One hundred years ago at the Paris Olympics in 1924, 20-year-old Johnny Weissmuller won three gold medals for swimming and a bronze medal for water polo. He went on to win two more golds at the 1928 games in Amsterdam and set 67 world records in his athletic career.

It wasn’t long before Hollywood came calling. According to the L.A. Times, a writer who was working on MGM’s Tarzan the Ape Man envisioned Weissmuller in a non-speaking role in a minor film and took him to see the Tarzan director and producer. “I didn’t realize what was going on,” Weissmuller told the Times. “They asked me if I could climb a tree and I said yes, and they asked me could I pick up a girl and walk away with her and I said yes . . . and that’s all there was to the test. I had the part.” The film was one of the most successful of 1932, and the first of 12 Tarzan films that featured the “ape man” yodeling his way across the jungle as he swung through the vines carrying his Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan in six of the films).

In 1948, after hanging up his loincloth, Weissmuller added to his Hollywood resume with the series Jungle Jim, based on the comic strip by Alex Raymond. He would make 16 films over eight years and 26 episodes for a TV series. They made Weissmuller a very rich man, as he owned a percentage of them.

Following in Weissmuller’s footsteps, Clarence Linden “Buster” Crabbe II parlayed a medal-winning Olympic swimming career — the bronze for the 1,500m freestyle in Amsterdam in 1928 and the gold for the 400m freestyle race at the 1932 Los Angeles games — into a Hollywood acting career.

Crabbe also played Tarzan once, in 1933’s Tarzan the Fearless, followed by more jungle man-style roles in King of the Jungle (1933), Jungle Man (1941) and King of the Congo (1952). Then came three Flash Gordon films, a Buck Rogers film and a dozen Billy the Kid films. He also played opposite Hollywood leading ladies such as Betty Grable in The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi (1933) and Million Dollar Legs (1939); Ida Lupino in Search for Beauty (1934); and Anna May Wong in Daughter of Shanghai in 1937. He and Weissmuller appeared together in Swamp Fire in 1946 and Captive Girl in 1950. “Some say my acting rose to the level of incompetence and then leveled off,” Crabbe is reported to have quipped.

Figure skater Sonja Henie, hailing from Norway, made her Olympics debut at the Winter Games in 1924 at age 11. She won gold medals in figure skating in three consecutive Olympics in 1928, 1932 and 1936, a record never bested so far.

After touring with her show, “Hollywood Ice Review,” Henie signed with Twentieth Century Fox and starred in 10 films, beginning with 1937’s One in a Million which cemented her status as a star and earned her a reported $500,000. “I want to do with skates what Fred Astaire is doing with dancing,” she told a reporter. Henie would become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars with hits such as Thin Ice (1937) with Tyrone Power; Happy Landing (1938) with Ethel Merman; My Lucky Star (1938) with Cesar Romero; Second Fiddle (1939) with Power again, and Sun Valley Serenade (1941), a musical featuring the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Milton Berle and the Nicholas Brothers.

British fencer Bob Anderson competed in the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki but didn’t win a medal, although the decorated soldier won many championships in fencing. However, he went on to have a six-decade career in Hollywood as a fight choreographer and/or sword master in the Bond films From Russia With Love and Die Another Day, The Guns of Navarone, Casino Royale (1967), the Zorro films, Highlander, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Pirates of the Caribbean. His crowning achievement was when he played Darth Vader in the fight scenes opposite Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, including the scene in the former film revealing to Skywalker that he is his father. His work as the stunt double was kept under wraps until Mark Hamill said in an interview in 1983, “Bob Anderson was the man who actually did Vader’s fighting. Bob worked so bloody hard that he deserves some recognition. It’s ridiculous to preserve the myth that it’s all done by one man.”

Another under-the-radar athlete, silver medalist in the 1948 Summer Olympics in London in the light-heavyweight category for weightlifting is Harold Sakata. His claim to fame in Hollywood is the role of the evil, bowler-hatted Oddjob in 1964’s Goldfinger, where he squares off opposite Sean Connery. He also appeared in forgettable films like 1972’s Goin’ Coconuts and 1982’s Invaders of the Lost Gold and Xiong Zhong, but most of his appearances were on television, including roles in The Amazing Spider-Man, The Rockford Files, Quincy M.E., Gilligan’s Island and others, all in the 1970’s.

Decathlete Rafer Johnson won silver in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and gold in the 1960 Rome Olympics, leading the U.S. team as flag bearer in the latter. He also had the honor of lighting the Olympic torch at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. His Hollywood career began after he retired from sports and he appeared in many films throughout the 1960s and ’70s like The Fiercest Heart (1961) with Juliet Prowse, The Sins of Rachel Cade (1961) with Angie Dickinson, Wild in the Country (1961) with Elvis Presley, A Global Affair (1964) with Bob Hope, None But the Brave (1965) with Frank Sinatra, The Games (1970) with Michael Crawford — a film about the Olympics — and The Last Grenade (1970) with Stanley Baker. On television, he appeared in the series Roots: The Next Generations (1978-79).

He is also had a hand in establishing the California Special Olympics.

Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce) won the decathlon gold in 1976 at the Montreal Olympics and the moniker “World’s Greatest Athlete.” Jenner once said, “I’m the type of guy who fails and fails and fails, and then, as if failure has become sick of him, succeeds.” Jenner was featured in television shows like The Fall Guy, Murder She Wrote and The Love Boat, but is best known for replacing Erik Estrada in CHiPs for seven episodes and the disco-style musical “Can’t Stop the Music.” As Caitlyn, Jenner made frequent appearances on the Kardashian reality TV shows.

Honorable mentions go to basketball superstars Michael Jordan (gold medal in the Barcelona games in 1992 for basketball) who appeared in the hit Space Jam in 1996 opposite Bugs Bunny and Bill Murray; and Shaquille O’Neal (gold medal in the Atlanta games in 1996) who was featured in Blue Chips, Kazaam and Steel. Four-time gold medal winner at the Olympics in 2000, 2008 and 2012, tennis star Serena Williams has been seen in the television shows My Wife and Kids, The Bernie Mac Show, ER, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Drop Dead Diva and others.

Figure skater Tara Lipinski, who won gold at the 1998 Winter Olympics, showed up in Touched by an Angel, 7th Heaven and Malcolm in the Middle before ending up in a supporting role on the soap The Young and the Restless in 1999.

Esther Williams was one of MGM’s biggest stars of the 1940s and ’50s, starring in a string of successful “aqua-musicals.” Williams started as a competitive swimmer and qualified for the 1940 Olympics Games — but they were canceled due to WWII. Williams was a two-time Golden Globe winner, in long-extinct categories: World Film Favorite in 1952, and Hollywood Citizenship Award in 1956. Though she never made it to the Olympics, she did end up with gold.