Dan Marino
Marino is on this site because of football. He played seventeen seasons at quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, played college ball for the Pittsburgh Panthers and was a first-team All-American in 1981, and he was the last quarterback taken in the first round of the famous 1983 class. He held or still holds a long list of NFL records at the position, he never played on a Super Bowl-winning team, and both of those facts are permanently welded to his name.
The screen career is three credits and essentially one joke. In 1994 he played himself in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, where his abduction sets the plot moving, and he is considerably better in it than a professional athlete has any business being, largely because he commits completely to looking irritated. He played himself again in Holy Man in 1998, and again on the children's series The Inspectors.
There is no acting career here to assess, and he has never claimed one. Treat this page as a footnote to a very long football page.
Movies (2)
TV (1)
Where to start with Dan Marino
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective is the one, and it is the only one. Marino plays himself as a mildly exasperated celebrity dragged through somebody else's farce, and the film is smart enough to keep him reacting rather than performing.
Holy Man recycles the same idea with far less around it, and works better as a curiosity than as a comedy. The Inspectors is a Saturday-morning children's series where he appears as himself once more, which by that point is less a role than a standing arrangement.
If you came to this page from the football rather than the films, watch the first one for the novelty and then go and find the game tape, which is where the actual performance is.