10 Iconic Celebrities’ Post Fame Careers

Cooter Went From the Dukes of Hazards to the US House of Representatives

Ben Jones (1941 – ) became famous as Cooter, the good ‘ol boy mechanic from The Dukes of Hazard, when that television series first aired in the 1970s. The role of the dirty, crazy, greasy TV wrench monkey was a perfect fit for his real-life persona of a high-strung live wire. When the show was over, he left acting for other career opportunities, and turned to politics.

The son of a railroad section chief, Jones grew up in a shantytown near Portsmouth, Virginia. A hard partier and frequent drunk who liked chasing Four Roses whiskey with Miller High Life, he spent many a night in local lockups, usually for drunkenness and disturbing the peace. As he put it, he spent decades as a “likker drinkin’, hell raisin’, dope smokin’, fist-fightin’, womanizin’ jailbird wild man“. Car wrecks, arrests, and three failed marriages failed to wean him off the bottle until 1977, when he went on a five-week bender. When he finally came to, he checked into a detox clinic, and quit cold turkey. He avers that he has not had a drop of alcohol since 1977.

He had gone to the University of North Carolina for four years, where he caught the acting bug after performing in his first student play. He first met Gy Waldron, creator and director of the Dukes of Hazard, in 1975 while auditioning for a role in the movie Moonrunners, about a southern family that runs bootleg liquor. Waldron met with Jones after the movie’s release, and when it was reworked four years later into The Dukes of Hazard, Jones was the first person to audition. The new action comedy TV series’ defied critics’ predictions that it would flop, and flop miserably at that. Instead, it went on to become a worldwide success, and a cultural icon of the 1970s and 1980s. As the hit series soared, Jones’ character, Cooter, became a heartland hero.

After the show was finally canceled, Ben Jones left Cooter behind, and turned to politics, running for Congress as a Democrat from a Georgia district. Predictably, his opponents made an issue of his rough past rendering him unsuitable for public office. In an effective bit of campaign judo, he simply responded: “I awoke naked in a tattoo parlor in Talladega, Alabama. I knew it was time to change my lifestyle. So I went into politics “. After losing his first Congressional bid in 1986, he ran for a US House Representatives seat in 1988, won, and served two terms in Congress.

His political career was marked by candor and wit, but in 1992, his congressional district disappeared in a reshuffle following the 1990 census, and he lost the subsequent Democrat primary. In 1994, he ran against Newt Gingrich, lost, and left politics. He attempted a comeback in 2002, running for a House of Representatives seat in Virginia, but lost. Since the 1990s, he has run museums across the country dedicated to The Dukes of Hazard, known as “Cooter Museums”.

Dolores Hart Left Hollywood For a New Habit

Before Elvis Presley became a hip-swiveling sexy heartthrob, he was a shy young man who blushed when he got his first onscreen kiss. That kiss was courtesy of a rising young actress, Dolores Hart, who starred opposite Elvis in two of his earliest films: 1957’s Loving You, and 1958’s King Creole. She eventually gave up a successful acting career to become a Benedictine nun, run a priory, and today she is Mother Dolores, working and living in a Connecticut abbey.

She was born Dolores Hicks in 1938 to a pair of actors who divorced when she was a toddler. From an early age, Dolores thought that acting would be her career. She grew up into a gorgeous girl, and as a teenager, she got a starring role opposite Elvis in Loving You. She recalled that when they were supposed to kiss, she and Elvis blushed so bad that their ears turned purple, and makeup artists had to rush in to brush them with paint to hide it. She starred opposite Elvis in another movie the following year.

By the late 1950s, Dolores Hart was one of Hollywood’s most envied rising starlets – a beautiful and captivating actress heralded as the next Gene Kelly. In 1961, she was the top-billing actress in MGM’s highest-earning movie of the year, Where the Boys Are. By the early 1960s, she was an established leading lady, starring across the likes of Montgomery Cliff, George Hamilton, Robert Wagner, and Stephen Boyd.

Despite the success, however, Hart’s soul was uneasy. Among other things, separating from colleagues after months of intense work on film sets reminded her too much of the breakup of her own family, and filled her with heartache. As she would later tell a magazine: “Before I was twenty, I learned that being in movies did not bring me the ultimate joy I expected“.

