Five Shocking Star Transformations—You Know, Other Than Sinéad O'Connor's

Nothing compares to "Nothing Compares 2 U's" makeover? Uh, tell that to Britney Spears, Taylor Lautner, more

So, Sinéad O'Connor went from looking like Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta to your dorky self in high school.

Good for her. We all have our journeys, and hers rendered her unrecognizable.

These things happen—and to the following stars, too:

1. Britney Spears: Maybe the most infamous transformation of all. One day, in our mind's eye, the pop star is happily working the school-girl-uniform angle; the next, she's sporting a Manson family 'do.

2. 50 Cent: For the love of a self-financed indie movie, this usually strapping rapper underwent the most common kind of star transformation: the Robert De Niro, wherein a star loses a lot of weight and/or gains a lot of weight for a role. (See: the emaciated Christian Bale in The Machinist, the portly Matt Damon in The Informant!, the fat and skinny De Niro in Raging Bull, and many, many others.) So you know, Jonah Hill and Entourage's Jerry Ferrara, who both recently became shadows of their former selves, do not qualify for De Niro status as they apparently slimmed down for the sake of slimming down. (How quaint.) 

3. Taylor Lautner: Take one skinny, spiky-haired kid. Cast him in a minor role in a low-budget teen movie. Watch the teen movie blow up into a blockbuster franchise, and watch the skinny kid, under threat of losing his job, pack on 30 pounds of muscle and blow up into a big-budget action star. This maneuver, a variation on the Robert De Niro, will heretofore be known as the World's Savviest Career Move. 

4. Jennifer Grey: The nose job to end all nose jobs (even though it actually didn't end nose jobs at all). In the early 1990s, Grey went under the knife, and emerged looking just fine, but no longer quite like her Dirty Dancing self. By the end of the decade, she was joking about her anonymity on a sitcom.  

5. Brittany Murphy: The classic blossoming that wasn't really seen as that. In Clueless, the then-17-year-old Murphy was invariably described as "schlumpy." Thereafter, she slowly but surely morphed into the pert blonde of Just Married and 8 Mile, raising questions and eyebrows along the way. "I really didn't lose [a lot of] weight," the late actress said in 2003. "I had just gone through puberty."