He Also Did / Film

Actors

• Mahershala Ali, back when his name was Mahershalalhashbaz Gilmore, played NCAA Division I basketball at Saint Mary's College in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• Michael J. Anderson, best known as the Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks, also was a programmer for NASA.
• Julie Andrews also writes children's fantasy novels, and has been doing so for some time.
• Rowan Atkinson is an electrical engineer and a sports car connoisseur who even appeared on Top Gear.
• While mostly known for her work in anime dubs and video games, Cherami Leigh also had a few roles in live action works from time to time.
• Major Attaway, the Genie in the Broadway version of Aladdin, actually did some anime voice acting before heading to Broadway. Notable roles include Mad Monk Urouge and White Knight Arcadios.
• Richard Ayoade — Moss from The IT Crowd, Dean Learner from Garth Marenghis Darkplace — also directed quite a few music videos.
• Fans of Borat may be surprised to see Sacha Baron Cohen playing supporting roles in stylized period pieces like Sweeney Todd, Les Miserables, The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor) or even Hugo (albeit typically in roles that still allow for a certain amount of comic relief). And then there's the miniseries The Spy, based on the real story of Israeli spy Eli Cohen, with Sacha Baron Cohen in the titular role - no comic relief whatsoever, ultimately a tragic fate, and wholly unlike most of his other roles.
• John Beradino, who played Dr. Steve Hardy on General Hospital from the show's 1963 debut to his death in 1996, previously played shortstop and outfield for several Major League Baseball teams, even winning a World Series in the process, with the Cleveland Indians in 1948.
• Mayim Bialik, whose first big splash was as the title character in Blossom, temporarily left acting and obtained a PhD in neuroscience. When she returned to acting with a role on The Big Bang Theory, her character Amy Farrah Fowler was also a neuroscientist.
• Anime dub voice actor J. David Brimmer is also a Broadway fight choreographer.
• Dan Blocker, who played "Hoss" Cartwright on Bonanza, also founded the Bonanza Steakhouse chain, which later ended up as a division of Ponderosa Steakhouse.
• The late Maddie Blaustein, best known for being the original voice of Meowth in Pokémon: The Series, Yugi's grandfather in Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Jillas in the third season of Slayers, among several other voice roles was also a comics creator, being a writer for several titles including many from Milestone Comics and additionally an editor for several Marvel titles including Web of Spider-Man early in its run.
• Tyler Bunch is known for his puppetry, most notably playing Treelo and Pop from Bear in the Big Blue House, Grampu from Oobi, and Elmo's dad from Sesame Street. However, he also did voiceover for Pokémon: The Series, under the pseudonym of H.D. Quinn. Among his most notable roles in the show include Hawlucha, Lysandre, and Incineroar (who he also voiced in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate).
• Steve Burns, the original host of Blue's Clues, is also an indie rocker. Here he is covering a They Might Be Giants song.
• Ted Cassidy, pre-Lurch, was a DJ on WFAA radio in Dallas, and was working the day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, helping to give updates.
• Ardwight Chamberlain was known as the actor who played Ambassador Kosh in Babylon 5, but before that he was also one of the Gag Dub writers for Samurai Pizza Cats.
• Jackie Chan is known worldwide for his action movies, combining martial arts with slapstick choreography. While some fans outside of southeast Asia know he's also a director and producer, very few know that he's also an accomplished singer. In fact, he did his own singing when he voiced Shang in the Chinese dub of Mulan! (Fans outside of China got to hear him sing during the Closing Ceremony of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.)
• Charlie Chaplin is certainly known best for his classic Mutual shorts and films like The Great Dictator and City Lights. Perhaps that's why so many are surprised by his very dark comedy Monsieur Verdoux, which is about a Bluebeard. No slapstick, no bittersweet limerence, no parody, just humour centered around a man who robs his many wives of their money, and collects the rest when he kills them. Another way of looking at this film: Did you know Orson Welles wrote a Chaplin movie?
  • Chaplin also composed the tune that became the song "Smile" as part of the soundtrack for one of his movies.
• Cam Clarke is a prolific voice actor of cartoons and video games. But he's also a singer, and in 1999 released the album Inside Out, a collection of Cover Versions of love songs sung from a Straight Gay man's prospective.
• Misha Collins is known for being an actor, but he also did a stint in politics, set up TheRandomAct charity, published poems, worked as a carpenter and woodworker, and worked in construction.
• Ian James Corlett is best known as a cartoon (and early in his career, anime) voice actor but he also has a fair number of writer/producer credits on cartoons, most of which are obscure outside Canada. Among these include three episodes of the Donkey Kong Country animated series.
• Canadian voice actress Alyson Court, best remembered for her role as Loonette on The Big Comfy Couch, provided the English names of the Robot Masters for Mega Man X5, giving them a Guns N' Roses theme. She was also the Motion Capture Director for Resident Evil: Outbreak...and part time motion-capture actress, despite being pregnant with her son at the time. She also hosted the CBC block Get Set For Life and, as a child, played a small role in Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird.
• Bryan Cranston voiced some of the monsters in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The producers homaged him by giving his surname to the Blue Ranger, Billy, and Cranston would eventually return the break he was given by voicing Zordon in Power Rangers (2017).
• Michael Crawford, who originated the title role in Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera and went on to a successful recording and concert career, was first famous as a light comedy actor, with appearances in several of Richard Lester's films (The Knackand How To Get It, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, etc.) and a popular BBC sitcom (Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em). He also played Cornelius in the movie of Hello, Dolly!, and it's two of his musical numbers that figure prominently in WALL•E.
• Elizabeth Daily is not only a prolific voice actor, but also a singer. She contributed two songs to the soundtrack of Scarface (1983): "Shake it Up" and "I'm Hot Tonight".
• Jim Dale is most known for his roles in Pete's Dragon (1977) and Pushing Daisies, as well as his award-winning performances as narrator of the U.S. Harry Potter audio books. But many don't know he was also a lyricist and pop singer early in his career, penning the Oscar-nominated title song from Georgy Girl and having several songs top the UK Singles Chart in the late 50s.
