Celebrities who rose to fame as they got older

If you’re beginning to edge into your more senior years and have a feeling that you’ve missed an opportunity to take on a new career, you couldn’t be further from the truth. In this article, New Rochelle Straight Stairlifts explore the stories of some of the people who have now become well-known celebrities in their later years…

 

Colonel Sanders

Known as Harland Sanders formally, it’s guaranteed that you’ll recognise Colonel Sanders’ face as it’s the world-renowned KFC logo. That’s right, the face in the logo isn’t a mascot but actually a gleeful mugshot of the chain’s original founder. Perhaps surprisingly, Colonel Sanders didn’t franchise the company until he was aged 62 in 1952.

From a very early age, Sanders knew the definition of hard work. When he was just six years old, he became responsible for caring and feeding his younger brother and sister after his father sadly passed away. From the age of 10, Sanders held jobs such as being a farmer, a streetcar conductor, a railroad fireman and an insurance salesman.

However, it wasn’t until he reached 40 during a spell overseeing a service station in Kentucky that set the wheels in motion that would see him transform from Mr Sanders into Colonel Sanders. Part of his responsibilities was to feed travelers who visited the establishment, with the food proving so popular that Sanders eventually made the call to move his operation to a nearby restaurant. A fried chicken became the key dish here, to the point of popularity that Kentucky’s Governor Ruby Laffoon gave Sanders the title of being a Kentucky colonel in 1935.

Nearly 20 years later, Sanders decided to close his sole restaurant in 1952 to focus on franchising his chicken business. He initially toured the US, cooking batches of chicken at restaurants that he visited and then securing deals that saw him being paid a nickel for every chicken that an eatery sold. Kentucky Fried Chicken went public in 1966 and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Samuel L. Jackson

Whether you know him as Mace Windu in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, or Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there’s no doubt that Samuel L. Jackson is now one of the most widely known and recognized names in Hollywood.

However, Jackson didn’t walk straight out of acting school onto the big screen. In fact, his big break didn’t come until he appeared in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever in 1991 — at the age of 43!

Prior to this, he had graduated from Morehouse College in 1972 and then performed sketches with a theatre company that focused on racial inequality. However, things could have turned out so differently. This is because in 1969 — while in his junior year at Morehouse College — Jackson protested the absence of black people on the board of trustees in a move that saw several board members locked in a building for two days. Jackson was subsequently expelled from the college and went about working as a social worker for two years in Los Angeles. During that time, he got inspired to act, managed to return to Morehouse College to study acting and eventually received his degree.

As previously highlighted, Jackson’s big break came in Jungle Fever and had managed to feature in over 100 films by the time he was 63 years old. In 2011, he also received the accolade of being the highest grossing actor of all time with over $7.2 billion in wealth. An extraordinary feat by any standards, but even more impressive when you think about the age that Jackson started to get recognized on the big screen.

 

Vera Wang

Moving over to fashion, Vera Wang is now recognized as one of the most prominent women’s designers in the world. What you might not know though is that the American fashion designer didn’t enter the fashion industry until she was 40 — she was first a promising figure skater and then a journalist ahead of this career move.

When she was just six years old, Wang took up figure skating and competed professionally as a teenager, coming fifth place alongside her partner, James Stuart, in the junior pairs competition of the 1968 and 1969 U.S. National Championships.

Once she had graduated from college alongside suffering the blow of failing to join the US Olympic team, Wang called time on her skating career in 1971. In the same year, she was invited to start working for Vogue magazine. Within a year and only aged 23, Wang received a promotion to become the publication’s senior fashion editor — a role that saw her become the youngest ever editor of the magazine’s fashion segment.

Fast-forward to 1987, Wang made another major career change as she left Vogue and became Ralph Lauren’s accessories design director. Within two years, she had successfully created 13 accessories lines at the renowned fashion house.

While preparing to marry longtime boyfriend Arthur Becker in 1989 though, Wang’s keen eye for fashion took on a whole new meaning. Annoyed with the designs available to her on the market, Wang sketched her own design for bridal wear and then commissioned a dressmaker to tailor her own elaborate wedding gown. A year later, Wang received support from both her now husband and her father so that she could open the doors of her own bridal boutique in New York City’s Carlyle Hotel.

As the years went by, Wang welcomed huge names with the likes of Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Victoria Beckham, Kate Hudson and Ivanka Trump as clients, and saw her wedding dresses featured on hit TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. Wang even designed a hand-beaded ensemble that was worn by figure skater Nancy Kerrigan at the 1994 Olympic Games.

 

Stan Lee

If you haven’t come across at least one Marvel film over the last ten years or so then you must have been living under a rock! The huge number of superheroes which have appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Iron Man was released in 2008 all came to be thanks to the amazing vision of Stan Lee. However, don’t think that Lee started coming up with ideas for characters with phenomenal powers by doodling in school — he didn’t create his first comic title (The Fantastic Four, for the record) until 1961, when he was 39.

Born back in 1922 as Stanley Martin Lieber, he decided to shorten his name once he became a writer. Lee was later hired as an office assistant at Timely Comics in 1939 and during the early 1940s, he became one of the company’s interim editors and also served domestically in the Army throughout the Second World War by working as a writer and illustrator.

By the time the 1960s arrived, Timely Comics was renamed Marvel Comics. Its boss sought out Lee and gave him a challenge of creating a series which could hold its own against DC Comics’ popular Justice League of America series. The Fantastic Four would be the result of that challenge, with Spider-Man, X-Men, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Black Panther, Captain America and so many more joining the cast in the years that followed.

In Lee’s more senior years, he would go on to make numorous cameo appearances in films tied to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even after his death in November 2018, fans still can see him on the big screen when he appears in 2019 blockbusters Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame.

 

 

Hopefully, the examples highlighted above will have convinced you that it’s never too late to change your career and pursue the job of your dreams. All that’s left to say is to wish you all the best with your pursuits!