Early cameos (1 Viewer)

[Eric Thrall]

I was talking with a friend the other day about cameos in feature films, and we started discussing what the earliest cameos of non-movie stars we could come up with were. The earliest we got was Babe Ruth appearing in Harold Lloyd's Speedy. I'm just curious to see what other early cameos people can come up with - and remember, I'm asking abotu cameos by people who were not movie stars.

 

[Scott Weinberg]

Hmmm. Interesting question. I just saw a Marilyn Monroe movie called Let's Make Love, which has cameos by Milton Berle, Gene Kelly, and Bing Crosby. (The cameos added some much needed color to the film.)
Jeffrey Lurie (owner of my beloved Philadelphia Eagles, in addition to being the producer of some rather weak movies) has a cameo in Jerry Maguire.
Roger Clemens in Kingpin
Brett Favre in There's Something About Mary
Cam Neely in Dumb & Dumber
Anna Kournikova in Me, Myself & Irene
Ron Darling in Shallow Hal
Lawrence Taylor in The Waterboy
John McEnroe in Mr. Deeds
Sammy Sosa in Kissing a Fool
Reggie Jackson in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!
Lennox Lewis in Ocean's Eleven
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Airplane!

 

[Mark Pfeiffer]

Alfred Hitchcock in many of his films.

 

[Van Patton]

mel gibson in fathers day

 

[george kaplan]

Well as far as early cameos, didn't Edison do one way back when?

 

[Ryan Donovan]

O.J Simpson was in two of the Naked Gun movies, providing possibly the most notorious cameo in movie history. Unless Charles Manson was in It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or something...

 

[FredHD]

Richard Dreyfuss in "The Graduate"

 

[Dave Kalloch]

Let's not forget hockey legend Lynden (L.B.) Beyers in Shallow Hal

 

[MickeS]

I wouldn't call OJ's role in "The Naked Gun" movies cameos, it was a regular character.

As for "OCean's 11", gotta add Topher Grace and Joshua Jackson (and maybe some other ones, those were the ones I recognized) playing themselves as poker students in the beginning of the movie.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Did I misunderstand the opening post or what?
Are any of these "early", like, say, before 1995. Way back before we had electricity.
2nd, ACTORS aren't what he asked for. He wanted non-actors. So we are looking for something like Teddy Roosevelt showing up in Birth of a Nation or something (I made that up so don't count it).
And an actor simply having a smaller part in an early film is NOT A CAMEO, it's just normal acting work. Dreyfuss just had a small role in The Graduate. He wasn't a star yet. That's like saying that Harrison Ford had a cameo in Apocalypse Now or American Graffiti.
Back to the question, I would guess that one of the trickier parts of this would be knowing who was famous at the time besides film stars who remain famous through their films. Who were the Kato Kaelins of 1918?