Most likely you know Dooley, too, no doubt for his parental roles opposite Molly Ringwald in “Sixteen Candles,” Dennis Christopher in “Breaking Away,” Julia Roberts in “Runaway Bride,” Helen Hunt on TV’s “Mad About You” and Cheryl Hines on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
It is a testament to Dooley’s skill that he manages to elevate what in lesser hands would be a stock character with comedic grace notes (the car salesman who goes into apoplexy at being asked for a refund in “Breaking Away”) and emotional shadings (his moving heart-to-heart with Ringwald in “Sixteen Candles” after he realizes he forgot her milestone birthday).
But there is more to Dooley, 94, than being a movie dad who doesn’t always know best.
In a more than 60-year career, his was an unconventional actor’s journey. He was 49 years old when he landed his first leading role in a movie as, yes, father of the bride in Robert Altman’s “A Wedding.” This after 25 years as a New York actor.
The role that got him noticed by television networks in the 1960s, he writes, was not his month-long stint replacing Art Carney on Broadway opposite Walter Matthau in “The Odd Couple,” but his inspired turn in a popular cigarette commercial that aired during an Academy Awards broadcast.
“Movie Dad” is breezy and conversational. Adapted from Dooley’s well-received one-man show of the same title, it is audience-tested, with career-spanning anecdotes that are funny and sometimes dishy (confronting Matthau, Oscar to his Felix, about his infuriating habit of breaking the fourth wall to milk Neil Simon’s already classic one-liners).
Some of Dooley’s credits are surprising. It turns out he co-created the award-winning children’s education series “The Electric Company.” He also provides glimpses into the working methods of Altman (with whom he made five films) and Christopher Guest (three) as a member of their stock companies.
“Movie Dad” has plenty of stories about generation-defining classics. Dooley shares that he initially turned down what would become one of his iconic roles, as the father in “Sixteen Candles,” but changed his mind after director and screenwriter John Hughes wrote the scene with Ringwald in which she opens up to him about her unrequited high school crush. “That’s why they call them crushes,” her dad reassures her. “If they were easy, they’d call them something else.”
As originally written, he reveals, the scene ended on an uncomfortable note, with him patting his daughter on the behind and asking her, “Where the heck are your panties?” He improvised a replacement line that Hughes used in the film: “When you meet your Mr. Right, make sure he knows you wear the pants in the family.”
But equally fascinating are the personal revelations. The emotional core of “Movie Dad” is Dooley’s own devastated parenthood. In addition to having an emotionally remote father, the beloved movie dad is twice divorced. (He has been married since 1984 to his third wife, Winnie Holzman, who later created the series “My So-Called Life” and the Tony Award-winning libretto to the Broadway musical “Wicked.”) His second wife disappeared with their children following their divorce.
Their absence haunts him throughout his career. He writes about one poignant scene in “Breaking Away,” in which he must comfort his cyclist son after the Italian racers he idolized sabotage his race. “I was embracing a young boy who could be … my missing son,” he writes. “At the time, I remember thinking … I wish my real missing son could see this scene.”
Spoiler alert: There is a happy ending to this off-screen drama.
As a character actor, Dooley has enjoyed the kinds of scene-stealing roles that are denied to movie stars whose names are above the title. He had indelible turns as Wimpy in “Popeye,” as a small-town man who claims to have been abducted and probed by aliens in “Waiting for Guffman,” and as the voice of Sarge in Pixar’s “Cars” trilogy. He writes that Dustin Hoffman called him personally to cast him as Willy Loman’s neighbor in the Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman” (Dooley was not available).
But it’s in the capacity of a movie dad that his work has most resonated for generations. “Hundreds of young women,” he writes, “have written to me, or stopped me on the street, saying, ‘I wish you were my dad.’”
Donald Liebenson is an entertainment writer. His work has been published in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, VanityFair.com and New York Magazine’s Vulture website.
Movie Dad
Finding Myself and My Family, On Screen and Off
By Paul Dooley
Applause. 304 pp. $29.95
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