The Six Pack

Six Actors Who Staged Early Retirements

by Matt Prigge

Greta Garbo: With Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka (1939), the Swedish Garbo made a bold transition from sudsters to comedies. One film later she retired. After the failure of 1941’s rom-com Two-Faced Woman, she retreated into her infamous seclusion, turning down comeback vehicles left and right. Garbo only popped up on celluloid twice after: in 1949, for screen tests for a comeback movie that never happened, and in the 1974 gay porn Adam & Yves, which featured a shot of her walking across First Avenue.

Grace Kelly: While shooting The Swan, in which she played a princess, the Philadelphia native was mid-seduction with Prince Rainier of Monaco. Shortly thereafter she was a princess for real, bidding farewell with High Society (1956) and forced by her husband to turn down returns as varied as Alfred Hitchcock’s deranged Marnie and Herbert Ross’ The Turning Point. The closest she got was narrating the 1966 TV movie The Poppy Is Also a Flower.

Ronald Reagan: After playing the smirking, Angie-Dickinson-bitchslapping baddie in Don Siegel’s The Killers (1964), the one known as the Gipper threw in the towel. And he was never heard from again.

Rick Moranis: Despite resurrecting his Bob McKenzie locutions for two Brother Bear movies, the SCTV vet is all but retired, partly because he’d gone from comic to mere actor with increasingly dire material, and partly because he was a single parent whose wife died of liver cancer. Like quite a few acting retirees, he’s moved into music, recording comic country songs.

Joe Pesci: He may be billed as co-lead with Helen Mirren in the upcoming brothel movie Love Ranch, but the onetime Tommy DeVito hasn’t done more than a cameo (in The Good Shepherd) since Lethal Weapon 4 in 1998. Why? Music, of course! His crooning alter ego is Vincent Laguardia Gambini, under which he’s recorded an album. Betcha didn’t know that.

Joaquin Phoenix: Yeah, right. But that Casey Affleck “doc” is going to be amazing.