Celebrities Whose Early Jobs Shaped Their Later Work

Ian Fleming spent the Second World War as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, planning deception schemes and forming the commando unit 30 Assault Unit. Casino Royale (1953) and the Bond novels that followed drew on that world of gadgets, codenames and Whitehall bureaucracy, and Godfrey is often cited as a model for M.

David Cornwell worked for MI5 and then MI6 in the 1950s and early 1960s, writing his first novels as John le Carré while still an intelligence officer in Bonn. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) let him leave the service, and the tired, morally compromised spies of his books, George Smiley above all, came straight from what he had seen of the trade.

Andy Warhol spent the 1950s as one of New York's most successful commercial illustrators, drawing shoe advertisements for I. Miller and magazine work using a blotted-line technique that allowed quick reproduction. His Campbell's Soup Cans (1962) and silkscreen portraits took the repetition, brand imagery and studio production of advertising straight into fine art.

Michael Crichton paid his way through Harvard Medical School by writing thrillers under pen names, and graduated as a doctor in 1969, the year The Andromeda Strain made his name. His medical training ran through his techno-thrillers and above all ER (1994), which he created from a screenplay based on his own time in an emergency room.

Billy Connolly served an apprenticeship as a welder in the Glasgow shipyards in the 1960s before turning to folk music with the Humblebums. His long, rambling stand-up stories are steeped in the banter, characters and gallows humour of the yards, and he has always credited the shipbuilders with teaching him to be funny.

Stephen King worked in an industrial laundry and as a high-school English teacher in Maine while selling short stories to men's magazines. In his memoir On Writing he describes how an earlier job as a school janitor, cleaning a girls' changing room, gave him the opening scene of Carrie (1974), and the small-town, working-class Maine of those years runs through almost all his fiction.

Unhappy with the small parts he was being offered in the late 1960s, Harrison Ford taught himself carpentry to support his family, with clients including the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. The trade let him turn down roles he did not want, and he was still taking carpentry work when George Lucas cast him in American Graffiti and then as Han Solo.

Jo Brand worked for about a decade as a psychiatric nurse, much of it in south London, before stand-up took over in the late 1980s. Her deadpan, unsentimental comedy grew out of that work, and she drew on it directly as co-writer and star of Getting On (2009 to 2012), a bleakly funny BBC sitcom set on an NHS geriatric ward.

John Grisham practised criminal defence and personal injury law in Mississippi for about a decade and served in the state legislature. A harrowing testimony he heard in court inspired A Time to Kill (1989), and The Firm, The Pelican Brief and his other legal thrillers rely on the procedure and pressure he knew from practice.

David Simon spent more than a decade as a police reporter at The Baltimore Sun, including a year embedded with the city's homicide unit for his book Homicide (1991). That reporting became the basis of the series Homicide: Life on the Street, and its institutional detail, from police paperwork to newsroom cuts, shaped The Wire (2002 to 2008).

Ricky Gervais spent years in office jobs, including as an assistant events manager at the University of London Union and as head of speech at the radio station Xfm, where he hired Stephen Merchant as his assistant. Those years of meetings, appraisals and awkward management gave him and Merchant the raw material for David Brent and The Office (2001).

Bear Grylls served with 21 SAS, a reserve regiment, until a parachuting accident in 1996 broke his back. After recovering he climbed Everest in 1998, and the survival and navigation skills from his military training became the basis of Man vs. Wild (2006) and his later adventure series, as well as his role as Chief Scout.

Before her own debut, Lady Gaga worked as a staff songwriter for Sony/ATV, writing for artists including Britney Spears and the Pussycat Dolls. That training in hook-driven pop craft shaped The Fame (2008), whose hits she co-wrote, and a decade later she co-wrote the Oscar-winning Shallow for A Star Is Born.

Greg Davies taught secondary-school drama for thirteen years before turning to comedy. He played the withering head of sixth form Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners (2008 to 2010), created and starred in the sitcom Man Down as a hapless teacher, and much of his stand-up is built on what he saw in staff rooms and classrooms.

Charlie Brooker began as a cartoonist and games reviewer for the magazine PC Zone, then spent years as a television critic for The Guardian and on Screenwipe. That close, sceptical attention to screens, games and media fed directly into Black Mirror (2011), his anthology series about technology's dark side, including the interactive film Bandersnatch.

Adam Kay worked as a junior doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology for six years before leaving medicine in 2010 after a traumatic delivery. The diary he had kept became This Is Going to Hurt (2017), a bestselling account of NHS working life, and he adapted it into the BBC series of 2022 starring Ben Whishaw.