Famous People You Have Met

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Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 4:09 pm

I don't know if this was ever done, if so, it was probably a long time ago.

What famous people have you met in your lifetime? For me:

1) When I was a little kid, I met William Shatner (i.e., Captain Kirk). This was in the heyday of Star Trek. He had come to town to do some sort of BBQ benefit. My mother took me, my twin sister, and younger brother. Well, Captain Kirk was overwhelmed with the cooking of the hot dogs, doing the sodas, and handing out food, so my Mom volunteered us. So there I was--standing alongside Captain Kirk. He cooked the hotdogs, handed them to me, and I gave them to the folks who were there. I was in total awe.

Afterwards, he came to our house for dinner. I will never forget it.

2) Anyone remember Mad Max Three (Beyond Thunderdome)? Well, they filmed that when I was in the Air Force and stationed at Woomera, South Australia. They were filming not too far from the town. So we'd drive out there after work and watch the filming.

One Friday night, Mel Gibson and a bunch of others from the movie came to Woomera and the bar a bunch of GI's hung out at. And we got drunk and shot darts with Mel Gibson. And Tina Turner came the next night and gave a small free concert (she couldn't charge money per her contract or something). So I ended up meeting both of them.

Unfortunately--I never asked Mel for an autograph or anything because back in the mid-80s he wasn't famous yet in the U.S. He was mainly known for the Mad Max movies.

How about you all? Anyone famous you've met?

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 8:01 pm

^^My wife dealt with several celebrities when she worked in arts organizations, i. e., a symphony orchestra, an opera association, and a modern dance company. Through her I met actor Vincent Price, choreographer Alvin Ailey, and guitarist Chet Atkins who, I recall, was in his early 60s and was accompanied by some arm candy who was around 22.

But I was truly honored to have met Jimmy Doolittle several times when I was in the Air Force and stationed at the Space Systems Center in Los Angeles. As chairman of TRW he would come over to our facility for quarterly briefings. He made a point to come around and shake each of our hands and ask us how we were doing. A real gentleman as well as a national hero.

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 8:31 pm

Most of my celebrity encounters go way back.

-- Rex Harrison: he was a regular customer of mine whenever he'd come to town. Very amiable guy, he loved to hang around and chat.

-- Burt Lancaster: I hired his daughter to work for us on a 1-year apprenticeship of sorts so I saw him often.

-- Eli Wallach: I spent a day with him in NY as part of a PR event we were both invited to. He was a real raconteur, great fun!

-- Matt Damon: he came into my shop and I didn't even recognize him. I spent almost a half-hour waiting on him and I found him to be an insufferable jerk. Mad

I couldn't understand why all the women from the main office several floors above were passing through the store.... It was only after I rang him up and he finally left that one of my co-workers said "don't you know who that was??" Then I understood why everyone came down.

-- Robert DiNiro: came into my shop one Christmas eve, leaving his limo double-parked. I guess he took longer than planned because eventually a stunning, tall, impossibly elegant woman came in, looking exasperated: his girlfriend, Naomi Campbell.

-- George Lucas: I run into him often since he lives nearby, and is a neighbor to our best friends.

-- Joe and Jennifer Montana: he was a regular at my shop during his peak years at the 49ers.

-- French President François Mitterrand: in my next job I ran an import company and was invited to a reception through the French-American Chamber of Commerce. I expected maybe 100 people but there were easily 2,000. It was insane. I totally gave up any thought of saying hello to Mitterrand. My wife and I went outside for a bit to get away from the noise and crowds. I looked up and saw Mitterrand heading directly toward us, followed by his entourage. He was leaving. I pushed forward, put out my arm to shake hands, and even before I could say "Bienvenue à San Francisco, Monsieur le Président" I was completely surrounded by French and American Secret Service men. Duh. How stupid of me not to realize that lunging toward Mitterrand would set off every alarm bell in the arsenal. I'm lucky they didn't shoot first and ask questions later. But in the end I got to have a short but amiable chat and we shook hands. (My French business partner would have killed me had he known -- he hated Mitterrand with a passion.)

