We all know the celeb-gone-bad story, where a famous person, who’s suddenly fabulously rich and has strangers offering them bucket loads of drugs, goes off the rails and ends up with a dodgy-looking mugshot.

What’s not so common is when it happens the other way round – when someone’s committed a crime, has maybe done some time, and then makes it big.

But it happens…

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Stephen Fry

It’s hard to believe that Britain’s beloved Stephen Fry could have ever done anything bad enough to put him behind bars, but he did.

When he was a teenager, he got his hands on someone else’s credit cards and decided to use them.

“I said to myself, ‘What ho!’” Fry told The New York Times. "For the next three months I went ape.”

He insisted his three months in a remand prison for young offenders wasn’t that bad – “anyone who's been to an English boarding school will have no problem with prison" – and afterwards, he went on to Cambridge University and comedy superstardom.

John Mayer

In 2009, singer John Mayer was outed as having a criminal past – by Mayer himself. He took to Twitter to reveal that he’d been arrested years earlier for driving without a valid licence.

"It's the lamest answer to the question, ‘Why you in here?’" he added.

The arrest had been back in 2001, before his career took off with songs like “Your Body Is A Wonderland”.

Mayer challenged TMZ to find his old mugshot, offering to donate $US25,000 to charity if they did. They did, giving two animal charities a very nice surprise.

Mark Wahlberg

Before Mark Wahlberg made it big as a model, rapper, actor and producer, he did some pretty horrible things.

A high school dropout and drug addict from a young age, he had civil action filed against him as a 15-year-old for racially abusing a group of African-American children and throwing rocks at them.

As a 17-year-old, he was charged with attempted murder after attacking two Vietnamese-American men on the street, knocking one unconscious and punching the other one in the eye. He pleaded guilty to assault and spent 45 days in jail.

“I did a lot of things that I regretted and I certainly paid for my mistakes," Wahlberg told ABC News in 2007.

NeNe Leakes

Real Housewives Of Atlanta star Nene Leakes has come a long way from where she was in 1992.

Back then she was charged for “theft of service” for ripping off her phone company, and was arrested three times after that for probation violations.

When Sheree Whitfield brought up Leakes’ mugshot on the show, Leakes took a dig at Whitfield’s boyfriend onWatch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen.

“Anybody can get a mugshot,” she said. “A mugshot does not equal 10 years in prison for doing a Ponzi scheme.”

To prove just how cool she was with her criminal past, she posted a photo of herself on Instagram wearing a sweatshirt featuring her own mugshot.

Bruno Mars

In 2010, the same year that Bruno Mars topped charts worldwide with songs like “Just The Way You Are” and “Grenade”, he was arrested in Las Vegas after being found with cocaine in a casino toilet.

Mars, real name Peter Hernandez, pleaded guilty to felony drug possession, paid a fine, did more than 200 hours of community service, and ended up avoiding a conviction.

“I was really intoxicated,” he later told GQ about the night. “I was really drunk. So a lot of that is a big blur, and I try every day to forget and keep pushing."

Danny Trejo