She often retreated to the countryside on her days off, and a friend recommended she try the guest house of a Connecticut convent, the Abbey of Regina Laudis. There, she found peace of mind and a sense of community and continuity that appealed to her. A few years later, she was engaged to be married, but changed her mind about her fiance and decided to become a Bride of Christ instead. After finishing Come Fly With Me in 1963, Dolores turned her back on Hollywood, and entered a convent. In 1970, she took her final vows to become a nun. Today, Mother Dolores works and lives in the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

The Grady Twins Went From ‘The Shining’ to Lawyering and Microbiology

In 1980, Warner Brothers released The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel of the same name. The movie, about an author with writer’s block who moves to an isolated hotel with his family, then gets possessed by supernatural forces, is a classic of the horror film genre. One of the scariest movies ever made, it aged well, and still retains its ability to thrill and chill viewers well into the fourth decade following its release. It received mixed reviews when first released, but today it is widely regarded as one of the greatest horror movies ever made.

In a film full of frightening, few things have sent more shivers down viewers’ spines than the Grady twins. The girls are best remembered for holding hands in hallways in matching frilly blue dresses, with pink ribbons, hair clips, and knee-high socks. Played by British twins Lisa and Louise Burns, the creepy girls really wanted to play with young Danny Torrance, chanting “Come and play with, Danny, forever, and ever, and ever“, apparently unwilling to take “no” for an answer.

The Grady girls’ scenes are among the film’s most memorable and readily recognizable, even though they are on screen for less than a minute total. They were ten years old when they starred opposite Jack Nicholson and almost stole the movie. Their success in The Shining did not lead to long Hollywood careers, however. After becoming pop culture icons at such a young age, actresses Lisa and Louise Burns just about vanished from the public eye.

As they revealed decades later, success in The Shining actually damaged their acting careers. The way acting schools worked in Britain, they were unable to enroll because they were deemed professionals, and thus ineligible. As a result, they were turned away from the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. So they gave up on acting, and pursued more prosaic careers. Lisa studied literature, and is now a lawyer who negotiates licenses for intellectual property. Her sister Louise, who pursued a science degree, is now a published microbiologist. And yes, they still want to play – both regularly attend horror conventions worldwide to meet fans.

Danny Torrance of ‘The Shining’ is Now a Biology Professor

The Shining owes much of its success to the contrast between the childish creepiness of the Grady twins, and the childish innocence of five-year-old Danny Torrance (real name Danny Lloyd). That jarring juxtaposition helped elevate the movie from just another horror flick, and transformed it into an instant-classic that can still thrill viewers four decades later.

A five-year-old Lloyd was selected for the role of Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) son because, unlike most kids his age, he could stay focused for extended periods of time. The child actor with the pudding bowl haircut was six when he and his family were flown to London for filming. They thought it would be a relatively brief process, but the perfectionist Kubrick kept reshooting scene after scene, until nearly a year had passed on set. Throughout, Lloyd was unaware that he was in a horror movie: his parents and Kubrick led him to believe that it was just a movie about a family in a hotel. He did not see the actual film until he was ten or eleven years old.

Lloyd’s performance was well received, but after The Shining, he appeared in just one more film, Will: G. Gordon Liddy, a TV movie in which he played the young Liddy. He then quit acting and disappeared from the public eye. In the following years, Stephen King was so frequently pestered by fans about the fate of little Danny Torrance, that he wrote a sequel in 2013, Doctor’s Sleep.

As to the real-life Danny, Danny Lloyd, the question of his fate buzzed around the internet for years, with plenty of fake news about just what had happened to him and where he had disappeared to. As he recently told an interviewer: “I once read that I had six kids and was a pig farmer“, before going on to note “that is not entirely accurate“.

In reality, after quitting acting, Lloyd went on to a pretty prosaic and run-of-the-mill life. After school, he went to college, and to help pay for tuition, he worked in a Walmart and drove a tractor in a hog farm – the origin of the rumors about his being a pig farmer. In 2007, he became a biology professor at a community college in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where he still teaches today, often downplaying his role as “that kid from The Shining“.

He has fond memories of his time on the film set, but while it was a remarkable and interesting chapter of his childhood, it never became a defining one for the rest of his life. Fortunately for him, his parents were not stage parents, and when he told them that he was ready to quit, they were fine with it, and saw to it that he had a normal upbringing. Reflecting on how life panned out, he stated: “I don’t regret trying acting. When I decided to stop, I don’t regret that either. At the end of the day, it’s not a huge deal. Well, it is and it isn’t. I still have to grade the tests at school, get the kids to bed. All the regular stuff“. As of 2018, Dan Lloyd – he outgrew and ditched the “Danny” long ago – has four children, including teenagers who frequently tease their now balding father about his bowl haircut in The Shining.

