The 10 Best Celebrity Comebacks

As shamelessly excited as we are whenever rich, privileged celebrities tumble scandalously, we’re a forgiving bunch. When a legitimately talented person tries to get their career back on track, we find it hard to not root for them.

That's especially true if they were once beloved in an iconic role, like Matthew Perry was as Chandler Bing on Friends. Though he garnered a lot of attention for his part in the series, his career declined after it ended in 2004. He landed roles, sure, but his mild successes were short-lived and nothing compared to the massive win that was his Friends run. He was sort of just there, better known as “the guy from Friends” than by his actual name, and in Hollywood that’s not how you want to be.

Perry’s career could be on the upswing with his new NBC comedy, Go On, about a depressed sportscaster who joins a support group to deal with the death of his wife. Set to preview its premiere episode tonight in grand fashion alongside the network’s Olympic coverage (the official premiere is Tuesday, September 11, at 9 p.m. EST, after The Voice) it will have eyes on it and could mark a major turnaround for Perry. Our fingers are crossed for him as we count down some inspiring stories of stars who managed to rise again: The 10 Best Celebrity Comebacks.

Written by Tanya Ghahremani (@tanyaghahremani)

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Neil Patrick Harris experienced a fair amount of success in his acting career early on, with a role in 1988’s Clara’s Heart and his starring role in Doogie Howser M.D. from 1989 to 1993. After the end of the latter series, however, Patrick’s career sputtered; he acquired guest spots in shows through the years but it was nothing compared to the iconic Doogie Howser role, and no one really gave much thought to him other than as “that dude who played the kid doctor on TV in the '80s.” Sad stuff.

It wasn’t until a cameo in 2004’s Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, in which he played a highly fictionalized, doped up, asshole version of himself, that he really saw a career resurgence, and his role as Barney Stinson in the wildly successful How I Met Your Mother cemented that. Now, after coming out as a gay man in 2006, Harris has been named one of the 100 most influential people by TIME magazine, and is also considered one of the greatest people ever. Seriously.

Vanessa Williams first garnered public attention in the early '80s when she won the title of Miss America 1984, becoming the first African-American woman to win the crown in the history of the pageant. However, her reign as queen was cut short after unauthorized nude photos of her appearing in an issue of Penthouse Magazine forced her to resign her title, because sponsors were threatening to pull their ads from the next year’s pageant.

She slipped off the radar for the next few years, as those with controversies surrounding them often do, but popped back up on the scene in 1988 to rebound as a singer—a move that served her very well, as she had numerous singles that charted on the Top 10, and even earned her a handful of Grammy Award nominations. Additionally, she forayed into acting and found success there as well, playing opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1996's Eraser, then in Hoodlum and Soul Food before landing iconic roles in popular shows Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives.

Before 2003, Robert Downey Jr. was known more for his substance abuse problems and arrest record than he was for his acting career. Though he appeared in a handful of classic, successful films in '80s and early '90s (Less Than Zero, Air America, Chaplin, Natural Born Killers), between 1996 and 2001 his career had hit slump. He was written out of his role on Ally McBeal due to his issues, and his arrests even lost him a role in the successful Julia Roberts-starring romantic comedy America’s Sweethearts.

He went to rehab repeatedly and, after a few years of struggling with his recovery, finally ventured back into films in 2003 with a role in The Singing Detective (Downey Jr. was considered a high-risk hire at that time, and only got the gig after his friend and Air America co-star Mel Gibson paid for his insurance). What followed was a string of successful films, including Good Night, and Good Luck, and A Scanner Darkly, but it wasn’t until he was cast as Tony Stark in 2008’s Iron Man that his career really took off again. He’s now clean and considered one of Hollywood’s most high profile and respected actors. Take note, Lindsay Lohan.

From 1994 to 1998, Ellen DeGeneres was the lead in the very successful ABC series aptly titled Ellen, but her subsequent announcement of her homosexuality in 1997 during an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show unfortunately saw a drop in ratings that led to the show’s cancellation during its fifth season. She moved on to stand-up comedy after the show’s end, and eventually attempted to return to television in 2001 with another sitcom, also aptly titled The Ellen Show, but it was short-lived and cancelled before the first season had finished airing on CBS.