• Porn star Dani Daniels is also an artist in the pointillism style under the name Kira Lee (link safe for work).
• Patrick Dempsey, of Grey's Anatomy fame, is a race car driver in his spare time, having competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 24 Hours of Daytona among other events. InTransformers: Dark of the Moon, his character is a collector, restorer and racer of vintage racing cars.
• Jerry Doyle (Michael Garabaldi on Babylon 5) was a stockbroker and corporate jet pilot. After his acting career began, he became a radio talk show host.
• Ja'Net DuBois, of Good Times fame, also composed and sang the theme from The Jeffersons.
• While he was starting out as an actor, Michael Clarke Duncan worked as a bodyguard for celebrities like Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, LL Cool J, and The Notorious B.I.G.. Duncan quit working as a bodyguard after B.I.G.'s death in 1997 and moved full-time to acting.
• Adrian Edmondson, best known for causing trails of destruction in The Young Ones and Bottom is also a well-known video director (for The Pogues among others) and musician with The Bad Shepherds.
• Bob Einstein, who used his 6' 4" frame to great comedic effect as Super Dave Osborne, played basketball at Beverly Hills High School and Chapman University.
• Carrie Fisher was best known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars films. She also wrote novels, nonfiction, plays, and screenplays, and was one of the most sought-after script doctors in Hollywood, punching up the scripts for Hook, Sister Act, The Wedding Singer, and the Star Wars prequels, among others.
• Fannie Flagg, actress and regular Match Game panelist, wrote the novel Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, which would later become the film Fried Green Tomatoes. She was nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay.
• Clark Gable served during World War II as a squadron commander, though he was only able to fly a few missions before his employers at MGM pulled strings to have him rotated stateside due to an incident where a piece of flak narrowly missed hitting him in the head (Gable was the A-list actor at the time). After it became clear that he was not going to be sent back into combat, he requested and received a discharge based on his being too old to serve in combat (he was 41 when the US entered the war). As it happens, his discharge papers were signed by Captain Ronald Reagan. Which was probably just as well, as Adolf Hitler was a huge fan, and offered a bounty to anyone who could bring Gable to him alive.
• Holly Gauthier-Frankel, the voice of Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, was a burlesque performer for a while.
• Jeff Goldblum first found fame as an actor, but as a teen he was a good enough jazz pianist to find work performing in nightclubs in his hometown of Pittsburgh. Over the years his piano skills were occasionally worked into his movie and TV roles; by The New '10s he had a weekly gig at the Rockwell club in Los Angeles performing with his band The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra when he wasn't busy with acting work. They released their first album of standards in 2018 and it sold so well that their second album arrived the following year.
• Clark Gregg is best known as an actor, but also wrote What Lies Beneath.
• Danai Gurira, best known for playing Michonne on The Walking Dead (2010) and Okoye from Black Panther (2018), is also an acclaimed playwright whose work has been performed on Broadway.
• Natalia Guseva played Alisa in Guest from the Future, and is a biochemist.
• Mark Hamill is best known as Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. He has done a lot more voice work, most famously as The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series, but he also appeared in Avatar: The Last Airbender (as Fire Lord Ozai) and the English dub of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, as well as Gravity Falls (as the Shape Shifter). He also cameoed in an episode of The Simpsons as himself, and played the southern Drill Sergeant Nasty who trains Homer in the same episode.
• Mark Harmon, the son of Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon, had a decent Collegiate American Football career of his own, as the starting quarterback for the UCLA Bruins in 1972 and 1973. He also coauthored the nonfiction book Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, a Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor.
• Phil Hartman was a renowned graphic designer who came up with the Crosby, Stills & Nash logo and designed album covers for bands like Poco and REO Speedwagon. He also co-wrote the screenplay to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, having worked with Paul Reubens in the Groundlings comedy troupe.
• Veteran character actor Wings Hauser pursued a singing career in The '70s under the name Wings Livinryte, releasing one album on RCA Records, which included a Cover Version of Randy Newman's "You Can Leave Your Hat On".
• Several decades before appearing in twenty-three of the Carry On films, British actor Charles Hawtrey was a famous boy soprano, and his early acting career includes the now lost 1934 film Murder at Monte Carlo starring a then-little-known Australian actor called Errol Flynn (a publicity still featuring Flynn and Hawtrey is among the few pieces of evidence that the film existed).
• Everyone loves how David Hayter, Solid Snake himself, is a successful screenwriter who wrote the screenplay for the first two X-Men films. He also did a draft of Watchmen and ended up being one of the credited screenwriters for that too.
• David Hemmings, the star of Antonioni's Blowup, began as a boy soprano and originated the role of Miles in Britten's opera version of The Turn of the Screw. Later in his career, he directed films and many episodes of television shows.
• Audrey Hepburn lived in the Netherlands as a teenager during World War II, where she supported the Dutch Resistance as a courier and raising funds for them by performing ballet. Later in life she worked extensively with UNICEF.
• Bridget Hoffman, a voice actress known for voicing roles like Jeri Katou and KOS-MOS, is actually the woman used in promotional material for The Evil Dead—most notably shown the movies's iconic poster.
• John Ingle, who played Edward Quartermaine on General Hospital for almost two decades (The Character Died with Him), along with memorable appearances in things like True Stories and The Office (as Dunder-Mifflin co-founder Robert Dunder), was a drama teacher at Hollywood High School and Beverly Hills High School before turning to acting full-time, with a long list of famous students, including Albert Brooks, Nicolas Cage, Richard Dreyfuss, Barbara Hershey, Julie Kavner, Swoosie Kurtz and David Schwimmer.
• Little known fact, look it up, Ken Jeong is a licensed medical doctor. He began performing in theater and comedy while a medical student in North Carolina, and worked at a Kaiser Permanente hospital in Los Angeles while also doing stand-up at local clubs. He gave up the practice in 2006 after his role (as a doctor, no less) in Knocked Up, but still maintains his medical license. He absolutely never mentions this.
• Mickey Jones, the go-to character actor for big, menacing biker/redneck-types (such as the mechanic in National Lampoon's Vacation) was a drummer in the 60s and 70s, working with Johnny Rivers, Kenny Rogers and most famously Bob Dylan on his chaotic 1966 European tour.
