mantori.suzuki

A lot of non-actors try acting and fail to impress. Madonna comes to mind in several roles. I think Sting fell flat in Dune, the only film I've seen him in. But once in a while someone gets it completely right, and I find those performances all the more enjoyable because I know that acting is not their main gig.

The two that stick in my mind are Gore Vidal as the space mission director in Gattaca (1997) and Mick Jagger as the male-escort service owner in The Man from Elysian Fields (2001). Vidal didn't show a lot of range but was perfectly cast as the grave, stoic man who would go to greater lengths than anyone could guess to achieve his goal. Jagger's performance, as a smooth-talking playboy becoming an emotional casualty of his own dubious trade, was subtle and nuanced. (Another rocker, Michael Des Barres, had a much smaller but also well-played role in the same film, but he has done a lot more acting than Jagger.)

I also find David Bowie very charming and fun to watch, but I'm not ready to conclude that he's a great actor yet. I'm not convinced he's not just playing a version of himself most of the time.

musicamusica

Greg Kinnear---a broadcast journalist who very successfully switched to acting.
Sam Shepard--- a VERY good playwright and a fairly good actor.
Tom Waits---I always enjoy him on the screen
Levon Helm----Several GOOD performances on the screen

emeraldkity4

I see a lot of cross over between music and the stage or film- entertainers are actors and many actors are involved in creating music as well.
Ever see Flight of the Conchords?


I also find David Bowie very charming and fun to watch, but I'm not ready to conclude that he's a great actor yet. I'm not convinced he's not just playing a version of himself most of the time.

Well which version of Bowie would that be?

you could also say the same thing about full time actors- Jack Nicholson ?

I love Sam Shepard- Fool for Love was the first professional play I saw, but Days of Heaven is one of my favorite films.

( I also liked Desperately Seeking Susan, I haven't seen Madonna in anything else}
<B Tom Waits

johnshade

Frank Sinatra and Doris Day, if you want to go back a few years. Under good direction (e.g. The Manchurian Candidate, From Here to Eternity) Sinatra could be terrific. And Day went from big band singer to top-notch film comedienne without missing a beat.

Levon and Sam are great in films. Fred Thompson, on the other hand, I've always found pretty wooden.

Chedva

Doris Day also did a great job in a thriller, obviously with great direction: the remake with Jimmy Stewart of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. That's the movie that also introduced what later became her theme song: Que Sera, Sera.

Don't know if I'd classify her as a great actress, but Jennifer Lopez has done some pretty decent work. So has Rosie O'Donnell (A League of Their Own, along with a more than passable turn by Madonna).

And of course, Whoopi Goldberg has made quite a name for herself in film (Ghost, for example) and TV (Star Trek: The Next Generation).

DougBetsy

Would y'all consider Harry Conick Jr an actor or a singer? He's good as both.

emeraldkity4

On a small scale I thought Dave Matthews did a great job when he appeared on House and I love Ice-T on Law & Order.
Who can forget the Prince of Bel-Air?
( not me- my daughter memorized the rap)

I haven't seen Fight club, but Meatloaf got rave reviews for his performance ( and he also did a great job when he appeared on House.

Kris Kristofferson has also appeared in many films , Limbo and Lone Star, a couple of the better ones.

I also think Mark Wahlberg is a fantastic actor- The Perfect Storm was completely compelling .
Actors can do music too, ever have seen Natalie Portman rap?

Batllo

Barbra Streisand
Cher
Beyonce
Jennifer Hudson
Liza Minnelli
JLo

BunsenBurner

"Actors can do music too" - Meryl Streep is not a bad singer. Pierce Brosnan, OTOH, should stick to acting.

Batllo

Sidney Pollack
Willie Nelson
Dolly Parton
Diana Ross
Frank Sinatra

JHS

Not surprisingly, I think rappers can make good actors. Ice Cube was fantastic in Boyz In The Hood; Mos Def has been pretty good in a couple of things; Queen Latifah was excellent in Chicago and OK in some sitcoms. Eminem playing, essentially, himself in 8 Mile. And, oh yeah, the Fresh Prince has done alright in a number of movies. I don't know at what point you decide that they are no longer non-actors, but none of them were actors when they started out.

Mick Jagger did an awful lot of acting. I don't know if by 2001 he counts as a non-professional. But he was pretty riveting in Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One and Nick Roeg's Perfomance in 1968, and he wasn't a pro yet then.

Jennifer Hudson pretty much knocked it out of the park in Dreamgirls without (as far as I know) previous acting experience. Beyonce, too, for that matter.

Saturday Night Live has made stars out of a number of people who started out purely as writers, and were not expected to act: prominently Conan O'Brien, Tina Fey, also Al Franken.

Sam Shepard was a famous playwright when he was cast in Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, in which he was great. He had done some incidental acting in his teens, though, with hippie-type theater groups.

Magician/card-sharp Ricky Jay is excellent in a number of David Mamet movies, and recently playing a Russian gangster in The Brothers Bloom.

Leslie Browne and Mikhail Baryshnikov were both good in The Turning Point, and Alexander Godunov was decent in Witness.

Alex Karras did such a good job playing himself in Paper Lion that he wound up with an acting career several years later, including great roles in Blazing Saddles and Victor/Victoria. Among other football players, there's Jim Brown (in a ton of movies, few of them good), OJ Simpson (ditto), and Brett Favre's cameo in There's Something About Mary -- take 'em or leave 'em.

Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

Peter Frampton had a nice turn as a Humble Pie roadie in Almost Famous. Levon Helm got a lot of praise as Loretta Lynn's father in Coal Miner's Daughter.

Finally, some real favorites:

Jason Mewes was really Kevin Smith's drug dealer before he became a fixture in Smith's films, and some other people's as well.

David Gulpilil, a 16-year-old traditional dancer, played the Aborigine boy in Roeg's Walkabout.

Ronee Blakeley was a folksinger with no acting experience when she appeared in Robert Altman's Nashville as a doomed country diva.

One of my favorite movies ever is Edward Yang's Yi Yi. The lead actor in that film, Nien-Jen Wu, is a major Taiwanese screenwriter and occasional director, but his acting career prior to Yi Yi consisted of three or four cameos in his own and Yang's films. He is sensational as an engineer who wonders whether he should have followed his dreams to be an artist.

broetchen

Add Ludacris in Crash.

JHS

Obviously, I cross-posted with everybody.

I love Sidney Pollack, too, especially in Husbands and Wives and Michael Clayton.

Agree strongly also on Mark Wahlberg and Jennifer Lopez (forgot that she was principally a dancer before she started acting).

DougBetsy

What is Mark Wahlberg's pre-movie claim to fame?

Batllo

DougBetsy- He was Marky Mark and a Calvin Klein model