In The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq, just given its US premiere at the Tribeca festival, the eponymous French novelist stars as himself. Guillaume Nicloux's film takes a real recent incident – Houellebecq's mysterious disappearance during the publicity tour for his Prix Goncourt-winning novel The Map and the Territory, in which he similarly appears as a character – and wryly purports to show what really happened: he was abducted and held captive by three brothers, who, despite his irritating ways, gradually came to respect him.
While Houellebecq may be the first novelist to have a film built around him, thespian turns by authors of his stature are by no means uncommon. One Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter racked up a long list of acting credits in film and TV (from The Servant to The Tailor of Panama), as other actor-playwrights – Alan Bennett, Sam Shepard – have done. Another, Gabriel García Márquez, played a cinema-ticket seller in the 60s Mexican film There Are No Thieves in this Town, in which the film director Luis Buñuel and the novelist Juan Rulfo were also in the cast.
Long overdue is a documentary compiling such glimpses, which have also included Thomas Pynchon voicing himself (depicted with a paper bag over his head) in The Simpsons, Graham Greene as a British insurance salesman in Truffaut's Day for Night, Martin Amis as a child star in A High Wind in Jamaica, Marshall McLuhan as himself in Annie Hall, Germaine Greer as Edina's "Dream Mother" in the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, and – possibly the most appealing of all – Roland Barthes as Thackeray in a French film in which Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert and Marie-France Pisier played the Brontë sisters.
Usually, such appearances are no more than cameos, often Hitchcock-style "signatures" in adaptations of the writer's own work (as with Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting and John le Carré in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), but some authors have taken their sideline rather more seriously, or at any rate said yes more often. Norman Mailer has eight acting credits on IMDb, Gore Vidal (who was in Gattaca and Bob Roberts) has 12, William Burroughs, 18, and George Plimpton (who improbably made his debut as a Bedouin in Lawrence of Arabia) has 30.
Arundhati Roy had a leading role as a young goatherd in the 80s Hindi film Massey Sahib, and played a stroppy student in the campus comedy In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, which she scripted. Fellow Indian Booker winner Salman Rushdie, who popped up as himself along with Julian Barnes and Sebastian Faulks in Bridget Jones's Diary, has since been a doctor in the Helen Hunt-directed Then She Found Me and appears as a "wake guest" (as do Jeffrey Eugenides and Debbie Harry) in the recently released River of Fundament, an arty adaptation of Mailer's rambling Egyptian novel Ancient Evenings, promisingly described by the Hollywood Reporter as "a six-hour, excrement-filled mythological journey".
