Best known as Dr. Derek "McDreamy" Shepherd on "Grey's Anatomy,"
Patrick Dempsey has come a long way in his life and career. From his early days growing up,
to his sudden heartthrob status as a Hollywood star, here's how he's transformed over the years.
Watching Patrick Dempsey on screen, everything seems to have come easily to him, but that
wasn't always the case. Speaking at Gatepath's annual "Power of Possibilities" event in 2018,
Dempsey revealed that he was placed in special education classes when he was young
due to undiagnosed dyslexia. Eventually diagnosed and given the proper accommodations,
Dempsey said at the Gatepath event,
"Everybody's an individual and we have to approach education in that way."
Discussing his diagnosis with Barbara Walters, Dempsey revealed,
"I think it's made me who I am today [...] You have to keep working, I've never given up."
While Dempsey's success may scream Hollywood, the actor's childhood looked a lot different.
In an appearance on Maine Voices Live, the star revealed he lived
in several towns throughout Maine in his youth. Dempsey recalled,
"I grew up in Turner until about junior high, then we moved to Buckfield and I was
there until about sophomore year and then went to St. Dom's in Lewiston."
If you've never heard of some of those places, you aren't alone. In 2010, the population in Turner,
Maine was 5,734 and Buckfield, Maine was even smaller, with just over 2,000 people.
Now imagine how small they were when Dempsey was growing up in the late 1960s and the 1970s.
Those small town roots left their mark on Dempsey, who told Maine magazine,
"I think the sense of a small town really applies itself when you go out into the world.
Everybody knows everybody, so you have to be able to get along, and if you don't
agree with your neighbor, you have to be able to work through it and be civilized."
Patrick Dempsey found his strengths outside of the classroom as a kid, playing just about every
sport imaginable to pass the time. During an appearance on Maine's "The Nite Show,"
Dempsey revealed he played baseball, soccer, and football, but his real passion was for ski racing.
"I won the state of Maine championship in slalom when I was 13, yes."
For those not in the know, slalom is the alpine skiing event where competitors race
downhill between flags. But despite his athletic ability, Dempsey didn't play sports at school,
as the star revealed on "The Nite Show,"
"They were never at the school because I never had the grades to get on any of the teams."
Dempsey continued,
"I was a horrible student, I was not really an academic, unfortunately,
which is why I went into acting for some reason."
He added that he was pretty good at getting in touch with his emotions and expressing himself,
and enjoyed participating in local theater.
Given his academic challenges, it's not hard to imagine that Patrick Dempsey didn't
exactly love school. It makes sense, then, that he left it for what he hoped was a brighter future.
According to the actor, it all started during a school power outage.
Dempsey's shop teacher taught him how to juggle to pass the time and he picked it up right away. He
went home, practiced, and joined a performance group. As Dempsey told Maine Voices Live,
"I put together a three-minute juggling routine and I did it here in Portland,
the regional for the Talent America competition."
"I sort of just kind of fell into this thing accidentally."
Dempsey won that competition and started considering a new future.
"I was gonna run away with the circus, but I was a bit too young,
they wouldn't let me in. It was Ringling Brothers."
And he explained further on "The Nite Show,"
"I tried to do Ringling Brothers Clown College
and I didn't get accepted [...] So clearly it wasn't my career path, it wasn't my destiny."
Still, Dempsey always seems pretty happy to show that he still has some circus skills,
whether it was his destiny or not.
"This was my escape out of a small town in Maine, was to juggle my way out."
When clown college and professional juggling didn't work out for Dempsey,
he took his talents elsewhere. In 1987, Dempsey starred in the teen romantic
comedy "Can't Buy Me Love" as a nerdy outcast trying to be one of the cool kids.
The same year, he starred in "In the Mood," in which he played a hunky teenager who was
on the prowl for older women, followed by 1989's "Happy Together" and "Loverboy."
Long before he was McDreamy on "Grey's Anatomy," Dempsey was quite the teenage heartthrob in the
'80s, but his career slowed a bit in the early '90s, when Dempsey became involved
with his much older manager, Rocky Parker, whom he ultimately married. After that, his career
went on the back burner with mostly small parts, until their messy divorce was finalized in 1994.
Not long after his divorce from Parker was finalized, Dempsey's life was turned upside
down once again. He brought his then-girlfriend, now wife, to meet his mother for the first time,
and she wasn't acting like her normal self, as he told Maine Voices Live,
"It was odd that my mother wasn't feeling well. She was always someone
who was very active and outgoing and never ill. It was just odd."
After Dempsey returned home, he received a call from his sister with the bad news.
He recalled the moment he learned of his mother's diagnosis during an interview with Today, saying,
"My sister called and said Mom had been diagnosed with cancer. [...] She had ovarian cancer and the
tumor was the size of a grapefruit and that she needed to go into surgery immediately."
Dempsey's mother came through the surgery well and was in remission for a time,
but the diagnosis would impact the whole family for years to come.
As the actor's mother continued to seek treatment,
Patrick Dempsey's career was experiencing a resurgence, thanks to romantic comedies.
He was cast as Andrew Hennings, the big city fiancé of Reese Witherspoon's Melanie Smooter
in "Sweet Home Alabama" in 2002, and the movie was a sort of new beginning for the actor.