-- Jerry Seinfeld: he's a big VW / Porsche fan. I ran into him at a VW show about 20 years ago. Very nice guy, the opposite of Matt Damon. I chatted with him for a few minutes about a 1964 VW he had just bought with zero miles, showroom new. I was curious whether he planned to drive it or keep it as something of a time capsule. He said "drive it! What else?"

-- Legh Knowles: who??? (And yes, it's Legh and not Leigh.) He was a trumpet player in Glenn Miller's orchestra. He is listed in the discographies of every one of Miller's greatest hits of the late 30's. I saw him a lot in social settings and he was thrilled to talk with a young (well, I was then anyway) guy who knew about Miller. Oh, the stories he had... Amazing.

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 8:40 pm

I've met Ronald Rivest (R of RSA) and Joni Eareckson. I also took a class from Sam Wagstaff at Purdue.

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 9:12 pm

I’ll skip the Hockey Players galore because that kinda goes with the territory Except for the awesome one known as Taz. He taught me how to waterski and give me dozens of autographed pictures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsHFZhvTW68

Let’s see…

I met that guy who played ‘Booger’ in the Revenge of the Nerd movies; Curtis Armstrong while fishing one summer.

Alex Lifeson from Rush was at my cottage many years ago. Sadly I was wearing a Triumph shirt (which were a much better band in my opinion).

Dan Aykroyd shoved me out of the way at the Liquor store last summer. If he didn’t block out the sun with his incredible mass I might have done something about it.

I said ‘Hey’ to Slash in a Pub in Finland a few years back. He also said ‘Hey.’

Mickey Rooney grunted at me after I said good afternoon to him on an elevator. He was much shorter than I would have suspected.

I saw Mitsou on the Metro (Le surely?) in Montreal one time. I nearly passed out. NSFW:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbDpR5jTmqs

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 9:17 pm

I meet actor Leonard Rossiter at Earls Court Underground in the Seventies had been diverted to us because of signal problems on the Circle line, seems no one else noticed him, he starred in "Rising Damp" and "The Rise and fall of Reginald Perrin", had appeared in quite a number of television programmes.

05/29/15

Nolan Ryan -- the greatest MLB pitcher of all time.

We were still living in Florida, 30 minutes away from the then Charlotte Rangers Statium (now Charlotte Sports Complex or some such). My son was a Cub Scout, and his Dad and I were the Den Parents. We took the entire den of six 8-year-olds to see a Texas Rangers baseball game at their stadium in the late 80's.

At the Seventh Inning Stretch, both teams headed for the lockers. Everyone, that is, except Nolan, who went in the opposite direction. He came over to the fence and started waving at all the children in the stands, and beckoned them over to him. Kids streamed through the opening in the fence to surround Nolan, and we herded our crew over to him, too. He sat down on the grass, enveloped in kids. That dear, sweet, humble man spent the entire break with those kids. He made it a point to address each and every one of them individually, asking their names, where they lived and how they liked school in that soft, quiet Texas drawl of his, signing autographs for any who asked. Kids wanted to hug him, which was fine with Nolan.

I will never forget that sweet man and how kind he was to all of those little kids. What a hero to look up to!!!

ETA: Oh, and Cord McCoy, Professional Bull Rider (PBR) at a bull riding event at the Mohegan Sun Casino.

*** BANNED *** Joined: 26 Jul 2012 Posts: 1123

Wayne "Static" and Tera Wray once in Las Vegas for a conference. I also met John Draper once. That was an interesting one. Laughing

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 9:43 pm

@KOD – That story reminds me of the time I was ‘Forced’ to see Tommy Hunter with my little niece. Tommy was signing autographs for the crowd when he spotted the little Girl (I think she was five at the time) and pretty much parted the Blue Haired Sea to spend some time with her and to autograph a picture for her. I guess he wasn’t used to having young fans so he made a point of treating her properly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Hunter

Posted: Sat May 02, 2015 11:04 pm

A few more come to mind:

-- Phil Lesh of the Greatful Dead: My wife taught two of his kids in high school, I ran into him often at school events. He was very generous to the school. We still run into him occasionally at his restaurant, Terrapin. He never remembers me but he always remembers my wife. Wink

As an aside, Jerry Garcia's wife was a filmmaker. She did a documentary on raising children in which my wife and then-baby daughter were extensively featured.

