Who was the first actor to release a single that sold one million copies?
It’s often the case that if you can act, you can probably sing, too, well, unless you’re Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia.
The skills needed to perform usually carry across to an actor’s voice, because if you can do accents unrecognisable to your own, you can probably also make your voice sound like a beautiful singer’s. It helps if you want to be cast in a movie musical, too, although you clearly don’t always need to have the necessary talent to land a role.
Still, it helps, and if your acting opportunities start to dry up for some reason, at least there’s the option of starring on stage or forging a music career. So many actors have given music a crack, from Joe Pesci (seeing him rap about being a gangster on ‘Wise Guy’ is truly unforgettable) to Johnny Depp and Jennifer Lopez.
It’s often pretty embarrassing watching an actor trying to cash in on their success to harness a half-arsed, and likely terrible, music career, as reflected in the awful projects helmed by the likes of Jeremy Renner and Jared Leto. Never trust someone who claims to be a Thirty Seconds to Mars fan.
Every so often, though, an actor will pivot to music with surprising success, faring better with a microphone to their lips. Back in the 1950s, a young actor dipped his toes into the world of music-making, and soon he became the first star of the screen to also shift over a million copies of a single. Over two million, in fact.
The first actor to sell one million copies
In 1952, a young Ricky Nelson debuted on the big screen with his parents and his brother, starring in the meta comedy Here Come the Nelsons. From there, he continued to act with his family on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, eventually releasing his debut album, Ricky, in 1957 when he was 17 years old.
By the following year, while still appearing on the long-running TV show, he released his sophomore album, Ricky Nelson, which contained the track ‘Poor Little Fool’. Originally written by Sharon Sheeley, herself the same age as the singer, the track became Nelson’s ticket to musical stardom. After a short fling with Don Everly when she was a teen, Sheeley wrote the track when she was just 15, eventually saving it for Nelson to record.
When the track was released in 1958, it skyrocketed to number one on the newly launched Billboard Hot 100 chart, making it the first song to reach this impressive milestone. Shifting two million copies of the record, Nelson would become the first actor to find such sizeable success as a musician, and while he soon followed this monumental moment with roles in the likes of Rio Bravo with John Wayne and various other films and TV shows over the coming years, it would be his music that singled him out as a true talent. I mean, who doesn’t love the sound of ‘Lonesome Town’?
Nelson released some gorgeous tracks before eventually passing away in a plane crash in 1985, remaining proof that, in a few rare cases, some actors are actually much better suited to singing.
