"My family was shocked when they heard I wanted to be an actor," Benicio del Toro once recalled. "None of us had the slightest thing to do with film. Actors were like extraterrestrials... I couldn't bring myself to tell them I was taking acting classes. For two years my father thought I was studying law."

So why did Del Toro finally reveal the truth? He won an Oscar -- for his performance as the Mexican cop in Traffic!

["My family knew I was acting every now and then, but they thought it was just one of several jobs I was doing to finance my studies," he recalled. "They kept asking me when I would finally get my degree. But I think I won them over with the Oscar and now they're, I hope, just a little proud of me."]

[Del Toro (only 21 years old when he landed the role of the vicious henchman in Licence to Kill) was the youngest actor ever to portray a Bond villain.]