Five actors who made one good movie and vanished off the face of the planet
Actors can have all the talent in the world, but if they don’t get cast in the right film at the right time by the right people, then they can go their entire careers without being recognised.
Lacking the guarantee that the glory will last, history is littered with one-hit wonders of the acting world. Even if they hit the big leagues, there are those stars who couldn’t translate their achievements into any sort of momentum, leading to some choosing to walk away from the limelight, while others tried their best to no avail.
Obviously, these actors didn’t completely vanish after their initial breakouts, and most of them have other movie credits to their name, but they just weren’t anywhere near as impactful as what came before that really showed the promise they held.
While you can ask if it is better to have had one fleeting taste of success, only to come plummeting down to Earth, or to never have succeeded at all and be spared the heartache of not reaching the mountaintop again, we know five people who you can turn to for an answer.
Five one-hit wonders of the acting world
Darlene Cates – ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’ (Lasse Hallström, 1993)
Before he was the globetrotting star he is now, Leonardo DiCaprio played a young boy with mental disabilities in Lasse Hallström’s small-town drama What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? The debate surrounding actors ‘appropriating’ disabilities has become extremely heated in the years since the film came out; however, the great irony of Gilbert Grape is that, for one character, the crew went above and beyond to cast someone authentic.
Peter Hedges, who adapted his own novel to provide the film’s screenplay, saw Darlene Cates on a human interest news piece about obesity and cast her as Bonnie ‘Mama’ Grape, the mother of DiCaprio’s character. Following the death of her husband, Bonnie’s weight expanded as her mental state declined, proving a pivotal figure in the story that Crates plays to perfection. Watching the film, you’d never guess she wasn’t a professional, but unfortunately, she remained a fringe figure for the rest of her life, appearing in a few TV shows and a short in 2014, before her health problems caught up with her and she died in 2017.
Jeff Cohen – ‘The Goonies’ (Richard Donner, 1985)
This list could have been five times as long and populated solely by child actors, with so many young stars of great movies fading away as they get older. Sometimes they decide that acting isn’t for them anymore, while for others, there are darker forces at play, but that’s a topic for another time. The person we’ve chosen to represent this phenomenon is Jeff Cohen, who, as an 11-year-old in 1985, won over the hearts of millions as Lawrence Cohen, better known as Chunk, or ‘Captain Chunk’, if you want to be pedantic.
Chunk was easily the breakout star of The Goonies, his ‘truffle shuffle’ dance probably the thing it’s remembered for above everything else. While Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, and Corey Feldman carried on as actors, Cohen fell in love with the business side of Hollywood, earning a law degree and later setting up his own firm. It was his legal acumen that allowed Ke Huy Quan, another former ‘Goonie’ who had fallen into obscurity, to land a part in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, such that when he won the Oscar for the movie, he thanked Cohen in his speech.
Alicia Rhett – ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Victor Fleming, 1939)
Considering that about six million people were in Gone with the Wind, it’s hardly surprising that a few of them fell through the cracks, and one such name is Alicia Rhett, who plays India Wilkes, the sister of Civil War-era hunk Ashley Wilkes. With Scarlett O’Hara in constant pursuit of her brother’s affections, India crops up at key moments throughout the film, notably spotting the two canoodling at a sawmill, leading to the awkward scene at Ashley’s birthday party.
Rhett, who comes from the same family that inspired Clark Gable’s character’s name in the original novel, was spotted by original director George Cukor in a play. She initially tried out for the parts of both O’Hara and Melanie Hamilton, but lost out to Vivian Leigh and Olivia de Havilland, respectively. Despite being in one of the most important films ever made, she struggled to find work afterwards, eventually quitting acting and making her living as an accent coach and radio station announcer, passing in 2014 at 98, with the Southern epic remaining her sole movie credit.
Heather Donahue – ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
It’s not hyperbole to describe The Blair Witch Project as a cultural phenomenon, for when audiences first clapped eyes on this amateur-style ‘found footage‘ horror about a group of students trying to debunk an urban legend, they didn’t know what to think. Some viewers were reportedly sick from the shaky quality of the footage, while the air of terror surrounding the doomed teens’ plight instantly generated a buzz, making hundreds of millions of dollars on a budget of absolute peanuts, so why did none of the stars become household names?
Joshua Leonard has done the best of the prime three, having consistently found work since 1999, while Michael C Williams struggled significantly more, accumulating a fraction of the credits as his former co-star. Then there’s Heather Donahue, who, as the de facto main character of the groundbreaking story, seemed destined to be catapulted to superstardom. Instead, she struggled to find work outside of Blair Witch-related projects, starring in the miniseries Taken, for which she was nominated for a Saturn Award. However, in 2008, she called time on her acting career, having since changed her legal name and moved into the business of growing medical marijuana.
Haing S Ngor – The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984)
The ‘Oscars curse’ is a very real thing, with a bevvy of examples of actors winning the top prize and then dropping like a stone, and few people embody this meteoric trajectory quite like Cambodian-born Haing S Ngor. Formerly a gynaecologist in his homeland, Ngor was a victim of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime, helmed by vicious dictator Pol Pot, which led him to emigrate to the United States, where he was cast in a film about the real-life horrors he had endured: Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields.
A monumental critical smash, The Killing Fields was well-represented at the 1985 Academy Awards, and for his performance as journalist Dith Tran, his first ever acting gig, Ngor won ‘Best Supporting Actor’, becoming just the second amateur in history to take home the gold. Alas, this was to be his peak, and though he was rarely out of work, Ngor was never given the same platform ever again. A noted humanitarian, he was shot and killed outside his Los Angeles home in 1996, where rumours persist to this day that he was gunned down on the orders of Pot, who wanted him dead for daring to speak out.
