Actors Who'd Be Rich Even If They Weren't Famous

#1 Lindsay Lohan

She says she wants to run for president in 2020 and who knows. She certainly has a lot of money backing her. Tabloid magnet Lindsay Lohan started on her path to stardom at a young age, modeling and booking acting gigs like The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday in the mid-to-late 1990s. She started out with a few advantages, though, her father, Michael, was a Wall Street trader, and she grew up in the wealthy Long Island enclave of Cold Spring Harbor, New York. This was good for her because she needed money to help her out of numerous legal affairs over the last 10 years and hardly an acting job as surfaced.

#2 Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham may play a twentysomething struggling to make ends meet on Girls. But in real life, things were much easier for the young comedic actress. Both of her parents are famous and highly sought after artists. Dunham's father, Carroll Dunham, a painter, has had his work featured in high-profile museums, including New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her mother, Lauie Simmons, operates a gallery in Manhattan, London, and Brisbane and sells her sculptures for upwards of $120,000 each. Lena went to private schools and was usually traveling the world as a child beside her parents.

#3 Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal

Talk about being born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Jake, and Maggie Gyllenhaal can trace their family lineage back to a line of Swedish nobility through their father. While both siblings have enjoyed show business success, they were raised by a family that had inherited hundreds of millions of dollars by various Swedish nobles. Both Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal come from a well-off family in Los Angeles, they're the children of director Stephen Gyllenhaal and screenwriter Naomi Achs, so money aside, besides the blue in their blood there was also acting and creativity.

#4 Gwyneth Paltrow

Gwyneth is not well liked in Hollywood circles and she believes people are just jealous of her, and that may be true. Like so many other young stars, Gwyneth comes from a family of professional movie and television big wigs. Her mother is famed actress Blythe Danner who has made several films and television shows and commercials in her long career, and her father is producer Bruce Paltrow who earned success with shows like St. Elsewhere and Thirtysomething. Her family fortune is said to be over $94.1 million as of 2015, and that's not counting her own money.

#5 Miley Cyrus

She's no slouch herself as far as her work ethic goes, but Miley was born already famous and wealthy thanks to redneck Billy Ray Cyrus and his one hit wonder "Achy Breaky Heart". To her credit, though, Cyrus has worked hard all of her life and has since amassed a fortune of her own, surpassing anything her father could have imagined. Between her days on Hannah Montana for Disney and her subsequent career as a hugely successful pop singer, her net worth today is estimated to be around $200 million. With that kinda money, she can continue to dress and act as stupid as she wants. And to be totally fair to Miley, she can really sing, but those stupid costumes gotta go!

#6 Julia Louis-Dreyfus

She starred in several tv sitcoms like Seinfeld, New Christine, and most recently VEEP, but she began on Saturday Night Live. Julia Louis-Dreyfus is one of the best-known comedy actresses working today, and she also happens to be the daughter of GÃ©rard Louis-Dreyfus, chairman of Louis Dreyfus Energy Services, whose net worth was estimated to be $5.4 billion as recently as 2011. Her great-great-grandfather LÃ©opold Louis-Dreyfus founded the major French commodities trading conglomerate the Louis Dreyfus Group.

#7 Nick Kroll

The star of Kroll Show and one of many funny people on The League, Nick Kroll grew up in an affluent area of Westchester, New York, and is the son of Jules B. Kroll, the founder of the billion-dollar corporate investigations company Kroll, Inc. He may be laughing and telling jokes now but growing up he had a nanny and went to private schools in the UK and Australia. That kind of money is NO JOKE. His mother was also a funny person, and she made a fortune investing her allowance in companies she thought just sounded "fun", like Yahoo!, Google, Toys R Us, and Build A Bear.

#8 Allison Williams

As it turns out, most of the cast of Girls had little-to-no money problems growing up. Take Allison Williams, for example. Her father is TV journalist Brian Williams, who for years enjoyed an insanely successful career as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. His career has since been plagued by scandal, but yeah, he's still got plenty of cash, and some he inherited from his grandmother in both his and Allisons name.

#9 Michelle Williams

No relation to Allison, the three-time Oscar nominee Michelle Williams is the daughter of Larry R. Williams, a Montana-born author, and financier, who made two unsuccessful bids for the United States Senate in 1972 and 1982. In 2013, Williams, who now lives in the U.S. Virgin Islands, contemplated a third run for Senate but never followed through, according to reports. The family net worth is said to be over $22 million.

#10 Sigourney Weaver

Given her father's lucrative career in radio and television, it's no wonder that Sigourney Weaver entered showbusiness. Weaver's dad, Sylvester Laflin "Pat" Weaver, Jr., worked at NBC from 1949 until 1956, serving as president of the network in his final three years. According to his New York Times obituary, Pat is credited with creating The Today Show and The Tonight Show and was a champion of the now-famous Meet the Press as well as several other long-running NBC programs. Growing up Sigourney considered her family to be extremely wealthy and her father paid for her first major audition, which she won. The rest, sas they say, is movie history.

#11 Paul Giamatti

Oscar-nominated actor Paul Giamatti had a pretty cushy life growing up, all thanks to his father, A. Bartlett Giamatti. Bartlett spent years teaching at Yale before eventually serving as president of the esteemed university for almost 10 years. After Yale, Giamatti set his sights on baseball, where he quickly became president of the National League and then Commissioner of Major League Baseball. With all that in mind, it's no wonder his son got the lead role on a show called Billions.

#12 Edward Norton

Edward Norton's maternal grandfather, James Rouse, enjoyed an incredibly successful career as a real-estate developer and urban planner, designing everything from new towns to shopping malls. Among his biggest contributions: Faneuil Hall Marketplace, which remains one of Boston's most popular food and shopping destinations to this day.

#13 Armie Hammer

Hammer, who recently starred opposite Henry "Superman" Cavill in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., became famous playing the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's The Social Network. But playing a pair of rich kids probably wasn't too much of a stretch since Armie is the great-grandson of the oil tycoon Armand Hammer. Funnily enough, Armie's great-great-grandfather, Julius Hammer, reportedly founded New York's Communist Party. Apple fell pretty far from the tree on that one.

#14 Balthazar Getty

Brothers and Sisters star Balthazar Getty was born into one of the wealthiest families in the world. His great-grandfather, J. Paul Getty, was the founder of Getty Oil, which eventually earned him billions of dollars. According to his 1976 obituary in The New York Times, his exact fortune was hard to pin down. However, two years prior to his death, it was said that Getty was worth anything between $2 billion and $4 billion. Or, you know, pocket change.

Categories

More