Sonny Bono Went From Pop Hits to Politics

Salvatore Phillip “Sonny” Bono (1935 – 1998) was the male part of the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and is best remembered today as Cher’s bell bottom-wearing other half. Their most famous hits were I Got You Babe and Baby Don’t Go. After the duo divorced, Cher went on to greater success, while Sonny’s musical career languished, sputtered, and eventually died. He eventually pursued new careers in business and politics.

As a songwriter, Sonny co-wrote “Needles and Pins“, which became a number 1 hit in the UK, and rose to #13 on the US Billboard in 1964 when performed by the Searchers. It returned to international fame in the 1970s, when performed by Smokie in 1977, and by the Ramones in 1978. It was also sung by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, among others, and became a #1 hit in when France when Petula Clark did a version with French lyrics.

However, his greatest commercial success came as part of the duo Sonny & Cher with his then-wife. They started as R&B backing singers for record producer Phil Spector, before achieving fame in 1965 with two hit songs, Baby Don’t Go and I Got You Babe. In the 1970s, Sonny and his wife turned to television, and enhanced their fame with a pair of top ten TV shows, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, and The Sonny and Cher Show. They divorced in 1975, but during their decade together, they had sold over 40 million records.

After his musical career came to an end, Sonny drifted for a while, before turning to the world of business. However, he got into politics in the 1980s after becoming infuriated with local governmental red tape regarding his house and an Italian restaurant he owned in Palm Springs, CA. So he registered to vote for the first time in his life in 1988, ran for mayor of Palm Springs that year, and won. He served for four years, until 1992.

He took a stab at the US Senate in 1992, entering the Republican primaries. However, the party went with a more conservative candidate, who went on to lose to Democrat Barbara Boxer. In 1994, he ran for and was elected to the US House of Representatives. He went on to serve two terms in Congress, where he was well-liked for his self-deprecating humor. His political career, as well as life, were cut short in 1998, when he was killed in a skiing accident after running headfirst into a tree. He remains the only member of Congress to have ever scored a #1 hit on the US Billboard Top 100.

Little Mikey Went From Acting in Ads to an Ad Executive

In 1972, Quaker Oats aired a TV commercial promoting its Life breakfast cereal, which featured Little Mikey (real name John Gilchrist), a fictional boy who “hates everything”, only to fall in love with the cereal after his older brothers use him as their food taster to try it out. The commercial was a hit, and won a Clio Award in 1974 for excellence and innovation in advertising. It gave rise to an ad campaign revolving around Mikey’s reactions to Life cereal, that ran for the next twelve years.

John Gilchrist, the son of an NYPD cop, was raised in the Bronx, the middle child in a family that would ultimately have seven kids. His parents owned a bungalow in nearby Long Beach, and there they ran into some children who had done modeling. They took a good look at those kids, then took a good look at their own, and concluded that the Gilchrist children’s freckly and “All American” look might be marketable. It turned out they were right.

As Gilchrist would later describe it, it was not long before his oldest brother Tommy was working regular gigs, making more money in a single day than their father earned in a week as a police officer. His mother became her children’s agent, and within a short time, her younger kids were also modeling and appearing in ads. Eventually, all seven of the Gilchrist children were doing advertising work, which enabled the family to move from the Bronx to Yonkers, and pay for the kids’ college educations.

Unlike many child actors, John Gilchrist actually has fond memories of his working youth. Perhaps that is because the acting gigs never became an all-consuming aspect of his or his siblings’ lives, and so never came to define them. They would do the gigs, then pursue the every lives of a normal family – just one whose children frequently appeared on TV ads.

The Life cereal ad campaign, which started with Mikey not liking anything, evolved into Mikey becoming a masticating machine who would anything placed before him. That gave rise in later years to an urban legend that the real-life actor, Gilchrist, had died after swallowing a fatal combination of hard rock candy and soda, which exploded his stomach. It never happened, and Gilchrist is alive and well as of 2018. He is now on the other end of the advertising game, working as an ad executive and the director of sales at New York’s MSG Network.

