[quote name=\'Matt Ottinger\' post=\'180437\' date=\'Mar 7 2008, 02:38 PM\']
[quote name=\'Mike Tennant\' post=\'180432\' date=\'Mar 7 2008, 02:09 PM\']
[quote name=\'uncamark\' post=\'180406\' date=\'Mar 7 2008, 12:03 PM\'](and Eddie Hodges, if you consider becoming a child star in a Broadway show "celebrity").[/quote]Eddie also had a
movie, TV, and recording career (including a film with Frank Sinatra), so I would say he qualifies.[/quote]
I don't know, I think a lot of the names we've mentioned strain the idea of 'celebrity' even more than Bob Stewart did in the waning years of
The $25,000 Pyramid. My uncle was a working actor in New York for fifty years, with Broadway, film and television credits on his resume, but there's a difference between 'working actor' and 'celebrity'.
[/quote]Let's put it this way: I recognized Hodges's name and knew a few things about him without having to look him up. I would think others did likewise. At least during the mid-fifties to mid-sixties he probably qualified as a celebrity to some small degree.
On the other hand, we may find that we have trouble defining "celebrity" definitively just as we have with defining "game show." One person's celebrity may be another person's has-been (or never was). I agree, though, that there have been a few stretches in this thread, and depending on your perspective Eddie Hodges may be one of them.
The flip side of this discussion is: How many "celebrities" do we know almost exclusively from their appearances on game shows? How many do we think of as celebrities only because the announcers or emcees of those shows called them "celebrities" or "stars"? Brett Somers and Nipsey Russell, just to take two examples, would probably be known today about as well as Eddie Hodges if they hadn't been on game shows for years.
