Why directors, authors and real people keep slipping into their own stories
Hitchcock could not fit himself into Lifeboat, a film set entirely on one small boat, so he appeared in a newspaper advertisement instead. The cameo, borrowed from a word for tiny carved gems, has become a game among filmmakers, authors and even the real people whose lives get dramatised.
The term started out in the 1920s theatre world, meaning a small part that stood out from the other minor roles. The Oxford English Dictionary links it to an older sense of a brief literary sketch, which in turn comes from the miniature portraits carved into gemstones. Only in the late twentieth century did it widen to mean any short appearance. Mike Todd's Around the World in 80 Days from 1956, stuffed with stars in walk-on parts and advertised with their faces in little oval frames, helped spread the word beyond theatre people.
Many cameos go uncredited, either because they are so brief or because a big name seems out of proportion to the project. Some are publicity stunts; others are tributes. Stan Lee, who co-created much of Marvel's comic universe, popped up in every Marvel Cinematic Universe film until Avengers: Endgame. When Tarantino made Django Unchained, he cast Franco Nero, star of the original 1966 Django, in a bar scene where the new Django spells out his name.
Directors like leaving their fingerprints. Hitchcock started early, in his third film, The Lodger, in 1927. Peter Jackson turns up almost unrecognisably across his Tolkien films, including as a peasant munching a carrot. Writers do it too: Nabokov slipped into Lolita as a minor character called Vivian Darkbloom, an anagram of his own name, and Stephen King appears briefly in almost every film adapted from his novels. In fiction, Balzac let characters wander between the novels of his Comédie humaine.
The most touching cameos come from the people behind true stories. The astronaut James Lovell and his wife appeared beside Tom Hanks and Kathleen Quinlan in Apollo 13, and Erin Brockovich played a waitress in the film named after her, with Julia Roberts in the title role. Maria von Trapp can be glimpsed briefly in The Sound of Music.
Source: Cameo appearance