The iconic commercial is now only part of the background of his life, but he recognizes and appreciates the cultural fascination surrounding. “I just never looked at it like some huge, big deal. Maybe that comes off to some people like I don’t want to talk about it. Totally not the case. I love talking about it. It’s a part of me“. A middle-aged man now with children of his own, he still likes the cereal that brought him fame. As he told an interviewer in 2012: “My kids like Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes, but I still sure do like Life!”

Charlie Bucket From ‘Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ Is Now a Veterinarian

Willie Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, about Charlie Bucket lucking into a Golden Ticket that entitled him to visit Willie Wonka’s chocolate factory, has delighted viewers of all ages since its release in 1971. The musical fantasy received generally positive reviews, but was not a huge commercial success at the time, earning about $4 million in its initial run from a $3 million budget. Starting in the 1980s, however, it resurfaced and took on a life of its own, thanks to repeated TV airings and home video sales.

Much of the movie’s success is owed to Charlie Bucket, played by Peter Ostrum, whose innocent smile and big blue eyes captivated audiences and helped catapult the movie into cultural icon status. Ostrum, who was twelve when casting agents decided he was the perfect fit for the role, took five months off from his studies and traveled to Munich for filming.

When shooting Willie Wonka was finished, Ostrum was thirteen years old, and he was offered a three movie contract. However, the experience of being away from home had not been to his liking, and put him off of acting. As he would later put it: “I enjoyed doing it but I couldn’t really see myself doing it for the rest of my life“. So he turned down the offer, turned his back on acting, and pursued a normal life. So after killing it in his single acting gig, the former child actor dropped out of the public eye.

Compared to other child actors, he was remarkably successful in attaining his goal of normalcy. When he got back home, his parents had bought a horse, and young Ostrum was impressed with the veterinarian who took care of it. So he decided that he wanted to be a vet when he grew up, and went ahead and did just that, earning a doctorate of veterinary medicine from Cornell University in 1984. As of 2018, Peter Ostrum is an established veterinarian in Lowville, in Upstate New York, where he lives with his wife and two kids.

Looking back at it, Peter Ostrum has no regrets about his choice not to pursue an acting career when he had a chance. He knew himself, even at that young age, and knew that he wanted stability in life: “How many kids carry a successful child acting career into an adult acting career? The Jodie Fosters and Ron Howards you can count on one hand … Acting was fine, but I wanted something more steady. The key is to find something you love doing, and that’s what I got “.

James Williamson Went From Creating Punk Rock to Designing Chips in Silicon Valley

Guitarist, songwriter, and record producer, James Williamson (1949 – ) was a member of Iggy and the Stooges, a 1960s to 1970s band whose primitive and raw rock and roll, coupled with confrontational performances, would pave the way for punk rock. In 2004, Rolling Stone included them in their list of 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, and in 2010, they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. As to Williamson, he went from revolutionizing rock and roll to developing computer chips in Silicon Valley.

Born in Texas before moving to Oklahoma as a child, Williamson began playing guitar in 7th grade. Without instruction, however, he did not go beyond basic chords, and it did not seem he would progress much beyond that. Luckily for him, his family moved to Detroit, and young Williamson ended up living next door to a family of musicians. He spent much of his free time hanging out with his neighbors and improving his skills.

By 9th grade, Williams had formed his own rock band, and it was during this period that he first came into contact with Iggy Pop and other members of the future Stooges. In 1970, he was invited to join the band as a second guitarist, but The Stooges were wracked by drug problems. Between that and a lack of commercial success, they dissolved soon thereafter.

The Stooges reformed in 1972, after David Bowie offered Iggy Pop a chance to record in London, and he called in Williamson and other band members to join him. Williamson co-wrote all the songs with Iggy, and played an explosive and raunchy guitar in the ensuing album, Raw Power. That guitar style, which was likened to how Darth Vader would play if he was in a band, became a major influence on the emerging punk scene. The Stooges had a turbulent couple of years touring, marked by copious amounts of booze, drugs, and craziness, before dissolving again in 1974. Iggy Pop went on to pursue a solo career.

Williamson quit playing after hurting his finger in a drunken brawl at an Alice Cooper party, and began working as a record producer, while pursuing a degree in electronics engineering. He did disco work as a staff engineer at Paramount Recorders in Los Angeles, and in 1979, worked with Iggy Pop as a songwriter and producer on his third solo album, New Values. However, personality clashes with Iggy’s new colleagues and other frustrations led Williamson to quit music for good and focus on getting his electronics degree, which he did in 1982.

