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Danny DeVito Worked On Dead Bodies Before Becoming Famous

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Updated on July 6, 2023

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You likely recognize Danny DeVito from movies like the the Jumanji sequel, Batman Returns, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but the actor is much more than simply his impressive record of Hollywood roles.

He put forth a lot of effort to get where he is now and is regarded as one of the comedic patriarchs.

But he originally never considered becoming an actor. He intended to be a beautician. When he reached 19, his sister Angela, who operated a beauty salon, advised him he had to get a job and it could as well be with her.

In 2006, he spoke to The Independent. “My sister Angie was 16 years older than me and had a beauty parlor. She said, ‘Why don’t you come and work for me?’ It was kind of embarrassing but I said, ‘Oh, what the hell’; and ended up having quite a feel for it.”

DeVito went on, “None of my friends gave me a hard time about it because they all loved Angie. She was great and paid for me to go to hairdressing school, which was amazing. I walked in and I was stunned. There were 35 young women in the room, each one better looking than the other. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“My sister had a very particular kind of clientele,” Devito recalled while sitting down for a chat on Lopez Tonight in October 2010. While she did have some young clients, the actor explained that there were also “the old ladies who lived down the [Jersey] Shore” where they were from. And when these older ladies passed away, they wanted “to have a nice hairdo.” That’s were DeVito came in.

“I used to go in there, you know, the mortuary,” DeVito explained before briefly stopping to acknowledge that “it’s a little morbid, but you’ve seen Six Feet Under and all these shows.” True enough. He then continued, “Anyway, there she would be, it was only women’s hair I did, and it was usually [a] really old lady.”

While that may sound sad, DeVito did note, “She didn’t talk back. She didn’t say, ‘Oh, I don’t like the way that hair’s curled.'” That’s certainly one way to put a positive spin on an unusual situation.

When his sister decided she wanted to sell cosmetics at the salon, she sent DeVito to Manhattan to study makeup artistry at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He watched the student actors rehearsing and, curious, began reading the plays they were doing. He took some acting classes, got laughs “and I was hooked,” he says.

He moved to Manhattan and knocked about as an actor, landing roles in experimental off-Broadway plays. He met Michael Douglas, the son of Kirk Douglas but then a struggling actor as well, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Festival. They wound up sharing an apartment on the Upper West Side.

“I remember when Michael got a part in ‘Summertree’ at Lincoln Center,” DeVito says. “We celebrated. And then something happened and he got bumped out. But his father bought the movie rights, so he got the movie. That’s a plus, you know what I’m saying?”

DeVito got his break in 1971 when he was cast in an off-Broadway adaptation of Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” He played Martini, an inmate at the asylum. He worked on the role by spending time with patients on Wards Island.

“I was pulling bits from them,” he says, “stuff that wasn’t in the book. There was a guy who always said ‘hello’ to you a million times. And Martini was shot down into the sea during World War II, so I always pictured the water rising in the room. That’s why I always sat on my legs in the chair — ’cause in his mind, the water’s rising.”

DeVito reprised the role in the 1975 movie adaptation, produced by Douglas and starring another actor from New Jersey, Jack Nicholson, who would also become a lifelong friend.

Fans on Reddit discussed in-depth, too, cracking jokes about DeVito’s mortuary-related roles on screen. One fan explained that while in some cases, mortuaries hire special staff to care for the deceaseds’ ‘beauty’ needs, a hairdresser or esthetician can just as easily be on hand to help out. At least, they could back in Danny’s younger days.