DERMOT MULRONEY

A down-and-dirty cowboy in Young Guns, an AIDS patient in Longtime Companion, a bumbling burglar in Career Opportunities... Mulroney, DERMOT MULRONEY has played everything but a classic leading man. He'll finally get his chance this month in Point of No Return.

Dermot Mulroney's breakthrough role didn't exactly inspire thoughts of leading manhood. As Dirty Steve Stephens in the 1988 Brat Pack special, Young Guns, Mulroney left two lasting impressions: a jaw stuffed with an ever-spewing wad of tobacco and a set of teeth that looked like artifacts from the Pleistocene era.

But Mulroney has been able to transcend the image of that memorable scuzzy character to find himself wrestling recently with the delicate problems of making love -onscreen- to Bridget Fonda. In Point of No Return, an American remake of the French thriller La Femme Nikita, Mulroney plays government assassin Fonda's tenderly naive boyfriend.

"The strange thing was to have to do what you might call intimate scenes on my third day," Mulroney, 29, says of the process. "You get to know somebody well, but you don't know them at all. It's really weird. I've been lucky, I haven't had to do that too much. It's difficult."

Wait a minute - he's been lucky that he hasn't been called upon to make love to many beautiful actresses in the course of his career? Mulroney looks abashed as he tries to explain. "It is uncomfortable. I mean there you are on the floor, with less on than you can imagine. In hindsight it looks rosy and interesting and exciting, but it's all just slightly embarrassing. You don't know how to talk to the person for the rest of the day".

It also presents problems when he goes home and his wife, actress Catherine Keener, asks how work went. "It's difficult, there's no question about it," he acknowledges. It does pop into your mind and her mind at weird times. But there shouldn't be that much importance on it. The first step is to make it acting."

Mulroney may not be a star, a la Tom Cruise, or a Beverly Hills, 90210-style heartthrob, but since he arrived in Los Angeles shortly after college graduation he has become something almost as rare: a working actor. He has created a noteworthy range of parts, from the vulgar Dirty Steve ("That's the first time I really branched out and latched on to some completely other soul") to a young man dying of AIDS in 1990's Longtime Companion ("You could see that it was a brilliant piece of writing that needed to be made") to King, the troubled leader of a group of street kids in last year's Where the Day Takes You ("Usually I play the bad guy. With King, you can't really tell he's a hero, but he is").

This year, he has so many projects coming out he could be planning the Dermot Mulroney film festival. In addition to Point of No Return, he'll play Alan Bates' son in the Sam Shepard western Silent Tongue and Anjelica Huston's son in ABC's Family Pictures, airing March 21. The two-part miniseries tells the story of a family dealing with a handicapped child. The role required Mulroney to play ages seventeen to thirty-seven and sport "a neverending cavalcade of cuts" from the Sixties and Seventies.

Scheduled to open this summer is Peter Bogdanovich's The Thing Called Love. As a struggling Nashville songwriter, Mulroney not only vies with River Phoenix for the affections of Samantha Mathis, he gets to display his considerable musical talents. An accomplished cellist, Mulroney provides, as he puts it, "some stand-up country cello" on the film's soundtrack.

To discuss all this activity we meet at the restaurant of his choice: Jan's Kitchen, on Wilshire Boulevard, a place so untrendy that its diet plate is still hamburger patty and scoop of cottage cheese. Mulroney sports the beard he grew for Where the Day Takes You and kept for Silent Tongue and Point of No Return. He is exceedingly polite, almost unassuming. But he cuts the sweetness with a dash of sardonic humor. "Are you going to do stuff like write what I order?" he asks (Grilled ham and cheese - American cheese - on white.)

Like so many people who make an impact on the screen, in person he is much smaller than expected - about five-foot-nine with a tight, almost delicate frame. His face is striking, with a large, young boxer's nose and dark brown eyes that turn down slightly. It's a hard face to pin down; one minute you're sure he could never be called handsome, and then he is. One minute you think he'd make a great thug, then something shifts and he looks like a shy, high school student.

Mulroney has been married for a year and a half. He met Keener on the set of the otherwise forgettable Survival Quest in 1988. The actor is so in love with his wife that when he plays a character who is single, he pins his wedding ring to the inside of his clothes - when he's wearing any, that is. When he starts talking about Keener, he looks like a guy who can't believe he got the prettiest girl in class to go with him to the prom. He says when he's preparing for a part, he relies heavily on her advice. "I'm fortunate to be married to a great actor, so that's really helpful. We work a lot together. She's incredibly inspiring and helpful."

Asked if his being married bothers his female fans, he says, "What female fans? If I get any fan mail it's from guys - they loved Young Guns. Or from gay men because Longtime Companion had a huge effect on a lot of people."

Though he has played many young men from unstable families, the portrayals are a world away from Mulroney's own life. He grew up in Alexandria, Virginia, the sone of a lawyer father and amateur actress mother. He was the middle of five children and had, by his account, an idyllic childhood, full of music and culture. His first taste of the actor's life occurred at age seven, when he appeared in a backyard production. "I distinctly remember the curtain call, the image is crystal clear," he says. "All that applause... I think every actor would be lying if they said that they didn't have some part of them that needs that attention."

While he remained attracted to a life in the arts, reality took over when he entered college at Northwestern University. He studied film, theatre and music and assumed he'd work his way up the ranks from behind the camera. The thought of earning a living as an actor "was outlandish, unimaginable for me." He did, however, take some acting classes. And when an agent from the William Morris office came out to audition graduating seniors, Mulroney showed up to do a scene from Fool for Love, by Sam Shepard - with whom he went on to work with twice.

The character he played in the audition had a slight limp, and Mulroney thinks he was signed by the big-time Hollywood agent not just because of his skill onstage, but his smarts offstage as well. "It wasn't that I had put a pebble in my boot," he recalls, "It was that I had the wherewithal to take my boot off after the audition and dump the pebble out." Whatever it was, it worked. The agency signed him, he moved to Los Angeles, and in three months he was starring in a television movie, Sin of Innocence. "I made a deal with my dad that he'd pay rent for me for a year while I tried to give it a shot," he says. "Fortunately, he put out only $400 bucks before I could start paying it myself."

Even a batting champion strikes out some of the time, and for all the busyness of his life, Mulroney is passed over for more parts than he gets. "You have to have a really thick skin, so triweekly rejections don't have an emotional effect," he says of the auditioning process. "I like my career. I'm happy with it. Slow and steady wins the race."