50 Awesome Facts about Hollywood Actors – Part 4

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1Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee

Bruce Lee was absolutely convinced he would lose in a fight to Muhammad Ali. “Look at my hand,” he said. “That’s a little Chinese hand. He’d kill me."


2. Lenny Montana, the actor who played Luca Brasi in the Godfather was actually a member of the Colombo crime family sent to monitor the set. Coppola cast him, but due to his nerves, he kept making mistakes and repeating his lines to himself. This was then incorporated into the film as a character trait.


3. Woody Allen has consistently refused to attend the Oscars or acknowledge his Oscar wins. His publicly given reason is his standing engagement to play clarinet in a Monday night ensemble.


4. Tom Hanks was paid a low $800 for the movie "He Knows You're Alone", $50,000 for "Toy Story" and a high of $70 million for "Forrest Gump."


5. Charlie Chaplin was criticized because he did not volunteer during World War 1. Although he registered for the U.S. draft, he received thousands of white feathers and angry letters. It was later revealed that he was rejected because he was undersized and underweight.


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6Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling

Ryan Gosling gained 60 pounds by drinking melted ice cream to play the father in Peter Jackson's 'The Lovely Bones.' He was then told he was too fat to play the part and the role went to Mark Wahlberg.


7. Christopher Walken is one of only two actors (the other being Alec Baldwin) to have a standing offer from Lorne Michaels to host Saturday Night Live whenever his schedule permits. Thus far, he has hosted the show 7 times, his most famous appearance being the "More Cowbell!" sketch.


8. When actor Raul Julia was terminally ill, he decided that his last performance would be as the villain in Street Fighter, as his children were fans of the game it was based on. The movie received terrible reviews, but Julia's performance was critically acclaimed.


9. Glenn Shadix, the actor who played Otho in Beetlejuice, was subjected to “ex-gay” electrical shock treatments when he came out to his parent. When this failed to change his orientation, he attempted suicide and survived a 3-day coma. After the incident, his parents accepted his sexuality.


10. Actor Dick Van Dike didn't know his actual birthday until he was 18. His parents lied to him about his birth date to cover up the fact that he was conceived out of wedlock.


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11Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy once gave a cab ride to JFK. The future president told the aspiring actor, “Lots of competition in your business, just like in mine. Just remember there’s always room for one more good one.”


12. Jackie Coogan, the silent film child actor who was famously exploited by his parents for his earnings, found renewed screen success later in life playing Uncle Fester on the Addams Family.


13. "Pinhead" actor Doug Bradley became so adept at applying and removing his prosthetic makeup that he was given an Assistant Make-up Artist credit on some Hellraiser films.


14. Superman actor Christopher Reeve was interested in Scientology until he was auditing and told them about a “past life” that was really a story from Greek mythology. He was disillusioned that they believed his lie and stopped pursuing Scientology.


15. Sylvester Stallone was not the actor that the producers wanted to star in 'Rocky'. With just $106 in his bank account, Stallone turned down a $300,000 offer — the equivalent of $1 million today — for the rights to 'Rocky' so that he could star in the film himself.


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16Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood

Clint Eastwood insisted on removing some of the dialogue in the original script for his character 'The Man with no Name' in the Dollars trilogy so that it could make the character more mysterious. As the trilogy progressed the character became even more stoic and silent.


17. Rory McCann ('The Hound', Game of Thrones) was incredibly anti-social until he learned that fellow actors in the show's group, the 'Brotherhood Without Banners' (Thoros, Lord Beric) were musicians, and formed a band called 'Brotherhood Without Banjos' with them.


18. Victor Mature, after being denied membership of the Los Angeles Country Club because he was an actor, replied: "I am not an actor - and I've got 64 films to prove it."


19. Actor John Banner, famous for his iconic role as Master Sergeant Hans Georg Schultz in CBS' Hogan's Heroes, was an Austrian-born Jew. He emigrated to the United States in 1938, and sadly, lost most of his family in the Holocaust.


20. Once during flight, actor Nicolas Cage as a prank used the PA system to say that he was the pilot and he was not feeling well. At the airport, police prepared to arrest Cage and his traveling partner Charlie Sheen. After Cage politely talked his way out of it, he later discovered that Sheen was carrying cocaine on him.


21Matt Damon

Matt Damon

Matt Damon could only say his name in Team America because his puppet came in looking mentally deficient and they didn’t have time to change it, so Parker and Stone just made him mentally challenged.


22. Actor Mickey Rourke attributed his comeback to his dogs and credited them during his Golden Globe acceptance speech in 2009. “Sometimes when a man's alone, all you got is your dog, and they've meant the world to me.”


23. Actor Joe Pesci started as a singer and guitar player and played in the same band as Jimi Hendrix.


24. Actor Clint Walker was pierced through the heart with a ski pole. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead, but a doctor detected faint signs of life and rushed Walker to surgery, where his damaged heart was repaired. Within two months Walker was again working.


25. An actor named Del Close died in 1999 and in his will, he bequeathed his skull to a local theatre so that he could still play the part of Yorick, a dead court jester, in productions of Hamlet. However, no one wanted to remove his head after death, robbing him of one of his final wishes.

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