It wasn’t until 2003 that she really reached the iconic status in Hollywood that she holds now, with the premiere of her daytime talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show (Who’s coming up with the names for these shows? Seriously.), a series that’s won her 32 Daytime Emmy Awards to date. Additionally, a highly public romance and eventual marriage to Arrested Development hottie Portia de Rossi, as well as her active campaigning for LGBT rights, cemented her status as a Hollywood A-lister.

There’s not much to say about Patrick Dempsey’s career, except that during both periods of Hollywood popularity—first in the '80s, then again beginning in the early 2000s—he’s always been considered a heartthrob. In his early 20s, he was millions of teenage girls’ object of desire, and more recently, he’s likely better known as McDreamy due to his role Grey’s Anatomy than he is by his actual name.

Since appearing on the latter series as Dr. Derek Shepherd, a neurosurgeon who works in a hospital where doctors seem to have steamy quickies in janitor closets more than they actually work, Dempsey has appeared in a handful of successful romantic comedies including 2007’s Enchanted and 2008’s Made of Honor, and most recently he appeared in 2011’s Transformers sequel, Dark of the Moon.

Mickey Rourke had a slew of successful acting jobs in the '80s (The Pope of Greenwich Village, 9 ½ Weeks, and Barfly), and his career slump was actually self-induced. Rourke gave up acting in 1991 because he, reportedly, had no respect for himself as an actor. He instead took up professional boxing, a sport in which he had competed as a teenage amateur, and fought to a 6-0-2 record.

It wasn’t without price, though. Rourke suffered a lot of injuries, which left him requiring surgery by the time he retired in 1995 and intended on returning to acting. He underwent reconstructive procedures for a compressed cheekbone, but the surgery was botched and it left him slightly disfigured, facially. He made his film comeback in 2005’s Sin City, but it wasn’t until he flexed his dramatic muscles starring in Darren Aronofsky’s highly-regarded The Wrestler, in 2008, that he experienced real career resurgence as both a serious actor and brooding action star.

After starring in a string of successful films in the late '70's and early '80s (Saturday Night Fever, Grease, and Blow Out, to name a few) John Travolta's resumé was marred by something no actor's career should ever experience: Talking baby movies, specifically Look Who's Talking and Look Who's Talking Too. This came in addition to a handful of roles in other bona fide flops in films like Perfect and Two of a Kind, and by the time the early '90s rolled around, it seemed like Travolta's career wasn't anywhere close to recovery.

Then, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction happened in 1994. Travolta received an Academy Award nomination for his iconic role as Vincent Vega in the film and an official pass to the A-Listers club again, where he's since remained.

Drew Barrymore achieved success early on in life with a role in 1982’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and by the time she turned 13, it seemed like she’d end up losing said success early on as well. Barrymore, like many who are exposed to Hollywood too young and too quickly, was dealing with numerous substance abuse issues, and she had been in rehab twice—once for drugs and alcohol, once for a suicide attempt—before she turned 15.

After a period cultivating the image of a Hollywood bad girl (going nude as a seductress in Poison Ivy, posing nude for Playboy, and flashing her breasts to David Letterman on the air for his birthday), she found legitimacy alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Mary-Louise Parker in 1995's Boys on the Side. Her cameo in the horror mega-hit Scream a year later became one of the most iconic scenes in cinema, and she followed that up with the Adam Sandler comedy The Wedding Singer in 1998, which started her on a roll of successful rom-coms (Never Been Kissed, 50 First Dates, Fever Pitch). Now, at 37, Barrymore is undeniably A-List, and she co-runs her own production company, Flower Films.

Matt LeBlanc became a household name during his run on Friends as Joey Tribbiani, but after the series ended, he unfortunately fell off. There was that short-lived, shitty spin-off, Joey, which saw his character move to Los Angeles to continue his acting career, but that was axed after two seasons and some episodes still remain unaired. Other than that, poor LeBlanc didn’t really do much in terms of acting for years—sort of sad when you consider the fact that his former Friends co-star Jennifer Aniston was getting film roles left and right. Hey, the business is tough.

He went through some things during his time off, as illustrated in this Daily Mail story from 2010, which describes an outing with his former co-stars David Schwimmer and Matthew Perry as “something more akin to a self-help group than a chance to catch up over a low-fat latte,” but it all seemed to work out for the best, because in 2011 he joined the series Episodes (which airs on BBC Two in the UK and Showtime in the US) as a fictionalized version of himself, and that earned him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a TV Musical or Comedy—something that, interestingly enough, the iconic role of Joey Tribbiani never did. Who’d have thought?