-- Johnny Moseley: he was another of my wife's students, and he lived near us.

-- Julia Child: she had graduated decades earlier from my wife's school and came back to visit a few times.

-- Robin Williams: he was a neighbor, less than a mile down the road. We often bumped into him at the upscale grocery halfway between his house and mine. (His house was a tad nicer...)

-- Magic Johnson: I sat next to him on a 3 hour flight to Philadelphia years ago.

-- Sergio Mendes: he was a very close friend of a friend. That friend and I spent a weekend at Mendes' estate in the San Fernando Valley in 1993. I met a bunch of Brazilian celebrities there but I never really knew who they were. I do remember, however, being overwhelmed with lust for a truly breathtaking beauty whom I was told was one of Brazil's top actresses. WOW! (Less than a year later there was a major earthquake in the valley and Mendes decided to get the hell out of California.)

05/29/15

@ oscarpiles -- Ohhhhh, what a sweet, sweet thing for him to do ... you gotta love somebody like that, yes?

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 12:06 am

I saw Pastor Frank at a party in the Canadian High Commission in London a few years ago but he was chatting up Justin Bieber so I never managed to get a word in Crying or Very sad

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 1:54 am

Wait -- wasn't he with Céline? Confused

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 9:52 am

Roger Daltry-in a ritzy Beverly Hills Hotel bar-I was there on business, went in for a drink and we had a nice chat. Kept calling me "Luv".

Robert Plant-in a hotel elevator in Chicago. This was post-Zeplin. Very polite.

Steve Ballmer-he grew up in the same area, knew my brother and was over for dinner several times. Back then, he had a full head of hair and was extremely shy.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 10:06 am

Remembering that with "fame", YMMV...

* I had a chance to chat with Robert Bloch at an SF convention; horror author he may have been, but he just kept us all laughing with his anecdotes.

* Way back, I chatted at length with an-US Navy submariner who told many stories of the funny and less funny aspects of submariner. I only fund out much later that he was Royce L. Gross, one of the top ten American submarine aces of WW2.

* But for the person I've been most honoured to have met is Emm Theay, a Cambodian woman who risked her life to save part of Cambodia;s cultural heritage from the Khmer Rouge. Had she been caught, they would have shown no mercy.

Master of Master Baiters Joined: 13 Jan 2014 Posts: 698

(In no particular order)

[Margaret Thatcher and several of her Ministers, including Norman Tebbit, Willie Whitelaw, Michael Howard, John Wakeham, Peter Bottomley. Norman Lamont, one who went to prison (Jeffrey Archer), Lord Hailsham, John Major, and others whose names escape me now].... Arthur Askey... Les Dawson... Matt Monroe... Danny La Rue... The Three Degrees... Des O'Connor... William G Stewart... The beautiful, the enormously likeable and absolutely wonderful Dana... Val Doonican... Harry Secombe... Marty Wilde... Brotherhood of Man... Charles Aznavour... Gene Pitney... Leonard Cheshire, VC... Paula Ratcliffe(My daughter was a team-mate of Paula's when they both ran in the County Cross-Country Team as teenagers - it was always difficult to 'meet' Paula, she was so often way out of sight with at least two hills and a valley between her and the rest of the field!) Very Happy

... Ray Clemence (we sat in a hotel bar in Liverpool into the early hours, one Grand National night in the 70's, getting drunk together (supposedly wetting the head of his new-born son - but what the hell .... any excuse is a good as another! Laughing

)... Bobby Charlton... The Kray Twins (Not sure they count - they were more notorious than famous)... John Osbourne (arrested him in Trafalgar Square because he sat down and wouldn't get up again)... and at least two others who must now be confined to the darkest corner of Her Majesty's prisons and left to rot.

ETA: Missed out one of the most boast-worthy ones: As a fourteen-year-old schoolboy in Cambridge, I once carried Sir Leonard Hutton's cricket bag from the Cambridge University Cricket Ground (Fenners) across Parker's Piece (Famous Cambridge land mark) to his hotel. He is still hailed as one of England's greatest cricketers ever.

