Career
Billingsley's first acting role was as a two-year-old in a Geritol commercial with Betty Buckley playing his mom. He went on to star in about 120 television ads throughout the 1970s and early 80s. At 12 he was quoted as saying: "After 100 (commercials), you lose count." He was likely best known for a series of commercials for Hershey's chocolate syrup in which he portrayed the popular character Messy Marvin.
One of Billingsley's earliest film roles was 1978's If Ever I See You Again (film), written and directed by Joseph Brooks.
His role in 1981's Paternity opposite Burt Reynolds earned a nomination for "Best Young Comedian - Motion Picture or Television" at The Young Artist Awards. Also in 1981, he appeared in Honky Tonk Freeway, and that October was a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
In 1982 Billingsley starred in several features, including Death Valley, Massarati and the Brain, and the made-for-TV movie Memories Never Die with Lindsay Wagner and his sister, Melissa Michaelsen. He had a featured guest role as Gideon Hale on Little House on the Prairie, began a three-year stint as a co-host on NBC's popular Real People (which would land him another Young Artist Award nomination), and he hosted a two-episode offshoot of the show called Real Kids.
In 1983 Billingsley starred in A Christmas Story, based on Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which built its audience slowly over the years and is now broadcast for twenty-four hours from Christmas Eve until Christmas Day on TBS. A Christmas Story tells of a boy named Ralphie who wants nothing more than a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas, while all the grown-ups in his life discourage him with the warning that "you'll shoot your eye out." This film earned Billingsley another Young Artist Award nomination, and is arguably the one role he is most associated with. Billingsley himself has been quoted as saying that people still approach him on the street, only to say "you'll shoot your eye out, kid!"
In 1984 Billingsley starred in an adaptation of The Hoboken Chicken Emergency with Dick Van Patten and Gabe Kaplan, a special Thanksgiving episode of the PBS series WonderWorks. He also appeared on a "Super Teen" special edition of the popular Family Feud and on the game show Celebrity Hot Potato. As the late 1980s approached, Billingsley's acting career slowed. He was a guest star on Who's The Boss?, Punky Brewster, The Wonder Years, and Highway To Heaven, and appeared in the film The Dirt Bike Kid (for which he won a Young Artist Award), and Carly's Web, Russkies (alongside a young Joaquin Phoenix) and Beverly Hills Brats.
The early 1990s saw Billingsley tackling older roles such as a would-be jock who gets hooked on steroids in the CBS Schoolbreak Special The Fourth Man. On that project he formed a close friendship with Vince Vaughn.
His next Schoolbreak Special appearance was in 1994's The Writing on the Wall, starring Hal Linden as a rabbi who teaches three boys about the horrors of intolerance after they are caught defacing his home, temple, and car with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti. Billingsley was nominated for an Emmy Award for this role.
Read more about this topic: Peter Billingsley
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“I seemed intent on making it as difficult for myself as possible to pursue my “male” career goal. I not only procrastinated endlessly, submitting my medical school application at the very last minute, but continued to crave a conventional female role even as I moved ahead with my “male” pursuits.”
—Margaret S. Mahler (1897–1985)
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
—William Cobbett (1762–1835)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)