5 Sitcom Stars Who Went on to Win Oscars
Who knew a part on Happy Days could lead to cinema immortality? From Robin Williams to Sally Field, the list of Oscar winners who started as sitcom goofs is much longer than you might expect.
Here are five more Academy Award recipients who cashed their first showbiz paychecks on classic situation comedies…
Leonardo DiCaprio
DiCaprio was earning movie accolades early in his career, still a teenager when he was Oscar-nominated for Who’s Eating Gilbert Grape? But does he get that role without his breakthrough as Luke Brower, the homeless kid who gets taken in by the Seavers on the ‘80s sitcom Growing Pains? TV mom Joanna Kerns remembers DiCaprio always messing around between takes. “He was totally mischievous,” she told The Independent. When Tobey Maguire, a member of DiCaprio’s infamous Pussy Posse, came around the set, “They looked like they were really up to no good.”
Halle Berry
Before Berry took home Oscar gold for Monsters Ball, she was preening with Leah Remini on Who’s The Boss spin-off Living Dolls. It wasn’t a great experience — she fell into a coma while filming the show, later being diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. But that didn’t stop Berry from taking one-off roles in other sitcoms like Amen and A Different World before her movie career took off for good.
Ron Howard
By the time Howard was 20, he’d already starred in two of the biggest sitcoms in TV history, as Opie on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days. It was an unlikely deal with cult movie maven Roger Corman to make the low-budget Grand Theft Auto that led to Howard’s career as a director. He gained steam with comedies starring former sitcom pals — Night Shift with Henry “The Fonz” Winkler and Splash with Bosom Buddies’ Tom Hanks — before eventually winning an Oscar for directing A Beautiful Mind.
Hilary Swank
Hey, TGIF kids — remember Camp Wilder? If so, that was probably the first place you saw two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. She played a goofy high schooler alongside other family-friendly teens played by the impossibly young Jerry O’Connell, Jay Mohr and Tina Majorino.
Swank probably also ran into DiCaprio when she guested on Growing Pains. Watch out for Tobey Maguire, Hilary — he’s up to no good.
Tom Hanks
America’s most beloved actor was a sitcom mainstay in the 1970s and 1980s, fighting the Fonz on Happy Days as a disgruntled childhood acquaintance who learned karate to get revenge.
But Hanks’ big breakthrough came as the cross-dressing Kip on Bosom Buddies. “The first day I saw him on the set,” Buddies producer Ian Praiser told Rolling Stone, “I thought, ‘Too bad he won’t be in television for long.’ I knew he’d be a movie star in two years.”
