Matt Lauer

Lauer's career arc is pretty straightforward, even if its ending wasn't. He came up through local television — first in West Virginia, then at WNBC in New York — before NBC News brought him into the national fold in 1992. Two years later, in 1994, he became the news anchor for Today, a role that put him in front of millions of viewers every weekday morning. That's not a small thing. Today was, for much of the 1990s and 2000s, the dominant morning program in American television. The real elevation came in 1997, when NBC moved him from the news desk to the co-host chair — a position he'd hold for exactly two decades, through 2017 (TMDB). During that run, he became one of the most-interviewed interviewers in the business, sitting across from George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Tom Cruise, among many others. He also hosted the annual "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" segment, which reportedly had him traveling over 150,000 miles across various editions of the feature. What's striking is how that kind of segment — a news anchor going on adventure — now feels like a relic of a specific, pre-streaming media moment. He was also a regular contributor to Dateline NBC and co-hosted the opening ceremonies of multiple Olympic Games (TMDB). His film appearances — cameos in Land of the Lost (2009), The Beaver (2011), Sharknado 2, Sharknado 3, and a voice role in Curious George 2: Follow That Monkey! — don't represent a pivot toward acting so much as a famous face lending recognizability to projects that needed exactly that. In Land of the Lost, directed by Brad Silberling and starring Will Ferrell, Lauer appeared as himself in a brief interview segment woven into the film's setup. Functional, not transformative. His NBC contract was terminated in November 2017 following a workplace misconduct allegation, ending his broadcast career abruptly (Wikipedia).