Who was the first actor to release a number one album?
Encouraging anybody, let alone a creative person, to stay in their lane is generally quite unhealthy advice. As the likes of David Bowie have proven, great art exists outside the boundaries of convention, and so largely, we should encourage artists to veer across platforms and mediums to deliver work that feels meaningful to them.
But then there are a host of artists who have proven otherwise, delivering work that laughs in the face of legitimacy and instead just acts as an abuse of their industry power. Maybe it was Robert Downey Jr’s meagre attempt to become a singer-songwriter, or Harry Styles’ attempt to make a “proper movie” with Don’t Worry Darling. There are countless examples where artists dominate a lane, and it’s absolutely fine for them to stay in it.
In fact, it’s probably best for their own safety that they do, because the sharp teeth of music’s biggest egos are constantly on watch, ready to snatch at any imposter they feel is coming for their real estate. A sentiment best showcased by Mark E Smith, who once bluntly said, “It irritates me all these actors in groups. Their actors and they form their own groups, as though that’s what they always wanted to do – I think that should be banned!”
But there are plenty of artists who exist within the middle of this Venn diagram. Names who provoke a confused but all-encompassing sense of respect, that leaves us wondering what came first, the acting or the music? There are modern examples like Childish Gambino and maybe even Jack Black, who all follow the path set out by the great Barbara Streisand.
Streisand was the definitive cross-platform artist, with 11 number-one albums to her name and a string of box-office hits that include Funny Girl and The Way We Were. But Streisand’s domination of both charts came in the 1960s, a decade when many artists were adopting the cross-platform career model. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin were perhaps the two notable members of that elite group who helped carve this elite model of stardom in the 1950s. And it was in the 1950s then, when this record was set.
So, who was the first actor to release a number one album?
Well, it was on March 24th, 1956, when Billboard’s album chart of weekly best-selling long players was first published.
Prior to that, the magazine began publishing ‘Best Selling Popular Albums’ in January of 1955, but only on a bi-weekly basis with 15 LPs and 15 EPs, before the chart became a weekly fixture towards the end of March 1956.
In that very first chart announcement, it was one of the pioneers of the actor/musician career, Harry Belafonte, who scored that first weekly number one with his record, Belafonte. That album sat at the top spot for six weeks before another cross-platform legend took his place. His new RCA labelmate Elvis Presley climbed to the top with his self-titled debut album, which stayed there for ten weeks, a position he would become acquainted with over his career.
But while that first number one came solely as a musician, it was in the following decade that he would consistently hit that top spot for creating the soundtracks to his own box-office smash movies.