• Sam Jones, best known for his portrayal of Flash Gordon, these days has his own private security firm, which provides bodyguard services for traveling in high-risk regions around the world. He served in the Marines before his acting career, which probably helps.
• Monty Python alum Terry Jones was a noted history enthusiast. He's hosted a compelling three-part documentary series called The Crusades, about, well, the Crusades. Like his compatriot Palin, his sense of humor makes the subject matter more entertaining. At one point he compares the original cult of Assassins to the Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "Kamikaze Highlanders". He also attempted to stage an interview with a goose, supposedly the direct descendant of a divinely inspired goose that served as the mascot for a crusader band. The really sad part is, that divinely inspired goose actually existed. Amusingly, he voices the audio tour at Doune Castle in Scotland, where much of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed (due to budget constraints, the castle stands in for every single castle in the film besides Castle Aaaaaargh and Camelot), and has optional fun facts for Python fans in each room.
• Brad Kane, most famous as the singing voice of Aladdin, is now a writer and producer and co-wrote and co-produced several episodes of Fringe.
• Boris Karloff started out as a stage-trained character in silent movies, then graduated to playing Fu Manchu, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, and associated mad scientists and crazy people in horror films. He was also the voice actor for the narration and the Grinch in the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. He also played the titular police detective, specializing in the Locked Room Mystery, in the 1950s TV series Colonel March of Scotland Yard.
• Voice actor Kiyoshi Kobayashi, best known as the voice of Daisuke Jigen in Lupin III, did some camera work for TMS Entertainment in the late '80s, most notably for AKIRA.
• Jeff Kober, specialist in playing psychotic villains, has an unexpected side gig as a meditation instructor. He's a musician, photographer and painter as well.
• Steven Kynman, a UK-based voice actor known for his roles in Fireman Sam and Thomas & Friends, is also a puppeteer, who even played some extras in Muppet Treasure Island.
• Hedy Lamarr (no, not Hedley) was best known as MGM's biggest star. She also had a patent for frequency-hopping spread spectrum, which would eventually lay the groundwork for communications technology that's currently used in Wi-Fi networks. Nowadays it's started to flip the other way and she's increasingly noted for being an inventor who incidentally also made a few movies.
• Martin Landau started out as a staff cartoonist for the New York Daily News before he moved into acting.
• Hugh Laurie, an actor known for his roles on Blackadder, House, and Jeeves and Wooster, also wrote The Gun Seller, a novel which parodies the spy genre, and has released two music albums. He both wrote for and appeared in A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Granted, this is likely to happen regardless of how you get to know him. Fans of House may be surprised to find out about his earlier comedy work (or even the fact that he's actually British), while fans who got to know his hilarious performances and strange characters in Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie will likely be surprised to learn he played the lead in an American medical drama. Not to mention that in his uni days, he represented Cambridge in rowing, making their first eight for the 1980 Boat Race (which Oxford won).
• Christopher Lee: Most prolific actor, opera aficionado, expert fencer, master of languages who would often dub himself, occult buff, former WWII commando, and sometime Heavy Metal singer.
• Jason Lee was a prominent professional skateboarder before becoming a full-time actor. Lee is heralded as one of the greatest street skaters of all time, influential for his ability of free-flowing combo strings, and is credited with at least codifying, if not outright inventing, the 360 kickflip.^note Rodney Mullen is typically regarded as the original inventor, years prior to Lee, but Mullen himself gives full credit to Lee for it He was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame in 2019.
• Actor Sheldon Leonard is most familiar to modern audiences as Nick the bartender from It's a Wonderful Life ("Out you two pixies go, through the door, or out the window!"). Later, he became a prominent TV producer, in which capacity he helped create The Andy Griffith Show among other classic sitcoms. (Oh, and he was the namesake for two main characters on The Big Bang Theory.)
• Chad Letts, voice of Hiro in Lunar: Eternal Blue, actually went on to become a prolific voice-over artist for commercials. Depending on how you look at it, Hiro might be the example of "he also did", but to this day he keeps it in his portfolio. He made his return to video game voice acting for Summon Night 6.
• Shari Lewis of Lamb Chop fame co-wrote the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Lights of Zetar".
• Many people don't realize that actress Lindsay Lohan has her own fashion company called 6126; she also has a brand of tanning lotion called Seven9ine.
• Dolph Lundgren is a trained chemical engineer. And he does actually put it to good use.
• Lee Majors is well-known as The Six Million Dollar Man and—if you happen to live in Germany—The Fall Guy. What only few people know is that he also sang the theme song for the latter show which technically makes him a country singer.
• Mako is best known for his voice acting turns as Aku, Uncle Iroh, and Master Splinter but he was also known as being quite the actor in front of the camera, having been nominated for an Best Supporting Actor Oscar in 1966 for The Sand Pebbles. He also starred in the original production of Pacific Overtures.
• Steve Martin, the Wild and Crazy Guy? He's also an accomplished banjo player who's performed with Earl Scruggs. He also wrote the serious novella Shopgirl, which he starred in the movie adaptation of. He also did writing on the thriller Traitor starring Don Cheadle, and also pens editorial pieces for The New Yorker, many of which were collected in the book Pure Drivel.
• Herbert "Zeppo" Marx of the Marx Brothers invented a type of watch with a built-in heart rate monitor, as well as a new kind of heating pad. His engineering company also popularized the Marman Clamp, which is still widely used for aerospace applications.
• David McCallum, most famous as Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and "Ducky" Mallard on NCIS, is also an accomplished composer and orchestral conductor (following in the footsteps of his father - cf. the Music section), having released four albums for Capitol Records between 1966 and 1968. One of his works, "The Edge", is one of the most sampled pieces of music in hip-hop to date.
• Scott McCord — the voice of such characters as Owen, Trent, Jacques and Brody in Total Drama and Dan Kuso in Bakugan Battle Brawlers — has a prolific career on stage in both New York and Toronto, and is also an accomplished bluesman, having released two albums and having been nominated for a Maple Blues Award in 2010.
