To Live and Prevail in L.A. What do the careers of George Clooney, Patrick Dempsey, Drew Barrymore, Sarah Jessica Parker, Naomi Watts and Teri Hatcher have in common? Time has been on their side. By Stephen Rebello W.C. FIELDS, the legendary screen comedian who brought a refreshing misanthropy to the frivolity of early Hollywood, once deadpanned, "If at first you don't succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it." In a city fueled by untrammeled ambition and self-absorption, few hopefuls have ever taken this mordant credo to heart, not even Fields. The truth is, as much as this town's titanium-hearted citizens love Cinderella stories, overnight sensations are rare, and those who, like Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts, parlay quick success into more or less steady trajectories are even rarer. The acting careers that take any shape at all are usually full of spurts, setbacks and relaunches. Depending on the order and timing of those ups and downs, you get certain "genres" of career, like the A- Star-Is-Born-style flameout, the comeback, and the late bloomer. These last two categories, in which a major triumph is scored after the stroke of midnight, are interestingly visible in current Hollywood, with quite different cases all offering evidence that the difference between W.C. Fields' "damn fool" and a star can be slim indeed. While the tabloids are brimming with the spring chicken bikini brigade, the real landscape of today's Hollywood is surprisingly full of many stars who didn't reach recognition until well into their 30s. Consider George Clooney, a high-wattage presence of current Hollywood who could conduct a master class in persistence of vision. Before Clooney clicked with TV audiences playing a seductive doctor on ER in 1994, he had spent much of the previous decade appearing in no less than 15 television pilots and eight series and chasing movie roles like that of the studly hitchhiker in 1991's Thelma & Louise, which he watched Brad Pitt take and ride to stardom. Having observed the career peaks and valleys experienced by his aunt, singer Rosemary Clooney, and by his newsman father, Nick Clooney, George persevered with scraps like Return to Horror High, Grizzly II: The Predator and Return of the Killer Tomatoes!When ERstardom hit, it had the look--as so much stardom does--of absolute inevitability, and yet the years in the wilderness had been to a purpose. Clooney's was a seasoned charm coming into its own as if on schedule. Years later, when he was on the verge of translating his celebrity into his first solid megahit, The Perfect Storm, his director, Wolfgang Petersen, commented, "With George, the older he gets, the better. When he's closer to 45, he'll be just fantastic." Clooney had by that time starred as Batman (in Batman & Robin) and with both Michelle Pfeiffer (in One Fine Day) and Nicole Kidman (in The Peacemaker) to no great effect, and had made a course correction by seeking out edgy collaborators like Steven Soderbergh, who directed him in Out of Sight; Terrence Malick, for whom he did The Thin Red Line; David O. Russell ( Three Kings); and the Coen brothers (O Brother, Where Art Thou?). As Petersen understood, Clooney was still gathering grace and gravity. He was on course to becoming the kind of effortless, relaxed, self-deprecating star that could be a successor to such golden age movie icons as Clark Gable and Cary Grant. Despite his reputation as a hell-raising good-time guy, age, experience and intelligence had burnished Clooney's good looks and deepened his screen presence. With his Perfect Storm clout he could easily have lurched from one blockbuster to the next, but he was old and wise enough to take the long view, as such predecessors as Paul Newman, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had done, producing and directing rather than depending on screen idol-dom. Having partnered with Soderbergh in the production company Section Eight, he directed the sweetly twisted Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and moved on with greater experience and confidence to direct the Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck. That triumph, atop his Oscar-winning performance as a CIA operative in Syriana, which he also exec-produced, has made him one of Hollywood's most respected talents and biggest stars. Time had been on his side all along. On a lesser but still interesting scale, aging well has also been the best revenge for Patrick Dempsey, who, at 40, has helped make Grey's Anatomy must see TV and has finally delivered on unfulfilled promise. Those with long memories may recall Dempsey's first