Known for: Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Net worth: $1 million
Child actor, Peter Ostrum, took a very different path than some of his American counterparts. As a boy in the 1970s, he won the role of Charlie Bucket in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory after being selected by talent scouts while performing with children’s theatre in Cleveland, Ohio. He was 12. The movie studio offered Ostrum a three-film movie contract once filming concluded. Ostrum turned it down. He credits the decision to having spared him the tough transition from child actor to adulthood.
Making the movie on the Munich set in West Germany set was a good experience. During the filming, he developed a close relationship with Gene Wilder (Willy Wonka). Ostrum considered going back to Hollywood for a showbiz career, but he never made the move. With the massive proceeds, he acquired a horse. It became his love and passion, ultimately leading to a career in veterinary medicine. Royalties are yet trickling in from the 1971 film.
Louise Fletcher
Known for: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Net worth: $1 million
Now, here’s an actor who played a character we all love to hate—quite possibly the very one we love to hate the most. In 1976, the late Louise Fletcher introduced to the world of cinema the most wretched of all iconic screen villains, the evil Nurse Ratched. Lording over the psychiatric ward that held Jack Nicholson’s Randle McMurphy and his band of fellow patients, Nurse Ratched’s epic clashes with the incorrigible patient are indelible.
Louise Fletcher won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and also the BAFTA and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress. Her rendition of the heartless Nurse Ratched made her one of three actresses ever to win all three awards. An astounding performance, indeed. It was Fletcher’s performance in Thieves Like Us (1974) that caught the attention of Milos Forman, director of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In late September 2022, she sadly passed away.
Kim Basinger
Known for: The Natural and Batman
Net worth: $40 million
Growing up as an extremely shy girl from Athens, Georgia, Kim Basinger managed to take on beauty contests and win the Junior Miss Georgia title. By the time she was 20, she was a top model appearing on the cover of every fashion magazine. But Basinger wanted more than a modeling career, so the Cover Girl moved to Hollywood.
Breaking into TV, she landed parts on the groovy Charlie’s Angels series. She broke into the film industry with a role as a Bond girl. But it was Tim Burton’s box-office hit Batman that propelled her toward the stardom she sought. Notably, her role as a femme fatale in L.A. Confidential is universally hailed as brilliant. Basinger is a vegetarian and an animal rights activist. She posed for PETA, sans fur, supporting their anti-fur campaign.
Talia Shire
Known for: Rocky
Net worth: $20 million
“Adrian!” Yes, Talia Shire played Adrian, Rocky Balboa’s adoring girlfriend, in the most famous boxing movie of all time. But she also played Connie Corleone in The Godfather , another unbelievably epic movie.
Notably, Shire was born a Coppola and is the sister to the godfather of film, Francis Ford Coppola. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in The Godfather: Part II . For her moving portrayal of Adrian in Rocky , Shire won a boatload of accolades: The New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, the National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress, an Oscar nomination for Best Actress and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama.
Sarah Miles
Known for: Hope and Glory
Net worth: $6 million
Swinging Sixties performer, Sarah Miles is a BAFTA and Academy Award-nominated, English actress who remained in film until the early Seventies. It’s a wonder she was able to achieve such fame. As a child, she was unable to speak until the age of nine because of a stammer and struggled so desperately with dyslexia she was expelled from four different schools. Finally, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), she excelled and was nominated for the BAFTA Newcomer Award in 1962 in Term of Trial .
She won an Oscar nomination for her role in David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter which was an adapted script from “Madame Bovary” set during the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Ireland. Miles’ husband, screenwriter Robert Bolt, adapted the play. It was a high point for Miles. After divorcing Bolt, Miles’ career flatlined but then sparkled one last time with Hope and Glory (1987).