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.)