He moved to Silicon Valley and got a job working for chip and semiconductor manufacturer Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), designing products around its chips. He kept mum about his former career as a musician, which was made easy by his colleagues being, as Williamson put it, “nerds and geeks … they don’t listen to The Stooges much“. He was hired by Sony in 1997 as VP for technical standards, in which capacity he helped codify industry standards for emerging products such as Blu-Ray Discs, before accepting an early buyout and retiring in 2009.

Ronald Reagan Went From Hollywood to the White House

Perhaps the most extraordinary post-celebrity career was that of Ronald Reagan (1911 – 2004). A conservative and fervent anticommunist, he capitalized on his appealing personality, folksy charm, and jaunty affability, to make the transition from an acting career to one in politics. Unlike most celebrities who made that switch, Reagan was far more successful as a politician than he had ever been as an actor. As an actor, he had never risen above Hollywood’s B-list or left much of a legacy. As a politician, he rose swiftly to get himself elected governor of California, before making the jump to the White House, where he became a transformative American President.

He was born into a poor family in Northern Illinois, and the family’s lot was made worse by his father’s alcoholism. The booze kept Reagan’s father from holding on to a job for long, and necessitated frequent moves. Reagan weathered the chaotic upbringing, finished school, and pursued a higher education degree. In 1932, he graduated from Eureka College, where he played football, was active in the drama society, and was elected class president in his senior year.

Reagan began his career as a sports announcer for regional radio stations, before moving to Hollywood in 1937. There, he had a successful screen test at Warner Brothers, and was typecast in a series of mostly B movies as a wholesome and easygoing good guy – roles that actually matched his real-life personality. Over the following quarter century, he appeared in over 50 movies, of which the best known are Knute Rockne, All American, and Bedtime for Bonzo, in which he starred opposite a chimpanzee. He also became president of the Screen Actors Guild. In the 1950s, he moved to TV, and added motivational speakers at General Electric factories to his repertoire.

He was a liberal Democrat until 1962, when he made a sharp turn towards conservatism and became a Republican. He garnered national attention with a motivational speech during the failed 1964 Goldwater campaign, and capitalized on that two years later to get elected governor of California. He turned the state budget’s deficit into a surplus by raising taxes, called in the National Guard to confront antiwar protesters, and imposed stricter gun controls to restrict open carry. He was reelected to another term in 1970.

After twice failing to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 and 1972, Reagan finally got the nod in 1980, and went on to defeat the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. He was reelected in a landslide in 1984. As President, Reagan helped redefine the purpose of government, and switched America from a New Deal track to a decidedly free market and business-oriented one.

The results of his presidency have been mixed, depending on one’s perspective. On the one hand, a huge increase in wealth, albeit concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. On the other hand, a shrinking middle class and a widening chasm of income inequality, as wages for most Americans, adjusted for inflation, have been stagnant or declining ever since. He suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years, and died in 2004. To date, he is the only movie actor to ever become President of the United States.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­____________

Where Did We Find This Stuff? Sources & Further Reading

ABC News – Leaving Hollywood For a Higher Calling

Biography – Ronald Reagan

Clash Magazine, March 30th, 2010 – The Stooges: James Williamson Interview

Daily Mail, October 31st, 2015 – The Shining’s Grady Twins Reveal How Movie Led to Them Being Shunned

Guardian, The, October 27th, 2017 – Danny Lloyd, the Kid in the Shining: ‘I Was Promised That Tricycle After Filming But it Never Came’

Hello Giggles – The Creepy Twins From The Shining Are All Grown Up But Still Down to Play, 37 Years Later

Indy Week – The Many Lives of Actor, Redneck, and Congressman Ben Jones

LA Times, January 7th, 1998 – Sonny Bono Dies in Ski Accident

Metro, April 2nd, 2018 – Turns Out Willie Wonka’s Charlie Bucket Never Acted Again After Starring in 70s Classic

New York Times, May 5th, 1992 – George Murphy, Singer and Actor Who Became Senator, Dies at 89

Newsday – John Gilchrist, Who Played ‘Mikey’ in TV Ad, Still Likes it After All These Years

Time Magazine – Top 10 Actors Turned Politicians

Wikipedia – Dolores Hart

Wikipedia – James Williamson (Musician)