(Credits: Far Out / Sergi Viladesau / Danny Lines)
In an ideal world, every professional actor would rack up hundreds upon hundreds of credits during their career because it suggests they’ve been gainfully employed and remained constantly in demand for an extended period of time.
Of course, many of the biggest stars in Hollywood history have typically been highly selective when it comes to choosing their roles, but that only applies to a very small percentage of those who followed their dreams of becoming working actors. On the other side of the coin, many recognisable names simply love to work and strive to find the best of both worlds, but striking the balance between quantity and quality is equally hard regardless of whether somebody appears in one film a year or a dozen.
Samuel L. Jackson is the single highest-grossing actor in the history of cinema with a back catalogue of credits that’s within touching distance of $30 billion, but he’s nowhere near being the most prolific performer of all time. James Hong is still going strong at 95 years old, has over 450 on-screen appearances to his name, and recently lent support in the ‘Best Picture’-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, but he’s nowhere near the top of the list, either.
Across film and television, Eric Roberts has somehow already been credited on 46 projects in 2024 alone to send him sailing past the 700 mark all told, which is remarkable without being record-breaking. Instead, the actor with the highest volume of credits also doubles as the only one to have exceeded the four-figure mark, which is why they earned the nickname of ‘The Queen of the Hollywood Extras’.
Bess Flowers was only active between 1923 and 1964, making her debut in aptly-named silent comedy Hollywood before notching her final outing in screwball caper Good Neighbor Sam, but barely a motion picture went by without her showing up in the background somewhere.
Beyond her colossal amount of credits that topped out at a mind-blowing 1,045, Flowers also holds the record for appearing in the most ‘Best Picture’ nominees after popping up in no less than 23 such contenders during her stint in cinema, and she also helped found the Screen Extras Guild in 1946, an organisation that existed until 1992 when it was merged with the Screen Actors Guild.
Hugely in-demand despite rarely being given a speaking role, Flowers was present and accounted for in five ‘Best Picture’ winners, appeared in projects from a litany of legends ranging from Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford to The Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy, and considering she’s got more on-camera credits than Christopher Lee and Danny Trejo combined, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest her record is one that isn’t going to be broken anytime soon, if at all.
