<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Magician/card-sharp Ricky Jay is excellent in a number of David Mamet movies, and recently playing a Russian gangster in The Brothers Bloom.</p>
<p>Leslie Browne and Mikhail Baryshnikov were both good in The Turning Point, and Alexander Godunov was decent in Witness.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Francois Truffaut in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Finally, some real favorites:</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>David Gulpilil, a 16-year-old traditional dancer, played the Aborigine boy in Roeg’s Walkabout.</p>
<p>Ronee Blakeley was a folksinger with no acting experience when she appeared in Robert Altman’s Nashville as a doomed country diva.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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