career splash in the '80s when his cocky charm enlivened small movies like Can't Buy Me Loveand Some Girls. Right up until the boys-withfedoras- and-machine-guns flick Mobsters iced him in 1991, he was regarded as a gifted actor with the makings of a major career. Thereafter, he continued to enjoy the support of power brokers like Joe Roth, then the head of 20th Century Fox, who had directed him in 1990's Coupe de Ville, but he turned up in fewer big films than in so-so straight-to-video and TV fare. Like Clooney, his smartest move was to keep pushing through lean years and let those years age him for the better, though unlike Clooney he had to fight post-flash-in-the-pan obscurity blues. When he broke back into the mainstream beginning in 2000 with recurring roles on Will & Grace, Once and Again and The Practice, he had an ease and charm that hadn't been there a decade before. And when he romanced Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama, he made for a plausible tug-of-war over the heroine's affections with Josh Lucas. Now his triumph on Grey's Anatomy has widened the path to feature films--he's costarring with Hilary Swank in the drama Freedom Writers and is set to costar in the live-action/animated romance Enchantedwith Susan Sarandon and Amy Adams. Those who first saw Dempsey in the '80s are not surprised, but it's part of normal Hollywood life that an entire generation may yet think Dempsey broke out of nowhere to become a star of Grey's Anatomy. Drew Barrymore is one of Hollywood's truly delicious delayed rebound tales. The descendent of a royal dynasty of stage and film actors/hellions, she had been a wildly precocious, hugely lovable early bloomer in the 1982 classic E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, then turned into a demon-ridden tabloid princess with a reputation so damaged she got laughed out of auditions even after she'd struggled back to sobriety. But she soldiered on, and starting with guilty pleasure Poison Ivy, anyone with an open mind could see that Drew Barrymore had more star screen power that only her failure to steady herself personally could stop. While taking projects that It girls of the day like Winona Ryder wouldn't have bothered with, Barrymore began to gather industry respect and a public following that has been notably loyal. By 1992, she was able to say (in a Movielineinterview), "I swore to all those people who made me eat it: Someday, you'll want me. And, through pure ambition, I showed those sons of bitches that I can do it. Success is the best revenge in the world. And I'm back." Getting progressively more beautiful, she stunned detractors with Scream (where she made the canny decision to take the cameo victim part rather than the lead), The Wedding Singer, Ever After and Never Been Kissed (of which she was executive producer), and she impressed her fans with stretches like Boys on the Side. In a death-defying act of self-belief and reinvention, Barrymore developed her own production company and produced Charlie's Angels, one of 2000's biggest money earners, and more success followed. With a Hugh Grant romantic musical comedy and a drama opposite Jessica Lange in the offing, Barrymore may well be in peak form just now, with surprises in store that anyone who observes her career progress would know better than to try to predict. Sarah Jessica Parker is a child-actor who came of age and didn't look back. She spent much of her childhood doing Afterschool Specials and Broadway plays, but she became most widely known for her role as a geeky brainiac in the 1982 cult TV sitcom Square Pegs. Through the '80s, she turned up in supporting roles in crowd-pleasers like Footloose, then flashed a sophisticated comedic talent opposite Steve Martin in the 1991 film L.A. Story, which paved the way for roles in Honeymoon in Vegas and Ed Wood. Basically, she worked and worked and worked some more. It took Parker two decades to land her perfect role--that of the snarky, stylish, relationship-challenged Manhattan columnist on HBO's landmark Sex and the City. And nothing in those two decades was wasted, apparently. The sum total of her comedic timing, emotional range, technical skill, particular charm, personal style and sheer professionalism was essential to bringing off the daring writing that made Sex and the City unusual. Since the show ended in 2004, Parker has done The Family Stone and Failure to Launch on the big screen, and though the jury may be out as to whether she'll endure as a big-screen star, it's unlikely that the goodwill her adorable chic and make-it-look-easy talent have earned her will run dry before her savvy and