One-time speech communication major Davidlee Willson '92 might just make it in Hollywood — without even being there.
	By Carl Hansen '99 "I always grew up thinking Los Angeles is the golden city, [and] that’s where I wanted to go," says actor Davidlee Willson ’92. But for him, the city of angels wasn’t what it had been cracked up to be. Case in point: on the film Pariah, director Randolph Kret’s skewed vision turned a normal production day into a hospital stay for Willson. "I got beaten up the first day of filming because I was dressed as a skinhead," he recalls of the experience on the Hollywood Boulevard set. "The filmmaker wanted the real reactions of people to a neo- Nazi walking down the street, and a bunch of them jumped on me and beat the crap out of me with a chain." Meeting Willson, one gets no sense of the skinhead character or his breakthrough role as a rapist in Leaving Las Vegas. His short blond hair is neat, his blue eyes wide, and his humor high — because he’s talking about the project that will, he hopes, put him on the map as a lead actor and a screenwriter. The Autumn Heart, a coming-of-age film he wrote, produced, and acted in, is loosely based on Willson’s home life in Saugus, Massachusetts. But while Willson’s family remains intact offscreen, the on-screen family has long been ripped apart. When Ann and Lee divorced, their four young children were split between them. The three girls — Deb, Donna, and Diane — stayed with Ann while the only son, Daniel, went to Lee. Years later when Ann suffers a heart attack, she asks to see her son. To honor their mother’s wish, the daughters seek out their brother — and they all discover a family they never knew existed. Willson is quick to deny more than a casual similarity between his real family and the cinema version. "The characters are inspired by my family, but they’re not my family, even though their names are all the same. The three sisters are named after my real sisters. So I have a Deb, Donna, and Diane," he says. But the brother, whom he plays, is named Daniel, not Davidlee. Deb in the film is played by Ally Sheedy — most notable for her ’80s portrayals of teen angst — and the mother, Ann, is played by Tyne Daly of Cagney and Lacey fame.