Patrick Dempsey

Patrick Dempsey was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1966 and was a working teen lead by the middle of the eighties. His niche then was the unglamorous kid who wins by persistence: Ronald Miller in Can't Buy Me Love pays a cheerleader a thousand dollars to date him for a month, and the film only works because Dempsey plays him as genuinely uncool rather than movie-uncool. Loverboy, Some Girls, Coupe de Ville and, oddly, a young Meyer Lansky in Mobsters followed.

The nineties largely did not. He kept working, in smaller film parts and television, and the closest thing to a hit was a supporting role in Outbreak. Sweet Home Alabama in 2002 was a surprise box-office success and put him back in play. Then Grey's Anatomy arrived in 2005 and made him, at thirty-nine, one of the most recognisable faces on American television, in a role that came with a nickname he did not choose.

What he does well is charm with something withheld behind it. Robert Philip in Enchanted is the sharpest version, a divorce lawyer trying to be reasonable at a cartoon princess, and he plays exasperation more precisely than anyone else in that film plays whimsy. He has a Primetime Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe nominations, and People named him Sexiest Man Alive in 2023.

Motorsport is a second career rather than a hobby: he has raced at Le Mans, at Daytona and in the Baja 1000, and it has fed back into the acting, most directly as the driver Piero Taruffi in Ferrari. He has lately been taking harder, colder parts in Thanksgiving and Dexter: Original Sin, and they suit him.