Her Gracious Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother...

...And the Two Most Famous People in the Whole World ... My Mum and my Wife!

Famous people I wish I had met:

Winston Churchill... Ike Eisenhower... Martin Luther King... Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev (preferably when Maggie was present, shouting at them to get on with it)... Laurence of Arabia... Group Captain Guy Gibson, VC and professor Barnes Wallace... King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia... [Mohammed Ali and Henry Cooper (missed out on that one by less than a mile)]... James Watson & Francis Crick ( to think that they were working in the lab next door to the one I was employed in as a spotty 16-year-old when I first left school, and I didn't even know it!)

Hitler - so I could cause him a slow, painful and undignified death by repeatedly kicking him in the balls with his own jackboots.Well... I was quite a hefty 8-year-old Laughing

)

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 11:25 am

Too many to count. Honestly.

I used to work at Gatwick Airport in the UK and one of my duties involved security at the VIP lounge.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 11:48 am

Tom Arnold came into the Pizza Hut I was working at while in college. There's some picture floating around of all us waitresses posing with him.

The cast of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 at the second MSTie con. I guess they count, even if it was just a silly, little show.

Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer and Chief Justice John Roberts -- all in law school. Thomas actually taught us a week-long Constitutional Law class.

The longer-haired member of Florida Georgia line stepped on my foot at the state fair and apologized to me. I don't know his name because I'm not a country music fan and I wouldn't have known he was even famous if it weren't for some nearby fan girls squeeing over him.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 11:49 am

^^^I'm kind of stuck with Slightly as I have worked as a bartender in the suites at the Indianapolis 500 for years and other special events. Izzy Stradlin from Guns 'N Roses lives very close to my mother. He's one of the nicest, sweetest, guys in the world. Axl Rose, not so much.

Master Baiter Joined: 26 Apr 2015 Posts: 239

In my field of work in deal with thousands of people a day, naming the celebrities in have met it's not hard to guess where u come from, anyway Shane Warne (australian cricketer) if met and spoken to, he was abusive and words cannot describe how much of a pig of a man he is.

Goran ivanisevic top world 5 famous tennis player in the world from the 90s. Absolute gentleman, had a good laugh with him.

Chris Ferguson world champion poker player, again a wonderful and humble man who was great to talk to.

Snoop dog probably one of the nicest and most approachable celebrities you could come across. Stops and talks to everyone and gives off great energy being around him

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 12:13 pm

The Green Cross Man AKA Dave Prowse (Darth Vader), sometime in the late 70s when he appeared at a school fete.

Terry Pratchett a couple of times at book signings.

Various members of The Sex Pistols, Clash, Dammed and other punk groups through the elder step-brother of a school friend, who ran a punk club, somewhere in Southern England.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 12:25 pm

My mother went to school with Corazón Cojuangco, who later became President Aquino of the Philippines.

I've met the wife of John "Beautiful Mind" Nash.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 12:31 pm

Prince Charles and Lady Diana visited where I worked as an apprentice in ’82 and chatted with us and our instructor for a few minutes and we were even on the BBC news for about 15 seconds.

After a concert also in ’82 a few mates and I spent 30 minutes or so chatting with Paul Weller, Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler of The Jam.

Watching a carnival in Antigua a couple of years ago my wife and I managed to get our photo taken with the Antiguan Prime Minister.

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 1:10 pm

I met John McVicar at an club in London this was after he became "respectable"

Also met Chic Murray on board a Royal navy ship when I was about 13

Posted: Sun May 03, 2015 1:26 pm

Ive been lucky enough to meet one of my musical heroes , Devin Townsend he was the most down to earth lovelt man you could ever wish to meet.

Ive also hung out with Ginger Wildheart back stage, from the wildhearts

Also chatted with Dave McPherson from Inme at a gig and met most of the members of Gamabomb at gigs/festivals.

Met Steve Nichol (former liverpool defender)

I saw but didnt speak to Dom Joly at heathrow airport so dunno if that counts really.

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