Dempsey: Class Clown Making Good

Dudley Moore once told an interviewer that he began entertaining his schoolmates in grade school because he wanted to deflect their attention away from his clubfoot. His thinking, he said, was that if they were laughing with him, they wouldn’t be laughing at him.

Patrick Dempsey, the fresh-faced and engagingly impulsive young star of last year’s “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “In the Mood,” escaped pain through the clown’s role, too. In his case, however, he was trying to attract attention, not deflect it.

“I grew up in a small town in Maine where if you didn’t hunt, fish or drink with the boys on Saturday night or play all the sports, you weren’t cool or hip,” said Dempsey, who is currently working on Joan Micklin Silver’s “Loverboy” for Tri-Star. “I very much wanted to be in that crowd, but I could never get into it.

“This is one time where being beaten up in school really paid off. I was very small and I wanted attention, so I’d annoy the bigger kids. Eventually they’d get fed up and throw me around. In order to avoid being hurt, I learned how to fall.”

The falling became tumbling, and soon Dempsey, the embodiment of gawky adolescence, was honing his skills as an entertainer. He mastered the unicycle, added juggling and puppetry to his repertoire, then began performing before community groups.

Suddenly, all those concerns over being short, “weird,” undatable and uncool were replaced by a self-confidence that has propelled him from a 17-year-old high school kid making his acting debut in a local production of “On Golden Pond” to a much-sought-after 22-year-old film star. Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy and Anthony Michael Hall may be better known than Dempsey, but none is busier.

In the past 18 months he has starred in six films, most of them comedies. One of them, Disney/Touchstone’s “Can’t Buy Me Love,” was one of the hits of 1987.

For someone whose life has been flipped sunny side up, Dempsey seems pretty unaffected by it. And so far, his ego has not bought into the Hollywood illusion of good looks. For a scene in one recent film, Dempsey wiped off his makeup just before the camera rolled, saying he preferred the natural look--pimples and all.

“I got a little heat for that,” he said, grinning. “But I’d do it again. In Hollywood, you only see gorgeous women and gorgeous men. People have pimples. Why not show them? They’re not such a bad thing.”

Dempsey, whose pimples aren’t particularly obvious, said he’s glad he wasn’t more socially attuned in high school. He said it was the feelings he had from not being accepted that got him into acting.

“If I’d started experimenting with drinking or partying at that time,” he said, “it would have taken me out of these feelings that I had. Alcohol numbs your feelings. I probably would have stayed home.”

Instead, he dropped out of school and went to New York where he got an agent and, shortly after that, a job. Dempsey was sent to San Francisco to act in a production of “Torch Song Trilogy.”

“I don’t recommend dropping out,” he said, “but it was the only opportunity for me to get out, so I took it.”

Dempsey had a lot to learn--more offstage, perhaps, than on. Rocky Parker, Dempsey’s acting coach and personal manager, said she first met him when he and her daughter were in the touring company of “Brighton Beach Memoirs.”

“I taught Patrick how to read and write,” Parker said.

“Rocky has had a tremendous impact on my life,” Dempsey said. “I have a person who is fighting with me. I’m not alone, thank God. I have someone on my side, and a lot of my strength comes from that.”

Dempsey’s biggest concern at the moment is escaping the restrictive image of “cute kid,” the sort of boy-man that, in movies at least, some older women may find attractive. In “In the Mood” he played a 15-year-old boy who ran off with a man’s wife during World War II. In “Loverboy,” he plays a pizza delivery boy whose female customers are expecting something more than cheese and pepperoni.

“Why am I getting these kind of roles?” he wondered out loud. “What is my problem with women? My coach and I agreed there were still things I had to deal with. That’s one of the reasons I took ‘Loverboy’--to get a foothold in dealing with women, both in front of and behind the camera, and then move on.”

Dempsey said that so far in his career, his purpose has been simply to establish himself, figuring that the more challenging roles will come later.

“I’m not in a position where I can say ‘no’ yet. It’s a matter of who looks right. I’ve been getting by on a lot of charm, but that will only last so long. . . . I don’t know that much about acting. I’ve been studying on a 24-hour basis for the last three or four years. But I haven’t lived enough. Jack Nicholson has been around for years and has experienced life, the ups and the downs.”

Dempsey isn’t looking for life experience in Los Angeles, he said. He rents a house here, but doesn’t want to fit into the party scene of Hollywood any more than he would like to have fitted in back in Maine.

“I find it very destructive because you come away completely stripped of any kind of identity,” he said. “So I stay home, watch a lot of movies, read and try to do the work. As far as running around with the ladies, it’s something I do in my mind.”