Tennis has a long history with the dramatically inclined athlete. There was the great 1920s player Bill Tilden, who "schmacted" his way through poorly received Broadway productions of his own plays. The '70s brought us that great thespian Billie Jean King. Her appearance with Bobby Riggs on The Odd Couple in 1973 is one of the all-time great athlete cameos (at least we'd like the think so). And her acting in that Geico commercial with the caveman? Brilliant. King is more than just good at playing herself, though. Her turn as a judge on Law & Order a few years ago was Streep-esque. Tennis players like Chris Evert and Andy Roddick have proven they can handle acting under pressure on Saturday Night Live. Of course, no list of tennis player-slash-actors would be complete without Novak Djokovic, the king of impersonating fellow players, and Vera Zvonareva, the queen of emotional breakdown scenes. The player with the most thespian cred has to be Serena Williams. She's played a distraught mother on ER, a college athlete suspected of murder on Law & Order SVU, and an ex-gangster on the Showtime series Street Time—watch her emote “getting out of prison” in the clip:
But if we could give an Oscar to the best performance by a tennis player, we’d give it to Ernests Gulbis. When he was a little rich boy living in Latvia, he appeared with his actress mother in a film directed by his grandfather. As you’ll see from these YouTube clips, Gulbis could give young Oscar winner Tatum O’Neal a run for her money as the cutest of cute child actors. As you’ll also see, Gulbis hasn’t changed much. The hair may be a little tamer, but the smile, laugh and precociousness remain the same.
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—Sarah Thurmond