I didn't realize he/she was in that

Well considering you have to be at least 36 to have been alive when it came out, I'm guessing a fair number of people may know who Jamie Lee Curtis is and not know anything about a 1978 movie she was in.

 

Plenty of people who weren't around when it came out have seen the original Halloween. Hell, my 11-year-old knows she was in it (though we did not allow her to watch the movie) and she primarily knows of Curtis from the Freaky Friday remake she did a few years ago.

Batman made the point a lot better than I did, though.

 

"Plenty of people" can still be a small minority of the roughly 150 million people age 36 or under in the United States.

 

I'm about to turn 38 and I've seen that movie a hundred times. Can't remember the first time I saw it, but I know it was before I turned 10. It's replayed as part of marathons every freaking October. On top of THAT, the fact she was in it was a major plot point in "Scream" in the mid-1990s.
Maybe teenagers don't know it's her -- and, honestly, they probably have no clue who Jamie Lee Curtis is since she hasn't done a whole lot in the last 10 years other than tell people how best to poop -- but I seriously doubt there's anyone ages 18 to 36 who doesn't know she was in Halloween.

 

Kevin Spacey in "Heartburn", with an intentionally bad red dye job, playing "Subway Thief".

 

Aaron Paul is the drunk guy at two parties in "Van Wilder."

 

And Bryan Cranston portrays astronaut "Gus" Grissom in a brief scene in "That Thing You Do." Tom Everett Scott's initial girlfriend in that movie is Charlize Theron.

 

That movie's full of them, with Hanks' wife, son and various friends getting bit roles in the movie. My favorite is on the expanded cut of the DVD, where Howie Long plays a guy who,it's strongly inferred, is Mr. White's boyfriend.

 

A couple nights ago I was up late watching a 2007 episode of "Cold Case" on ION (DirecTV ch. 30). It was a story of a homeless woman with two young daughters. The woman had been killed eighth years before and her car dumped in a lake. One of the current-day daughters was played by Jennifer Lawrence. I called my daughter in to show her the teenaged Jennifer Lawrence. She watched for a few minutes and pointed out that the mother in that episode is the same woman who is her mother in the "Hunger Games" series. The actress is Paula Malcomson.

 

Lawrence was also the daughter on the short-lived "Bill Engvall Show."



In Grease, when John Travolta tries out for the basketball team, the kid he punches in the stomach is Michael Biehn of Terminator and Tombstone fame.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1zmXJf2dc

 

Holly Hunter was in it as well. It was written and produced by the Weinstein brothers. Fisher Stevens, who is an oscar winning documentary filmmaker, is in there too.

 

Jimmy Fallon is a jeep driver who brings a bunch of ammo to Easy Company in the "Bastogne" episode of Band of Brothers