• Gates McFadden — Doctor Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation — was also a choreographer for the Jim Henson Workshop, working on such films as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. For the latter, she was credited with her first name as Cheryl McFadden.
• Screen and voice actress Danica McKellar has also written six books about mathematics. As a math major at UCLA, she cowrote a research paper with her professor and another student. The theorem they developed is called the Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem.
• Marin Miller, best known for their work in anime dubbing, has 20 years of singing experience in opera, musical theater, worship and pop rock. They were an ensemble leader for several years in the Golden State Pops Orchestra, the California Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Opera. They also performed as a costumed theme park character/scare actor for half a decade and was one of only two people assigned female at birth to portray Shrek at Universal Studios Hollywood.
• While it's fairly well-known that Dudley Moore was a classically-trained pianist and led his own Jazz trio for years alongside his comedy and acting, not many people are aware that one of his songs, the 1971 Jazz-Funk-Scatting piece "Song for Suzy", climbed up to #9 on the Australian pop chart.
• Julianne Moore wrote several successful books for children.
• Stephanie Morgenstern, the voice of Sailor Venus in the DIC Entertainment dub of Sailor Moon, co-created Flashpoint and X Company with her husband Mark Ellis.
• Rob Morrow, star of Northern Exposure and NUMB3RS, is also a singer and songwriter and co-wrote Doof's Evil Hideout Vacation Swap for the Phineas and Ferb season 4 episode "Live and Let Drive".
• Martin Mull first gained notice as a comedic singer-songwriter (sometimes described as being like a Lighter and Softer counterpart of Randy Newman). He released 7 albums in The '70s, and has had a couple of compilation albums of his work. Even before that, though, he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and has been a prolific painter as well.
• Frankie Muniz of Malcolm in the Middle fame is also a race car driver and the drummer for the band Kingsfoil.
• George Nader (a.k.a. the guy from Robot Monster) wrote a science fiction novel.
• Jerry Nelson, a puppeteer for The Muppets, was also a talented singer and songwriter who also played guitar and ukulele. He recorded an album called Truro Daydreams, released in 2009. Also, before joining the Muppet team, he had a few minor/walk-on roles on TV shows in The '50s and The '60s like The Defenders (a speaking role) and Naked City, as well as some commercials around that time ("I think one was a roll-on deodorant", he claims). In addition, it has been theorized that he voiced Pete and Paganini for PBS's P-Pals bumpers. While this can neither be confirmed nor denied, he did have a voice acting role on Sheep in the Big City, in 2002.
• Leonard Nimoy directed Three Men and a Baby (the highest-grossing film of 1987) and The Good Mother (as well as the less-surprising Star Trek III: The Search for Spock). He also released five albums, directed music videos, acted in many non-Star Trek-related roles, and (most notably) was a successful photographer.
• Nolan North is an videogame voice-acting superstar. He also played the dad to one of the main-characters in the teen drama-series Pretty Little Liars.
• Conan O'Brien started out as a writer for The Simpsons.
• Before his breakout role in Heroes, Masi Oka was a CG animator for Industrial Light & Magic who worked on all three Star Wars prequels.
• Frank Oz is known as the voice of several Muppets, including Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, Grover, and Yoda. (He was also the Hands of the Swedish Chef while Jim Henson did the head and voice.) However, he also directed Little Shop of Horrors (which, after all, uses puppetry to portray a major character), The Stepford Wives (2004) remake, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the original British version of Death at a Funeral.
• Pauley Perrette has earned a cult following for her role as Perky Goth forensics expert Abby Sciuto on NCIS. Many people don't know that Perrette actually holds a master's degree in forensic science.
• Karen Prell is another Muppet performer who has branched into this trope. She's best known as the voice of Red Fraggle, but she's also done computer animating gigs for Pixar and Valve Software.
• Vincent Price is best known for his horror roles, but most of his early work was dramatic, and he also took a few voice acting roles, notably in The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo and The Great Mouse Detective. He was also well-known as an art collector (he donated 90 pieces of art to a community college, making it the first community college to have such a collection), and as a noted gourmet cook (authoring several cookbooks, and once giving a demonstration on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson of how to poach a fish in the dishwasher). He also spoke several languages and was an opera-grade singer. During a segment on What's My Line? where the blindfolded regulars were supposed to guess his identity by listening to his voice and his answers to their questions, he sang all his answers in French to keep them from recognizing his distinctive voice. Furthermore, the monologue at the end of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" was spoken by him, including the Evil Laugh.
• John C. Reilly isn't just an Oscar-nominated actor. He also sings and plays guitar. Here he is singing with Becky Stark. He also did his own drumming in Step Brothers. Furthermore, he's one of the most versatile actors out there - it's almost hard to believe that the same guy who starred in comedies like Walk Hard, Wreck-It Ralph and the aforementioned Step Brothers is the same guy who starred in deep, dramatic movies like We Need to Talk About Kevin and Magnolia.
• Ariana Richards, most famous as Lex in Jurassic Park, is an accomplished professional oil painter.
• Maximilian Schell, Oscar-winning actor, was an accomplished pianist in his spare time, playing with orchestras and composers like Leonard Bernstein.
• John Schneider and Tom Wopat, the two leads of The Dukes of Hazzard, were both successful Country Music singers in The '80s, with the former even having four #1 hits. Schneider also appeared in the Screen-to-Stage Adaptation of Grand Hotel in 1991.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger - the Terminator, Conan the Barbarian (1982), Hercules in New York, the Kindergarten Cop - was Governor of California. He also was a competitive bodybuilder.
• Michael Shannon, famous for his roles in Revolutionary Road, Man of Steel and Boardwalk Empire, performs in an indie band called Corporal. Here's video proof.
• Robert Shaw of Jaws and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three was not only an actor but an accomplished playwright, screenwriter and novelist. His best-known play, The Man in the Glass Booth, was produced on Broadway starring Donald Pleasence and then Leonard Nimoy in the title role, and also was made into a film starring Maximilian Schell.
• Long before transitioning and becoming an actor, Brian Michael Smith became the first person assigned female at birth to score a varsity touchdown in the State of Michigan on September 17, 1999.
