The 21 best cameos in film, from Stanley Kubrick to Quentin Tarantino

From Alfred Hitchcock trying to get on a bus in ‘North by Northwest’ to Martin Scorsese in the back of the cab in ‘Taxi Driver’, Charlotte Cripps picks some of the best cameo roles played by film directors

Steven Spielberg is unforgettable as a bureaucrat in John Landis’s 'The Blues Brothers' (Universal Pictures)

Directors love making small cameos in their own films. But few have made as many as Alfred Hitchcock. In The Birds, he can be seen leaving the pet shop with two of his own terriers as Tippi Hedren comes in; he’s sitting on a bus next to the film’s star Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, and in Lifeboat, he can be spotted in “before and after” photographs in a newspaper weight-loss advert.

Hitchcock’s 37 silent cameos became so popular with fans that the director began to make his appearances earlier in the film to avoid distracting the audience from the plot.

Likewise, Quentin Tarantino frequently sneaks into his own films, from Pulp Fiction to Kill Bill. Others taking a leaf out of Hitchcock’s book include directors M Night Shyamalan and Martin Scorsese.

It is more understandable when actors become directors, such as Clint Eastwood, who stars in most of his films, but who also made a brief cameo in his early film Breezy (1973). But in many cases, it seems the director just can’t resist showing up on the big screen, rather than just during the end credits.

Find out which directors hate their own films, here.