Timothy Leary

An accomplished clinical psychologist, convict, mystic and writer, Timothy Leary also dabbled in stand-up comedy and acting during his colorful life. Dismissed from his teaching position at Harvard in the early 1960s after some high-profile experiments involving the then-legal hallucinogenic LSD, Leary coined his famous phrase "turn on, tune in and drop out." His outspoken embrace of the drug culture resulted in numerous arrests and a high media profile that included appearances in a number of experimental films at the height of the hippie era (including the little-seen Honeymoon, directed by and starring John Lennon and Yoko Ono), as well as a strange 1969 miniseries for German television called Romeo und Julia 70, which starred Frank Sinatra's daughter Tina as half of the Shakespearean couple and included cameos by Leary, Ray Charles, and Hugh Hefner, among many others.

As the 1960s waned, Leary often appeared in documentaries about the era, as well as narrative films ranging from the Cheech and Chong comedy Nice Dreams to the Wes Craven horror flick Shocker. Leary also occasionally appeared in small cameo roles on popular television series including the romantic comedy Moonlighting and the sophisticated 1990s hit Frasier. Perhaps his largest film role came in the 1997 artificial intelligence fantasy Conceiving Ada, in which he plays opposite Tilda Swinton and Karen Black as a mysterious guru figure named Sims.