• Lily Snowden-Fine, the original voice of Peppa Pig, is also an accomplished, award-winning artist who has done pieces for Canada’s Globe and Mail and The New York Times.
• Carlo Pedersoli was a musician, an inventor and an Olympic swimmer. He also was Bud Spencer.
• Tyrone Savage (better known as the voice actor of Matthias, Warrior of Redwall) is also a theater director.
• Sylvester Stallone is more than a muscle-packed action film actor. Many of his films from The '70s and The '80s border on one-man shows: He wrote the script, produced them, directed them and played the lead role. He is also almost solely responsible for the Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive for which his brother Frank provided half the soundtrack.
• Voice actor Stephen Stanton was also a special effects artist on (amongst others) Last Action Hero, Starship Troopers and Armageddon (1998).
• Many Star Trek alumni have made the jump to the director's chair. Jonathan Frakes has directed episodes of Burn Notice, Leverage, Persons Unknown, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Covert Affairs, as well as a couple of episodes of Castle (including the sci-fi themed ep named, "The Final Frontier"); Robert McNeill has directed many episodes of Chuck; and Roxann Dawson has directed The Closer. Dawson also has an incredibly prolific career as a TV Producer.
• James Stewart: In addition to being an accomplished movie star (famous in particular for It's a Wonderful Life), he was also a private pilot, which lead to him serving in World War II, rising to the rank of Colonel and serving as a Wing Commander by war's end. He went on to serve in the Reserves during the Cold War and retired as a Brigadier General in 1968. In fact, more than a few celebrities who were eligible to serve during World War II did so.
• Wanda Sykes worked as a contracting specialist at the National Security Agency before she went into standup comedy.
• While known for the voice of Monkey D. Luffy nowadays, in Japan, Mayumi Tanaka had also been well known for her role in the Mashin Eiyūden Wataru franchise ^note best known in the U.S. for its incarnation as a TurboGrafx-16 game, which was released as Keith Courage in Alpha Zones in that territory as the title character.
• Later in life, child actress Shirley Temple became an ambassador to the UN, chief of protocol for the State Department, and Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
• Lea Thompson has directed episodes of shows like The Goldbergs, Young Sheldon, and Star Trek: Picard.
• Jennifer Tilly, she of the big-boobed bimbo roles, has also won a bracelet in the World Series of Poker. In fact, this is a subgenre, as many actors are at least passable in poker (notably Gabe Kaplan, Dick Van Patten (whose son Vince calls the World Poker Tour), Mimi Rogers, and Lou Diamond Phillips, just to name a few).
• Stephen Tobolowsky is also a writer and director, mainly writing plays and directing theatre, but he's directed some short films and one full-length feature (the 1988 comedy Two Idiots in Hollywood), and helped David Byrne with the script for True Stories (though Byrne ended up rewriting it himself, but credited Tobolowsky to make the film look like less of a Vanity Project). In his teen years back in The '60s he was in a short-lived Garage Rock band called A Cast of Thousands which also included a similarly-young Stevie Ray Vaughan on guitar.
• Dick Van Dyke is well-known for his acting. He's also done 3D computer animation for years, even doing special effects for an episode of Diagnosis: Murder when there was no budget for a motorcycle crash.
• Jesse Ventura, who appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator, is also a bodybuilder-turned-governor, also known for his time in Professional Wrestling.
• It's fairly well-known that Christopher Walken trained as a dancer before he focused full-time on acting. More obscure is that he worked as a lion tamer in a circus at one point, or that he had a busy career as a child actor on television in The '50s (still billed as Ronnie Walken at that point in his career), or that among his early stage credits, he originated the role of King Philip in The Lion in Winter on Broadway (Timothy Dalton played the role in the movie).
• Nancy Walker played Ida Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (and its spinoff Rhoda), and appeared in Bounty paper towel commercials. Much of her earlier career was in Broadway musicals, and it was perhaps for this reason that she was chosen to direct the infamous movie musical Can't Stop the Music.
• Justine Wanger (née Johnstone) was a Ziegfeld Follies dancer and Silent Movie actress in the 1910s and The Roaring '20s. After she quit acting, she enrolled at Columbia University, where her research on plants impressed her instructor enough that she was invited to join the team that developed the modern intravenous slow-drip technique. Later on she became a noted pathologist and endocrinologist, investigating such varied topics as syphilis, hibernation, and artificial resuscitation.
• Before going into acting, Michael Warren was a former college basketball star at UCLA who played for the school's national championship teams in 1967 and 1968; the latter of which saw him play alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor; see the Athletes folder below), with the two later appearing together in Airplane!.
• John Wayne was an uncredited producer for the Christmas featurette Santa And The Fairy Snow Queen.
• Ty Webb, probably best known for his hamtastic delivery as White Knight Leo in Lunar: Eternal Blue, also had some bit roles in Serial Experiments Lain and Battle Athletes Victory. Leo remains his only major role.
• Johnny Weissmuller is perhaps best known for his role in the Tarzan film series. However, prior to that role, he had won five gold medals in swimming at the Olympic games.
• Amusingly (since he played the multitalented Renaissance Man Buckaroo Banzai), Peter Weller is an accomplished Jazz trumpeter and also has a Ph.D. in art history, serving as an adjunct faculty member at Syracuse University at one point.
• Bob West, the voice of Barney the Dinosaur, is also an artist and graphic designer for film and television. Some of his credits include The Muppets (2015), Single Parents, Speechless, Community and Angel.
• In addition to voice acting (most famously, he was the original voice of Tigger in the Disney Winnie the Pooh adaptations), Paul Winchell was also a puppeteer, an acupuncturist, and an inventor — his most famous inventions being the artificial heart and the blood plasma defroster.
• Henry Winkler, best known for playing the Fonz from Happy Days, also wrote the Hank Zipzer series of children's books about a kid with dyslexia (which Winkler himself found out he had at 31).
• Hillary Wolf, a child actress best known for playing one of the McAllister kids in the first two Home Alone movies, became an accomplished judoka, representing the US in Judo at the 1996 and 2000 Olympics.
