Celebrities Who Were On Game Shows Before They Were Famous

On the classic game show, To Tell the Truth, three people would come on and all make claim over the same name and interesting life story or accomplishment related by host Garry Moore. After several rounds of questioning, the panel of celebrity judges would guess which participant was telling the truth.

The topic of one early 1970s episode was Mr. J.B., a horse led into the studio by Moore, and ridden by three girls dressed in brightly-colored Western duds. All three kids claimed to be Amanda Cobb, a rider and trainer of horses like Mr. J.B., purportedly a "new breed" that was "small as a pony with the look of a standard horse and the markings of an Appaloosa." The child in an oversized yellow cowboy hat and super-chic '70s fringe vest turned out to be a liar: She wasn't Amanda Cobb at all, but a second-grader named Cynthia Nixon. 

That same Cynthia Nixon would one day co-star on Sex and the City, win an Emmy for playing stressed-out lawyer Miranda, and run for the office of governor of New York. According to an interview on Today, Nixon was selected to be a To Tell the Truth decoy because her mother worked on the long-running game show.

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