Is That Who I Think It Is?

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I just saw Kirstie Alley as a contestant on The Match Game. Kinda surreal. She had her trademark long hair, but her teeth were in some desperate need of straightening. She said she had come to LA as an interior decorator to do a job, and that she was originally from Witchita, KA. She must have liked the attention she got from winning, since she seemed to have stuck around for awhile.

[goggle]

I think they show that episode often, because I've seen it more than once.

OT, BagofBones, what company do you get cable from? Because all of a sudden mine (Cablevision) seems to have dropped GSN.

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Gah! I hope not. I watch it compulsively. I use DISH satellite, so hopefully I'm safe. I did notice Miss Alley on three episodes, b/c she won and they kept bringing her back. She won something like $11,000, which is peanuts nowadays, but was probably a lot in 1978.

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Resurrecting an oooold thread to say that Lily Allen has a two-second 'blink and you'll miss it' role as a lady-in-waiting in Elizabeth. She's young and tiny (younger and tinier than she is now), and quite literally if you sneezed or looked away for a second you wouldn't catch it.

[sumire]

White Christmas The last third of the film. Rosemary Clooney is mad at Bing and has run off to New York City to do a single act, believing her sister is planning to marry Danny Kaye.

Clooney does a torch song called "Love, You Didn't Do Right By Me". As she stands on stage singing in the night club, 4 young men wearing black dance around her. One of them is George Chakiris who would win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Bernardo in West Side Story a few years later.

Oh, cool! I wanna go watch that and look for him now. I also have the urge to watch The Mirror Crack'd--I don't give a damn about Pierce Brosnan, but Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in an Agatha Christie adaptation sounds like good times.

My biggest ITWITII moment so far has been recognizing Courtney Love as one of Nancy's friends in Sid and Nancy. So surreal.

ETA: Whoops, I accidentally landed on the first page and didn't notice the dates were from five years ago. I didn't mention Courtney Love here before, did I? I remember mentioning it _somewhere_.

I love this kind of celebspotting, but sadly, I wouldn't recognize Lily Allen if she walked up and slapped me.

[satellite]

Aug 20, 2005 16:59:33 GMT -4 sumire said:

A quick glimpse of an actor/actress before fame struck

Not quite what everyone else is posting, but in the spirit of the above... I'm reading The Celluloid Closet, and I must say, Jim Carrey is probably one of the last faces I was expecting to see in there. Not because of the gay context, but because this battered library copy of the "Revised Edition" was published in 1987, a good three years before In Living Color and seven before his Ace Ventura superstardom.

The author cites Carrey's 1985 Once Bitten for derogatory gags and a "particularly atrocious"--but also "undeniably homoerotic"--shower scene, and provides a still photo of young Jimmy and two co-stars who have not, AFAIK, gone on to earn umpteen million per picture.

I was shocked when I realized years later that Jim Carrey was in the tv movie Doing Time on Maple Drive, playing the alcoholic brother in a dysfunctional family. Oddly enough it came out in 1992 while ILC was on, but I guess he hadn't gotten really famous yet. Drama? What?

He was also in the Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool playing an Axl Rose-ish rock star with the real G n'R in uncredited cameos as his friends.

Overall, "Miami Vice" has to be my biggest Is That Who I Think It Is? show. It seems like every actor over age 35 has been on that show at one time or another.

Orlando Bloom full frontal as a rent boy in Wilde.

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Orlando Bloom is also the guy that falls out of the helicopter in Black Hawk Down, right as they start dropping into Mogadishu. Ioan Gruffuds is the medic in that movie.

[Wol]

Awesome thread. Some of my faves:

Alicia Witt in Dune

Laura Dern in Foxes

Gabriel Byrne, Patrick Stewart and Liam Neeson in Excalibur

Nic Cage, Anthony Edwards, and Eric Stoltz in Fast Times at Ridgemont High

John Cusack, Joan Cusack, and Jami Gertz in Sixteen Candles

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Chris Isaak in The Silence of the Lambs. He plays a cop on the SWAT team that goes after Hannibal in the hotel sequence.

[satellite]

Samuel L. Jackson in Goodfellas.
David Caruso in King of New York.
Angelina Jolie in Playing God, which was supposed to be Duchovny's big crossover to the movies.
Duchovny in Red Shoe Diaries (I didn't get cable until 1996 or so).
Clive Owen in The Rich Man's Wife. That was a big shock since I figured he was one of those Royal Shakespeare Company types until I discovered him in Gosford Park.
Sean Bean in the Acuvue contact lens commercials- I always used to wonder who that gorgeous guy was.
Matt Ross (Albie from Big Love) in American Psycho.
Fran Drescher in Spinal Tap

Everyone on my list just happens to have one of those distinctive faces and/or voices, so it's really easy to pick them out.