• Ian Ziering, aka Steve Sanders from Beverly Hills, 90210, played Edison Trent from Freelancer. Same goes for John Rhys-Davies, who played Gimli in The Lord of the Rings and Tobias from said game.
• Quite a few Texas-based voice actors also worked for Radio Disney, such as Dean Wendt, Kara Edwards, Kyle Hebert, Susan Huber and Cherami Leigh.
• Magnus Roosmann of Young Royals and Evil (2003) is well known in Sweden for his various film, tv and theatre roles. What is much less known is that he voiced Metalseadramon and Puppetmon in Digimon Adventure'' - Roosman not typically doing voice work.

Directors & Producers

• Eric Allard, special effects artist, associate producer of Short Circuit 2 and second-unit director of Class of 1999 is not only the one of the minds behind the now (in)famous Energizer Bunny commercial campaign. But is responsible for contributing to several of Universal Studios Florida's attractions, including the firey climax of Jaws: The Ride and the Slime Geyser that stood outside Nickelodeon Studios until its closure in 2005.
• Woody Allen plays the clarinet, and wrote several humorous essays and short stories.
• Roger Allers, the director of the Disney epic The Lion King (1994), also directed the zany animated comedy Open Season.
• Robert Altman was a prolific industrial film and TV director before finally establishing himself in feature films. He also occasionally dabbled in writing song lyrics. He wrote the lyrics for "Black Sheep", which hit #1 on the country charts in 1983 for John Anderson.
• Ralph Bakshi is known for directing Deranged Animation set primarily on the streets of New York, like Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin and Hey Good Lookin' as well as the fantasy films Wizards, The Lord of the Rings, and Fire & Ice, and the fairly realistically grounded American Pop. Before Bakshi did the films that made him famous, he was an animator and director at Terrytoons studio. He even created a show for them called The Mighty Heroes.
• Chuck Barris, most famous for creating The Dating Game, producing The Newlywed Game, and creating and hosting The Gong Show, also wrote the hit song "Palisades Park" for Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon. However, he probably wasn't a CIA agent as he claims in his book (later a movie) Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind.
• Steve Barron, director of the film adaptations for both Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) and Coneheads originally served as an assistant cameraman for Superman: The Movie and A Bridge Too Far before directing several well-known '80s music videos including Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing", Toto's "Africa", Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and a-ha's "Take On Me". He was also an executive producer on ReBoot.
• Noah Baumbach, a director known for grounded dramedies like The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha and Marriage Story, also cowrote the screenplay for the animated family film Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. To be fair, this was mainly to pay off his divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh.
• Michael Bay got his start in Hollywood directing music videos. One of the more infamous is the Beast and Beauty Concept Video for Meat Loaf's "I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)," making this both the fakest-sounding fact and the only option upon re-watch, as it features early elements of what would become Bay's signature style. Namely, an obsession with sunsets, stuff blowing up and getting smashed, and chase scenes.
• By way of his production company Brooksfilm, Mel Brooks produced the movie The Elephant Man, as well as the remake The Fly (1986)^note David Cronenberg credits him for coming up with the latter film's signature line "Be afraid. Be very afraid.". He deliberately didn't use his name in the marketing of either film because he didn't want people to think they were comedies. He also produced the film adaptation of 84 Charing Cross Road, staring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft.
• Before becoming a director, Tim Burton was an animator and worked on such films as the Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings, TRON, The Black Cauldron (though many of his contributions were cut), and The Fox and the Hound. He was also a puppeteer for The Muppet Movie.
• James Cameron is also a deep-sea explorer. In 2012, he became the third person to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, and the first to accomplish the trip solo.
• John Carpenter is an electronic musician. This also explains why his films tend to have an electronic score rather than an orchestral one: He has made the score himself.
• Christopher Cerf, the co-creator & co-producer of Between the Lions, co-wrote The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, an entire book revolving around the It Will Never Catch On trope. He also co-founded National Lampoon, was a composer-lyricist for Sesame Street, was a senior editor at Random House, and helped Marlo Thomas on a few of her Free to Be... specials.
• Bob Clark started out directing horror movies, most notably Black Christmas (1974). Then he did Murder by Decree, a period piece about Sherlock Holmes fighting Jack the Ripper. Then he made the first two entries in the teen comedy film series Porky's. Then he made the family comedy A Christmas Story. He mostly directed family-oriented flicks until his death.
• Larry Cohen is known for writing and directing low-budget independent horror and Blaxploitation movies, and scripting big-budget action-thrillers.
• Besides all those horror films, Wes Craven directed Music of the Heart.
• Ryan Coogler, like Mahershala Ali, was a student athlete at Saint Mary's College in California, playing on the football team as a wide receiver. After Saint Mary's dropped their football program, he transferred to Sacramento State.
• Merian C. Cooper, the director of King Kong (1933), lived a life that went so far beyond just movie-making that it can't be easily summarized (and explains many of the thematic elements in his most famous film). He worked as a reporter and explorer, and served as an aviator and officer in multiple wars. He was present on the USS Missouri when the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II was signed, and that's just one of the fascinating details about his life.
• Roland Emmerich, famous for his large-scale sci-fi disaster movies like Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, also made Anonymous, a historical mystery thriller about who actually wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare.
• Will Finn, director of the ill-received Home on the Range, has contributed to numerous shows and films as a storyboard artist (including Slimer! And The Real Ghostbusters, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi, Over the Hedge and Rock Dog) and served as a supervising animator on Beauty and the Beast for Cogsworth and Aladdin for Iago.
• Marc Forster not only directed Monster's Ball and Finding Neverland but Stay, The Kite Runner, Quantum of Solace, Machine Gun Preacher and World War Z as well.
• Donald F. Glut is a screenwriter (children's television) and director (exploitation films), but is best known for having written the novelization of The Empire Strikes Back. He does this apparently to support his amateur paleontology habit. He has written many books about dinosaurs, including the seven (so far) volumes of the award-winning reference series, Dinosaurs: An Encyclopedia, which are NOT for the casual dinophile, being intended for folk who know the difference between the quadrate, squamosal, occipital and jugal.
