He Quit at 49 to Paint Jungles: 12 People Who Got Famous Late, Like Henri Rousseau

Anna Mary Robertson Moses spent most of her life as a farm wife in upstate New York, and she started painting seriously only in her late 70s. In the spring of 1940, a collector brought a stack of her small pictures to a New York dealer. Other dealers had already turned her down because of her age.

That October, at 80, she had her first solo show, under the modest title “What a Farmwife Painted.” By 1950 she was a national celebrity, and she was still painting after her 100th birthday.

Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up in a pioneer family in the 1870s and ’80s and spent most of her adult life on a farm. Her daughter, the writer Rose Wilder Lane, encouraged her to write down what she remembered of her childhood.

Little House in the Big Woods came out in 1932, when Wilder was 65. She kept going, and by 1943 the series had grown to eight books. Three decades later, her stories became the TV show Little House on the Prairie, which ran from 1974 to 1983.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in October 1961, after nine years of research, writing and recipe testing. Julia Child was 49.

Her TV career started almost by accident. During a book interview on Boston public television, she beat egg whites on air, and 27 viewers wrote to the station asking to see more. Her show, The French Chef, debuted nationally in February 1963, when she was 50. It ran until 1973, and she went on to film more than 350 episodes of television.

Henri Rousseau collected tolls for the city of Paris, which is how he got his nickname, “le Douanier,” the customs officer. He had no art training and painted in his free time. In 1893, he left the job to paint full time, at 49.

His jungles are full of tigers, monkeys and giant leaves, but he never left France. He studied the plants at the botanical garden in Paris instead. Surprised! was the first of about 20 jungle paintings, and he made it in 1891, while he was still collecting tolls.

Frank McCourt started teaching in New York public high schools in 1958, and he later taught creative writing at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. For years he tried to turn his childhood in Ireland into a novel and couldn’t find the right voice for it.

After he retired from teaching, he realized the voice was his own. He wrote the memoir Angela’s Ashes in 13 months. It came out in 1996, when he was 66, and won the Pulitzer Prize for biography the next year. It was later published in 27 countries.

Richard Adams was a British civil servant with two daughters. On a long drive to see Twelfth Night at Stratford-upon-Avon, the girls got bored and asked for a story, so he started making one up about a group of rabbits escaping from their warren.

He was persuaded to write it down, which took him more than two years. Then 14 publishers turned it down. Watership Down finally came out in 1972, when he was 52. It won the Carnegie Medal that same year and went on to sell tens of millions of copies.

Raymond Chandler worked for years at a Los Angeles oil company and lost the job in 1932, during the Great Depression. At 44, he started writing detective stories for pulp magazines, and his first one, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, appeared in Black Mask in 1933.

His first novel, The Big Sleep, came out in 1939, when he was 50, and it introduced the private detective Philip Marlowe. Seven years later it was made into a film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Samuel L. Jackson worked in theater and played small film and TV roles through the 1970s and ’80s. He was 45 when Pulp Fiction came out in October 1994, and the role of Jules made him a star.

It also brought his first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actor, when he was 46. In 2022, the Academy gave him an honorary Oscar for his career.

In the 1970s, Ina Garten had an MBA and a job as a nuclear energy budget analyst for the U.S. government, working in the White House. In the evenings she cooked her way through Julia Child’s books. “Julia Child taught me how to cook,” she told CBS.

In 1978, she saw an ad for a specialty food store for sale in the Hamptons and told her husband, Jeffrey: “I have to do something different. Nuclear energy policy’s not me.” She ran the shop for about 20 years. Her first cookbook came out in 1999, when she was 51.

Jane Lynch spent years in small parts and commercials until director Christopher Guest cast her in Best in Show in 2000. In 2009 she became famous as the cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester on Glee, and she won an Emmy for the role in 2010, at 50.

As a girl, Lynch quit a school play because she was afraid of making mistakes. “That is the last time I walked away from anything,” she told NPR in 2011. “I’ve been a yes person now for a long time.”

Anna Sewell spent about six years writing a novel told by a horse, about how horses were treated by the people who drove and owned them. Black Beauty came out in November 1877, when she was 57. It was the only book she ever wrote.

It sold slowly at first, but within six months sales were close to 100,000. By 1892, a million copies were in circulation in the U.S., and almost 150 years later it is still in print.

Susan Boyle was an unknown singer from a small town in Scotland when she auditioned for Britain’s Got Talent. On April 11, 2009, the show aired her audition, and she sang I Dreamed a Dream from Les Misérables.

A week later, clips of her singing had almost 50 million views on YouTube. Her first album came out that November and sold eight million copies in under two months. The original audition is still on the show’s official YouTube channel.