Long before he took an unexpected starring role in the presidential election race, Donald Trump carved out an equally unsettling acting career, with a string of cameos in films and television shows dating back to the 1980s.
Demonstrating an apparently insatiable desire for screen time, Mr Trump launched himself on unsuspecting viewers in the 1989 crime fantasy Ghosts Can’t Do It, starring Bo Derek and Anthony Quinn. He plays himself in a boardroom scene and can be seen smirking at Derek’s announcement that it “isn’t woman’s work we’re doing here today”.
When her character tells him, “You’re too pretty to be bad”, Mr Trump, honing the self-appreciation that has served him so well on the campaign trail, replies: “You noticed?”
The performance earned him a Razzie award for “worst supporting actor”.
In 1992’s Home Alone 2, the tycoon, again playing himself, is asked for directions by Macaulay Culkin’s Kevin McCallister in the gilded Plaza Hotel in New York. Mr Trump had purchased the hotel for a world record fee slightly above $400 million and would shortly be forced to sell it for a $75 million loss as part of a humiliating debt restructuring programme to stave off bankruptcy.
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In the mid-1990s he made a string of appearances, including turning up on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air with a briefcase full of cash to buy the home of Will Smith’s fictional family. “Everybody always blames me for everything,” Mr Trump drawls when one of the children says he’s ruined her life.
In 1998 he popped up as himself again in Spin City, boasting to Michael J Fox about how he dashed off nine chapters of his latest book “on the first day”, and was found lunching with one of Samantha’s suitors in an early episode of Sex and the City. In 2001 he was seen singing the praises of Ben Stiller’s male model in the comedy Zoolander.
The following year he was glimpsed in the Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock romcom Two Weeks Notice but the cameos were drying up. In 2004 he returned to the screen in The Apprentice, which reportedly earned him $213 million and helped him to polish the television skills that have taken the Republican nomination race by storm.
