11 Celebs' Strange Pre-Fame Jobs

From birthday party clown to outhouse cleaner
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 7, 2014 1:25 PM CDT
11 Celebs' Strange Pre-Fame Jobs
Angelina Jolie and Brad PItt. He's in a tux now, but he used to wear a chicken suit.   (Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/AP)

Hey, you gotta start somewhere. Radar rounds up 25 celebrities who had strange—and sometimes a little embarrassing—jobs before they got their big breaks. A sampling:

  • Cindy Crawford: Shucked corn at a local fair for $4 an hour. (But note, that's how she ended up getting discovered.)
  • Hugh Jackman: Performed as "Coco the Clown" at parties for children. "I had no magic tricks," he once recalled, leading a 6-year-old to call him "terrible."
  • Ellen DeGeneres: Sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door.
  • Sylvester Stallone: Cleaned out the lions' cages at New York's Central Park Zoo for $1.12 an hour.
  • Brad Pitt: Handed out flyers, while dressed in a chicken suit, outside a Los Angeles El Pollo Loco fast food joint.

  • Johnny Depp: Sold ballpoint pens over the phone. Or rather, tried to—he reportedly never actually made a sale.
  • Matthew McConaughey: While living in Australia, he got paid to shovel chicken manure out of cages.
  • Howard Stern: Drove an ice-cream truck.
  • Sean Connery: Has been a coffin polisher, a milkman, and a lifeguard.
  • Whoopi Goldberg: Her job was to put makeup on dead people at a mortuary, in preparation for their wakes and funerals.
  • Stanley Tucci: Cleaned outhouses at a New York summer camp.
Click for the complete list, including one now-sex-symbol who used to have to dress up as a banana at her old job. (More Cindy Crawford stories.)

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