• Suzanne Goldish, an anime ADR director at the L.A-based recording studio Studiopolis, and best known for directing the English dubs of K, Tiger & Bunny, and the Viz Media re-dub of Sailor Moon, as well as the modern reboot, Sailor Moon Crystal, was formerly a voice actress at the infamous 4Kids Entertainment, most notably, as Chris Thorndyke from Sonic X.
• Mark Goodson, who was known for many hit game shows of television's past, like The Price Is Right, Family Feud and many others (many alongside his partner Bill Todman), also was behind a few non-game shows, like the 1959-61 ABC Western The Rebel w/Nick Adams as Johnny Yuma (Goodson made this one with his partner Todman).
• H.B. "Toby" Halicki of Gone in 60 Seconds (1974) fame made his crash-fest films borderline one-man shows. He was originally a scrapyard owner, so he supplied the vehicles used in his films himself. He wrote the scripts, he directed and produced the films, he played the main character, and he did all his stunts himself.
• Jamison "Jam" Handy was a producer of numerous industrial films and filmstrips. However, he got into that field after being a news reporter, and prior to that, he was a swimmer who helped introduce new swimming styles to America, and earned two Olympic medals.
• Hanna-Barbera, best known for their kid-friendly cartoons such as The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Scooby-Doo and countless others, also produced the rather serious live-action telefilm The Beasts Are on the Streets.
• Brian Hegleland, screenwriter of bleak noir potboilers such as L.A. Confidential, Conspiracy Theory, Payback, Blood Work, Mystic River, and Man on Fire, wrote and directed A Knight's Tale, a wholly good-hearted, high-spirited romantic comedy medieval sports movie (heavy emphasis on the romance and comedy).
• Jim Henson, the creator of The Muppets, did a surrealistic teleplay called The Cube in the 1960s about a man trapped in a small cube who's visited by various strange people as he tries to find his way out. Henson also wrote a screenplay for a surrealist movie titled Tale of Sand (imagine a Looney Tunes episode performed live by humans and you'd basically have this movie). It was never produced in his lifetime, but it was turned into a graphic novel posthumously, with art done by Ramon Perez.
• Ishiro Honda directed both the classic film Gojira and the unpopular Godzilla's Revenge. He was also an assistant director to Akira Kurosawa.
• John Hughes is now primarily remembered for making some of the best-known teen films of the 1980s such as Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, becoming something of a cultural icon for Gen Xers. And then he also wrote and produced the family film Home Alone in 1990 (which ended up becoming his biggest commercial hit).
• Former Disney CEO Bob Iger started out as a weatherman for a small-time TV station in Ithaca, NY. During his final month with the company, Iger served as guest weatherman for the early morning news on KABC in Los Angeles on December 9, 2021, and reportedly did an admirable job of it for someone who, by his own admission, hadn't done the weather for 48 years.
• Peter Jackson, director of gore comedies like Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste and Braindead, as well as the live action The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
• Spike Jonze, the director of Where the Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich? He plays the dirty old lady in skits in the Jackass movies.
• Neil Jordan, director of Oscar winning dramas like The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire, made the comedies High Spirits and We're No Angels in The '80s.
• Shusuke Kaneko directed not only the 90s Gamera trilogy, but also the live-action Death Note films and Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!.
• David Kirschner is responsible for creating and producing several animated childhood classics; Rose Petal Place, An American Tail, Once Upon a Forest, The Pagemaster, Cats Don't Dance. And...he also produced the Chucky movies. It's like if Don Bluth created A Nightmare on Elm Street!
• Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a duo of directors best known for the wonderfully weird Everything Everywhere All at Once, have actually directed a number of high-profile music videos, including Lil' Jon's "Turn Down For What" and Joywave's "Tongues". Most of these are about as absurd as you might expect from them — the former stars Daniel Kwan crashing into and wrecking several apartments with his crotch, while the latter depicts a group of hunters trying to shoot clothes onto wild nudists.
• Albert Lamorisse (director, producer, and writer of The Red Balloon) invented the strategy board game Risk during a family holiday in Holland in 1957.
• Glen Larson, creator of Battlestar Galactica (1978), Knight Rider, Magnum, P.I. and many other shows, was also a member of the Four Preps, a vocal quartet which enjoyed some success in the late 1950s with hits such as "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)", "Big Man" and "Down by the Station", all of which he co-wrote.
• Fairly well known, but Ang Lee directed: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, Hulk (the 2003 movie), Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil.
• Chuck Lorre had a long music career before hitting it big as a TV producer with Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. He did lots of work on the New Wave Music scene in The '80s as a musician, songwriter and producer (including writing Debbie Harry's solo hit "French Kissin' in the USA"), then switched to music work on animated shows, composing the memorable theme for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) and co-creating the Cats & Co. segments and characters on Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats.
• Sidney Lumet is best known for directing gritty, realistic dramas such as 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. He also directed The Wiz, the film adaptation of the Broadway musical. Long before his directorial career he was a child actor.
• David Lynch is best known for directing Mind Screw films like Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. Another one of his best-known films is The Elephant Man, which is for the most part a straight forward and extremely emotional drama. He also directed the contested adaptation, Dune (1984) and The Straight Story, the latter of which is a G-rated Disney film. He has also done a number of shorts and directed a few documentaries. Oh, and he started as a painter. He's also done some rather bizarre web shorts, such as the crudely animated series Dumbland, which is... just... well... just watch it.
• Seth MacFarlane is also a jazz/swing singer. He has a particularly strong reputation for it in the UK, where he's not only toured but performed several times at the very prestigious BBC Proms and had his own TV and radio specials.
• Before becoming a celebrated director, Terrence Malick studied philosophy and published his own translation of one of the works of Martin Heidegger; after that he was a journalist, whose published works included an extensive obituary for Che Guevara in The New Yorker. After entering Hollywood as a screenwriter but before becoming a director with Badlands, his work included a rewrite of the script for Dirty Harry.
• Sam Mendes is known to film fans for directing such varied works as American Beauty and Skyfall, but he was a big-name theatre director long before he turned his talents to film — the revival of Cabaret in The '90s that made Alan Cumming famous? That was his work. He still directs for the stage today, and as an example of his range, he went from Skyfall directly to the 2013 West End musical Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and then to a new staging of King Lear!
