Performers Who Became Known for Something They Started Late

Julia Child had worked in advertising and wartime intelligence and could barely cook when she enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 1949, at thirty-seven. Twelve years of work with her co-authors produced Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), and The French Chef (1963), which she began at fifty, made her America's first great television cook.

Phyllis Diller was a mother of five and a copywriter when she made her stand-up debut at the Purple Onion in San Francisco in 1955, at thirty-seven. Her fright-wig look, cackle and jokes about her imaginary husband Fang made her one of the first women to headline as a solo comic, and she toured and appeared on television for more than half a century.

Ruth Westheimer survived the Holocaust as a child refugee, trained as a sniper in pre-state Israel and earned a doctorate in education before her first broadcast. Her late-night radio show Sexually Speaking began in New York in 1980, when she was fifty-two, and her frank, cheerful advice made Dr. Ruth a television and publishing star for four decades.

Kathryn Joosten was a psychiatric nurse who took up acting in community theatre at forty-two, then moved to Los Angeles in her mid-fifties to try for screen work. She became familiar as Mrs Landingham in The West Wing and won two Emmys as Karen McCluskey in Desperate Housewives, a whole career built after most actors' peak years.

Jane Fonda was already a two-time Oscar winner when she opened a workout studio in Beverly Hills in 1979 and, at forty-four, released Jane Fonda's Workout (1982). It became the best-selling home video of its time and launched a fitness business of videos, books and records that ran alongside her acting for over a decade.

Danny Trejo spent much of his youth in California prisons, got sober and became a drug counsellor. Visiting the set of Runaway Train (1985) to support a client, he was spotted and cast at forty, and he has since appeared in hundreds of films and series, from Heat to Robert Rodriguez's Machete, while running a chain of Los Angeles taco restaurants.

Sharon Jones sang backing vocals for years without a solo contract, working as a corrections officer at Rikers Island and an armoured-car guard. She made her first record at forty and fronted Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, whose raw, live-sounding soul albums earned a Grammy nomination and helped spark a retro-soul revival before her death in 2016.

Judy Sheindlin spent more than two decades as a prosecutor and family court judge in New York before Judge Judy began in 1996, when she was fifty-three. Her brisk, no-nonsense manner made it one of the most-watched daytime shows in American television for twenty-five seasons, and she continued with Judy Justice from 2021.

Charles Bradley worked as a cook and handyman for decades and was performing as a James Brown tribute act in his fifties when Daptone Records heard him. His debut album No Time for Dreaming came out in 2011, when he was sixty-two, and two more acclaimed albums and the documentary Charles Bradley: Soul of America followed before his death in 2017.

Tim Gunn spent decades as a teacher and administrator at Parsons School of Design before Project Runway (2004) put him on camera at fifty-one. His courteous mentoring and catchphrase advice to make it work made him a television personality in his own right, with his own series, books and later the Amazon show Making the Cut.

Iris Apfel ran a textile firm for decades and was little known outside the design trade until the Metropolitan Museum exhibited her wardrobe in 2005, when she was eighty-four. She then became a model, campaign star and documentary subject, signing with a modelling agency in her nineties and working until her death in 2024 at 102.

Susan Boyle had sung in church and local pubs in West Lothian for years and cared for her mother when she auditioned for Britain's Got Talent in 2009, at forty-seven. Her debut album I Dreamed a Dream was the world's best-selling album that year, and she has since released a string of top-ten records and toured internationally.

Richard Osman worked behind the scenes as a television producer for years before co-presenting Pointless from 2009, at thirty-eight. At forty-nine he published his first novel, The Thursday Murder Club (2020), which became one of the fastest-selling adult crime debuts in British publishing and launched a bestselling series and a film adaptation.

Graham Norton had been a chat-show host for two decades when he published his first novel, Holding (2016), at fifty-three. The quiet rural Irish murder story won Popular Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was adapted for ITV, and his later novels have established him as a serious writer alongside his broadcasting.

Ruth Jones was best known as co-writer and star of Gavin & Stacey when she published her first novel, Never Greener (2018), at fifty-two. It became a Sunday Times bestseller, and the novels that followed have given the Welsh actor a second, solo career as one of Britain's most popular writers of character-driven fiction.