Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Twenty seasons, six championships, six MVP awards, nineteen All-Star selections: the basketball career needs no help from this page. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played for the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers, was twice named Finals MVP, and added two more titles as an assistant coach after he stopped playing.

The screen career started with Bruce Lee. Abdul-Jabbar trained with him, and Game of Death in 1978 built its most famous sequence around the height difference between them. Then came Airplane!, where he plays an airline co-pilot named Roger Murdock who insists, with total sincerity, that he is not Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It is one of the great deadpan performances by a non-actor, and it set the template. From Fletch to Troop Beverly Hills to D2: The Mighty Ducks to BASEketball to Glass Onion, he is usually cast as himself, and the joke lands every time because he plays it completely straight and never once acknowledges that it is a joke.

Away from the gag there is a third career. Brothers in Arms in 2004 carries his name as author rather than as subject, and the documentaries built around him, Kareem: Minority of One among them, treat him as a public intellectual instead of a retired athlete, which is closer to how he has spent the past few decades. He also shows up in the archival record of nearly everything: O.J.: Made in America, They Call Me Magic, Shut Up and Dribble, and Be Water, where he appears as Bruce Lee's student and friend rather than as a basketball player at all.