experience find a new vehicle. Naomi Watts' performance in King Kong is a great reminder that, among Hollywood's late bloomers, she is the unrivaled standout. As the young actress whose unexpected ability to project subtle but riveting, straight-from-the-heart emotion in front of Jack Black's camera on the way to Skull Island, she seemed almost to be making reference to her own breakthrough performance in David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Though the Brit-born, Australian-reared beauty had been expected to launch out of the 1991 Australian movie Flirting along with her two charming costars--Nicole Kidman and Thandie Newton--she experienced neither the greater nor lesser ascension that they, respectively, enjoyed. Stuck in failed or simply terrible films--like the disastrous 1995 comic book flick Tank Girl or Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering--while her close friend Kidman's career soared, she had every right to be discouraged. Women rarely hit it big after 30. Sharon Stone, who'd been working 12 years before Basic Instinct made her an "overnight star," is an exception. Even now, it's hard to understand how Watts' depth as an actress managed to go unexploited for so long, but the irony is that her breakthrough performance almost missed ever being seen. Mulholland Drive was originally a TV pilot for ABC, and ABC execs, having decided to work with an outre auteur like David Lynch, got cold feet when Lynch handed them the unsurprisingly unsettling piece. For people who saw the pilot back then, the performance by Watts was a jawdropper, and the idea that it would never be seen was almost incredible. More so to Watts herself. In a hugely improbable move, Lynch turned the pilot into a feature film, and the rest is history. Watts has gone on to a string of complex, witty, fearless performances, winning her first Oscar nomination for 21 Grams, flexing box-office muscle in two The Ringmovies and showing off her comic chops in I Heart Huckabees. The strange twists of Watts' fortune no doubt fuel the hope of many blonde unknowns, but those who've watched her in Mulholland Driveand concluded they could do as well might qualify as the "damn fools" W.C. Fields spoke of. Teri Hatcher, reportedly the highest-paid of the Desperate Housewives and perhaps of all actresses on nighttime TV, thanked ABC during her candid 2005 Golden Globes acceptance speech for giving her"a second chance at a career when I couldn't have been a bigger has-been." The huge success Hatcher now enjoys in her early forties is obviously an especially sweet coup--as well it should be, since before Housewives, she'd most recently been seen doing Radio Shack commercials with Howie Long. Hatcher had made a big splash on TV's Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, which ran from 1994 through 1997, so she'd had a solid platform to move out from. But even with the preparation of playing a sleek Bond girl in the 1997 007 film Tomorrow Never Dies, she had not been able to parlay her fame, looks and talent into movie stardom. This had to have been particularly distressing to an actress who'd put in two decades of small ups and downs before the Lois & Clarktriumph and knew that being out in the cold as her 40th birthday loomed was potentially fatal. But, hitting 40, she landed the role of a frantic, clumsy, sexy divorcee in an iffy-sounding TV series--a part that Sela Ward, Calista Flockhart and Mary-Louise Parker reportedly turned down--and she and Desperate Housewives got struck by lightning. Sheer luck? Not just. Look at almost anything Hatcher did in her fallow years--her small comedic turn in Spy Kidsin 2001, for instance--and you see the appealing quirkiness and nervous beauty that the world now finds irresistible. She may have flown under the radar for years, but she resurfaced looking great and proceeded to deliver consistent, winning performances week after week on a hit show. When it comes to living and prevailing in Hollywood, a town built on the suspension of disbelief, persistence is a strategy against which rational arguments fail. Fields' "damn fool" is tomorrow's star. There's always reason for hope that a great, career-making part is just around the corner. The examples abound and the failures are never heard from. And any career that's ever gotten started can never really be pronounced officially dead. As Mark Twain so wittily put it: "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Excerpted from the July/August 2006 issue of Hollywood Life. Previously, on To Live and Blank in L.A. To Live and Wed in L.A.

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