• Cult film director Russ Meyer was also a prolific photographer for Playboy and other girlie magazines.
• Mad Max director George Miller was also responsible for producing Babe, its sequel, and later the Happy Feet films. He's also a medical doctor.
• Acclaimed auteur Alexander Payne, who wrote and directed films such as Sideways, About Schmidt, and Election, is also credited on the screenplays of Jurassic Park III and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, though little of his work on the latter film made it into the finished product.
• Oren Peli, notable for writing/producing/directing the smash hit Paranormal Activity is also a video game programmer, having notably worked on the PC version of Mortal Kombat 3 and the 2007 and 2008 editions of Sony's best-selling MLB The Show. In the latter games, Peli has his own player named after him, as MLB players who are not part of the player's union cannot be represented in a MLBPA-licensed game, so the developers have fictional stand-ins using the names of various members of the programming team, Peli among them.
• Brad Peyton, the director of such movies as San Andreas, Rampage (2018), Cats & Dogs 2: Revenge of Kitty Galore, and Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, as well as the creator of Daybreak (2019) and Frontier (2016), also made two cartoons for his native Canada: What It's Like Being Alone and Dr. Dimensionpants.
• Michael Portillo was formerly a Conservative Party politician known for unexpectedly losing his House of Commons seat in 1997 in what was dubbed the "Portillo Moment". Afterwards, he flourished as the creator of many documentary series about his railway travels around the world, such as Great British Railway Journeys, Great Continental Railway Journeys, and many others.
• Sam Raimi gets this from both directions. Either you know him as the director of the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy and are surprised to find out he's also a prolific b-horror director or you're a horror fan surprised to discover the Evil Dead guy also directed a bunch of big-budget Spider-Man movies.
• Horror director George Romero once did a romantic comedy titled There's Always Vanilla and directed a few episodes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
• Alan Rudolph, a protégé of Robert Altman who went on to become one of the first big names in the modern indie film movement with sophisticated dramedies like Choose Me and Trouble in Mind, kicked off his directorial career with two ultra-obscure Horror movies (Premonition and Terror Circus), and before that was an assistant director on eleven episodes of The Brady Bunch, a show for which his father Oscar Rudolph was a frequent director.
• Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone (1959), Night Gallery) wrote Requiem for a Heavyweight, which some have said was the point where televised drama grew a beard. He also co-wrote the original Planet of the Apes (1968) Film of the Book, which, while easily falling within the niche people think of him as being in, is often neglected, possibly because he only co-wrote it. He was also a noted boxer and the host for the game show Liar's Club.
• Celine Song, best-known for writing and directing the Oscar-nominated film Past Lives, also directed a live production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull on The Sims 4 of all things, which was livestreamed on Twitch, and was a staff writer on the first season of The Wheel of Time.
• M. Night Shyamalan, (in)famous for films with supernatural slants and shocking plot twists, co-wrote the screenplay for the first Stuart Little movie. He also made the relatively obscure Miramax film Wide Awake. He also stated in a 2013 interview that he ghost-wrote She's All That.
• J. Michael Straczynski, producer/writer/director of Babylon 5 was also the screenwriter for Changeling. He was also the head writer for the first two seasons of The Real Ghostbusters and the first season of Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. Of course he's also done substantial work in comics, most notably on Spider-Man (see The Amazing Spider-Man (J. Michael Straczynski) and One More Day) and Thor, and he then moved to Superman and Wonder Woman. Tropers who are deep into JMS lore (e.g. the dweeby fans) know that he got his start writing for Murder, She Wrote in the 8th season. He was brought in to liven things up a bit: Jessica became a part-time professor of criminology in New York, the show's tempo changed a bit, etc. If you pay attention, you can see his style stamped all over MSW.
• Quentin Tarantino directed episodes of ER and a CSI episode that featured direct dialogue references to his earlier films, and a character even suffers the same fate as The Bride. He's also an actor as has appeared several movies he's directed. He also co-starred in From Dusk Till Dawn with George Clooney. Oh, and he also did uncredited work on the screenplay for It's Pat!.
• Peter Tewksbury, who did a bunch TV directing plus a handful of feature films, including two of Elvis Presley's later films (Stay Away Joe and The Trouble with Girls), eventually retired from Hollywood and became a well-known cheesemaker and cheese expert in Vermont, under his birth name Henry Tewksbury (Peter was his middle name).
• Bob Thompson, former creative manager at LEGO who had co-developed BIONICLE and produced its original three Direct to Video movies, making sure they would be fun and not too violent for kids, also co-produced and developed the highly violent Warhammer 40,000 animated movie Ultramarines.
• François Truffaut, the legendary French film director, played the French scientist Claude Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This was one of his few acting roles, and his only one in a movie he didn't direct.
• The Wachowskis created the Speed Racer film. Their screenplays for Assassins and Bound (1996) would also count. According to The Art of The Matrix, it was hard to get funding for the trilogy because everyone thought of them as "those [two] who did the movie with the lesbians" (Bound).
• Jay Wolpert is best known as a co-producer of the early years of The Price Is Right (the Barker version) and for creating a bunch of weird game shows; he's also a scriptwriter, having worked on The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
• Rob Zombie's first professional job in the entertainment business was a set and prop designer for Pee-wee's Playhouse. He's also an Industrial Metal musician and successful director of horror films.
• Ghost (1990) was directed by Jerry Zucker. Yes, as in Jerry Zucker of the ZAZ team that wrote and directed Airplane! The advertising for the third The Naked Gun included the following tagline: "From the brother of the director of Ghost". David Zucker also directed The Naked Gun 2½ which contains a spoof of the pottery scene in his brother's Ghost (1990).
• Edward Zwick, best known for Oscar-baiting historical epics such as Glory, The Last Samurai and Defiance as well as dramatic thrillers like The Siege and Blood Diamond, began his career directing the romantic comedy About Last Night..., and returned to the genre with Love & Other Drugs. He also produced television dramas with The Bedford Falls Company, which means he helped produce thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, among others.

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