On the heels of that movie's success, Dempsey was cast in his most iconic role to date:
Dr. Derek Shepherd on the ABC medical drama "Grey's Anatomy," which premiered
in early 2005. While early reviews for the series were lukewarm, fans loved it and
critics were eventually won over. Once again, Dempsey was catapulted to heartthrob status.
Shortly after the premiere of "Grey's Anatomy," Dempsey was cast in yet another magical role,
this time alongside Amy Adams in Disney's fantasy film "Enchanted" in 2007.
In 2008, Patrick Dempsey founded the Dempsey Center to give back to the community where
his mother first started receiving treatment, in Lewiston, Maine. According to the Dempsey Center
website, the actor and the rest of his family realized through their mother's experience
how much a cancer diagnosis impacts everyone. That was the inspiration for the creation of the
Dempsey Center, a cancer support center with resources for affected families.
Dempsey told Maine Voices Live that it was after the second or third recurrence
of his mother's cancer that they started learning about wellness centers, saying,
"There's so many ways to give back and do something, but sometimes you need to just
take care of your own area, your own town. You make a bigger impact there. Sometimes
people think globally but I think sometimes we forget what's going on in our own backyard."
Dempsey's mother ultimately died from the disease in 2014,
six years after the founding of the Dempsey Center.
Founding a cancer support center doesn't come without costs, something Patrick Dempsey
and his family no doubt learned quickly after the founding of the Dempsey Center.
The actor explained on "The Nite Show,
"We had to figure out how to raise money because all the services are free
and I didn't really want to do, like, a banquet, they're not really that much fun.
So the bike ride is much more enjoyable and the run and the walk, it's really fun."
Dempsey himself competes in the bike rides each year.
According to him, one of the great things about the Dempsey Challenge is that there
are many ways to get involved. On Maine Voices Live, Dempsey shared,
"It's not a race. You're cruising along and
then you stop at the rest stops and you go at your own pace."
Over the years, the Dempsey Challenge has raised more than $16 million for the Dempsey Center,
according to Central Maine.
While his acting career flourished, Dempsey continued to pursue his passion project of race
car driving. Despite getting involved in racing as an adult, Dempsey revealed on "The Nite Show,"
"I always loved car racing since I was a little kid."
This led Dempsey to found Dempsey Racing in 2006, beginning his career as a
competitive race car driver. In the 2013 documentary mini-series "Patrick Dempsey:
Racing Le Mans," Dempsey revealed just how important racing is to his life, sharing,
"My life really started once I started racing."
In 2015, ESPN reported that Dempsey's team took second place in the GTE amateur category of the
24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in France. Dempsey said of the second place finish,
"I think it's hard to put into words how much it means to be on the podium in Le
Mans [...] It's an amazing accomplishment — you always dream about moments like this.
I've worked really hard over the last three years to make this happen, and I'm here."
In 2015, after a decade on "Grey's Anatomy," fans were shocked when Patrick Dempsey's character,
Dr. Derek Shepherd, was killed off the show following a car accident and,
ironically enough, poor medical care that resulted in him being brain dead.
However, Dempsey's departure wasn't a total shock, given that his character had been in
only a handful of episodes that season, but fans were still truly devastated.
Given Dempsey's long run on the show, speculation immediately started about how and why he'd
been given the boot from the series. But according to an interview Dempsey gave,
he left "Grey's Anatomy" simply to focus on his family and save his marriage. As he People,
"You can only do one thing at a time and do it well [...] I [learned] to prioritize.
Our union has to be the priority. I wasn't prepared to give up on her and she wasn't either.
We both wanted to fight for it."
"One door closes, another door opens, my old man used to say."
After his departure from "Grey's Anatomy," Dempsey could have made the transition to racing,
but despite never feeling at home as an actor, he just can't seem to stop acting. In 2018,
Dempsey starred as the titular character in the TV miniseries "The Truth About the Harry Quebert
Affair." Then in 2020, he starred as Dominic Morgan in the first season of the television
series "Devils," playing a very different character from the beloved Derek Shepherd
and the heartthrobs he's portrayed for most of his career. Of the character, Dempsey told TV Insider,
"It was unexpected for me because you don't know if he's a good guy or a bad guy.
Dominic does whatever it takes to achieve his objectives."
But whether Dempsey will continue working on television shows or make his way back to
the big screen is still uncertain. He revealed on Maine Voices Live,
"I really am enjoying shows that have like a 10-part miniseries. They're fun to do."
As "Grey's Anatomy" fans are aware, in the Season 17 premiere of the show, which aired in late 2020,
viewers were pleasantly shocked to witness the return of a slightly older and more gray-haired
Dr. Derek Shepherd, in a dream sequence while Dr. Meredith Grey was unconscious
after contracting COVID-19. Patrick Dempsey appeared in four episodes of Season 17,
helping Meredith come back from the brink of death by reminding
her she had their children to think about. Of the return to "Grey's Anatomy" Dempsey told Deadline,
"It was great. It was really fun, very special [...] It's crazy how much time has passed,
but it really was so comforting, and lovely, and inspiring to go back,
and to work together, to see everybody."
When asked during an interview for Variety whether there was
any hope of seeing Derek again in the future, Dempsey teased,
"​​Who knows? Never say never with this show, right?"
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