area, and I met her once years ago when she was in town, before her acting career took off (a friend of a friend is friends with someone who knows her). To me, she will always be the girl that apologized to me after accidentally elbowing me in the dick at a party (she was sitting in a chair when someone said her name, and she spun around in the chair to see who it was). Honestly, though, I never made the connection between her at the party and the Oscar winner until someone pointed it out to me.
Nope, that is and will always be Fred Dagg.
When I first started watching CSI, I viewed Jorja Fox mostly as Leonard’s deceased wife from Memento.
Jonathan Banks (Mike in Breaking Bad)
In a case of the opposite of this phenomenon, I rewatched Major League a year or two ago, and was shocked and amused to see that the “Pray To Jobu” Haitian caricature was totally Dennis Haysbert, the POTUS from 24 and the reassuring guy from the Allstate commercials.
Even though I saw Major League many times back in the day, I had never put 2+2 together. :smack: 
I remembered him from both Next of Kin (where he played a hillbilly?) and High Spirits a not-very-good comedy.
I thought of a few more.
Katherine Helmond, Richard Mulligan, Ted Wass, Billy Crystal, and Robert Guillaume will always be, respectively, Jessica Tate, Burt Campbell, Danny Dallas, Jodie Dallas, and Benson from Soap. (Despite rumors to the contrary, I consider the Benson from Soap and the Benson from Benson to not be the same character.)
And Bill Nye will always be Speed Walker, the physically-fit superhero, who fights crime while maintaining strict adherence to the regulations of the International Speed Walking Association. Heel, toe. Heel, toe!
I’ve heard of that character, but never really seen anything with him. A local PBS station showed The Games around 2000 and I thought it was brilliant.
Clicked on the link; is that his real hair?
I now remember where I first saw Jeff Goldblum as an actor to take notice of, even though this isn’t how I continue to remember him, re: the OP. It was as the Big Bad Wolf in Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre.
Watch the linked doco, it’s 45 minutes and will give you Fred Dagg in all his genius. And that really was his hair.
Ray Liotta as Joey Perini on Another World.
Beat me to it. It may just be the three of us in this thread, though.
For me, Connery is Bond. Always Bond. Pegg is a relaxed, spaced dude playing shoot-em-up video games, drawing cartoons and killing zombies.
Philip Seymour Hoffman as George Willis in ‘Scent of a Woman’ and Phil in ‘Magnolia’ (brilliant in both), and David Carradine as Frankenstein in Death Race 2000.
Also John Turturro, for me, isn’t Jesus - the earliest films I saw him in were The Color of Money and The Sicilian in the 80s. He’s worked in so many movies since I couldn’t say which I like more.
I cannot always see Angelina Jolie as Legs (from Foxfire), because she has always been taking on very different public personas, and she left the Legs character behind long ago.
Foxfire is anyhow still one of my favorite movies.
Micky Dolenz didn’t start off playing drums with silly Monkees; he started playing drums with an elephant when he was Corky, The Circus Boy!
And yeah, Maynard was a pretty cool cat 
, and Milton was ok, but Thalia was the real reason for me watching Dobie Gillis. Of course I wouldn’t kick Zelda out of bed for eating crackers, either :eek:.
I was a young teenager the first time I saw Malcolm McDowell in a film – Time After Time where he plays the shy, romantic lead.
I thought he was sweet, had a teenaged crush on him, so decided to check out this other film he was in, A Clockwork Orange. Followed by if… and O Lucky Man.
I knew Peter Capaldi from Local Hero back when it first came out and was at once bemused and amused years later to see him in Thick of It. The reverse was true for Mr Boods, who only knew him as Malcom Tucker, when he first saw Local Hero.
Judi Dench when I first became aware of her:
The eighth Doctor? Always and forever ‘I’. (which is why if Richard E Grant and Paul McGann ever get any Doctor Who screen time together, it will be painfully obvious that they’ve merely gone on holiday by mistake.)
One I just thought of:
Heather Graham, while I will always appreciate her work as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, will always be Mercedes Lane in License to Drive.