“In the ninth grade I read a book by John Knowles called A Separate Peace. The fictional prep school it described seemed so romantic to me — the old school with the gothic architecture. That book is what really convinced me to go to Princeton. I wanted to play football at a prestigious school.”
Upon graduating from Santa Monica High in 1984, Dean turned down 17 athletic scholarships to go to Princeton which, as a member of the Ivy League, couldn't offer him one. He captained Princeton's volleyball team. As a free safety on the football team he set an NCAA record that still stands by racking up 12 interceptions in a single season and earned First-Team All-American honors. He also made his mark as a ladies man. During two of his years at Princeton Cain dated Brooke Shields, a model who had become a cultural icon and an adolescent fantasy thanks to her memorable Calvin Klein ads.
CONTINUED BELOW
As graduation time neared Cain settled on football as his career of choice. He was signed by the Buffalo Bills as a free agent. In July of 1988, while training with the team at the SUNY Fredonia campus, Cain injured his knee. By November, the strapping athlete — listed variously as 5-10, 6-foot and even 6-1— was forced to retire from pro football at the age of 22 and return home in search of a new career.
It would take Dean Cain a decade to begin shedding the man-of-steel image from Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993-97).
Dean Cain decided to make a career of the other passion he had discovered at Princeton: writing. His father helped him apply it toward screenplays. Around then Christopher Cain won his second Golden Reel award for directing Young Guns and was well positioned to help Dean get a start in Hollywood. The younger Cain landed a few small studio writing jobs, but to pay the bills he put his cosmopolitan good looks to work acting in commercials. In four years Cain appeared in 35. The screen exposure led to guest roles on TV shows like Grapevine, Life Goes On, A Different World and Beverly Hills, 90210 in which he played the boyfriend of the Shannen Doherty character.
Cain's big break came when he landed the lead in the pilot for Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. The show was picked up by ABC and enjoyed five successful seasons (1993-1997). Playing a superhero born on Krypton, raised in a small town and hiding behind the alter-ego of a mild-mannered newspaper reporter would ultimately engender an insipid quality to the young star's image. But during those first heady months as Superman Cain's square-jawed-smoothie looks made him a frequent object of mass-media swooning and an overnight household name.
That starpower even allowed Cain to persuade the show's producers to let him write two of the episodes: “Season's Greeding” and “Virtually Destroyed”.
From the outset Lois & Clark grappled with the bane of every weekly TV series: the need for a steady supply of fresh twists and new dimensions within the suffocating confines of a family genre. The heroic struggle to keep a flesh-and-blood Kryptonian flying for five seasons on earth airwaves led, near the end, to his being married off to Lois Lane, an event which, to Superman fans, had always seemed only a parallel-universe possibility. It failed to generate enough interest to reverse the show's ratings slide.
That marriage seemed to be echoed in Dean Cain's own life. Taking full advantage of his celebrity, Cain had been dating Hollywood babes like Ami Dolenz and Pamela Anderson, as well as Gabby Reece, a volleyball player, model and TV personality. In 1997 he surprised everyone by announcing his engagement to Nashville recording sensation Mindy McCready. From the release of her first album Ten Thousand Angels in April of 1996 McCready was acclaimed for her angelic voice, blonde beauty and catchy hits like “A Girl's Gotta Do (What a Girl's Gotta Do)”
Cain popped the question in mid September of 1997 while at the home of Mindy's parents. The moment was apparently unplanned. When McCready accepted, Cain slipped on her finger a ring made from a green twist tie.
The engagement caught McCready as her star was bursting into a supernova and as Cain's own dimmed with the cancellation of Lois & Clark. Cain was able to devote time to directing the music videos for two of his fiancée's hits: “You'll Never Know” and “The Other Side of This Kiss”. His acting career was sustained by the release of two theatrical releases (Best Men (1997) and Eating Las Vegas (1997)) and several TV movies. All slipped quietly into the twilight of late-night and cable TV.
The magnitude of Cain's success with the Lois & Clark series came back to haunt him as he tried to make the transition to movies. Having been typecast as an antiseptic do-gooder, he couldn't get directors to consider him for the kinds of gritty, multi-dimensional characters at the heart of most big-budget Hollywood films.
Toward the end of 1997 Dean Cain and partner Mike Carr formed a television production company called Angry Dragon Entertainment (ADE). The company's first successful project was a revamping of Ripley's Believe It or Not narrated by Cain himself. It premiered on TBS Superstation in January of 1999 and generated strong enough audience interest to send it ultimately into syndication. ADE also secured a TV development deal with Columbia TriStar Television.
PAGE 3
