David James Elliott; Celebrity Profile

David James Elliott Celebrity Profile

E!: In the spring of 1990, 29-year-old David Elliott moved to Hollywood to pursue his dream of acting, adding the middle name 'James' to join the Screen Actors Guild. In the process, commitment-phobic David broke the heart of his long-time girlfriend, Nanci Chambers.
Nanci: But that's okay. I knew that it was just ... it wasn't about me. It was just about the struggle. He thought he needed to go and be an actor without me, that I would get in the way.
DJE: And I gotta tell ya, you come here, and it's really tough to meet people. And it's tough to meet people when you're alone.
Nanci: You know, I thought he was just having a great time and everything was going well. He had all these new friends. Of course, I was just mortified. His first job was a movie with Heather Locklear .. playing his, you know .. Oh, I just wanted to die! Like, great! Heather Locklear. That's so great!
DJE: And I was all alone. I was calling her and I kept saying, "You gotta come down." She kept saying she was coming down. She was coming down. She wouldn't come.
Nanci: And he showed up one day. I was at work. I came home, and he was sitting on my patio, in front of my house, and I said, "What are you doing here?" And he said, "I came to pack you."
DJE: Hey, I'm here. Start packing, 'cause we're going.
Nanci: So he packed up my house, and I've been here ever since. He decided to keep me! [laughs]
E!: Four months after moving to Los Angeles, Nanci joined David in his small east Hollywood apartment. Two struggling actors living on love and Canadian residual payments.
E!: In the fall of 1991, the couple was married in a small ceremony at Los Angeles city hall.
Nanci: We didn't have any money to have a wedding, so we went to the justice of the peace. Didn't tell anybody. Anybody! Not my parents, not his parents. Nobody knew for about three years after.
DJE: 'Cause we thought we'll have a wedding later and we'll have a big wedding and this'll be good.
E!: The big wedding would have to wait. David and Nanci were barely scraping by.
DJE: I couldn't get arrested. And then I started getting desperate. Money was getting low.
E!: Each failed audition made the situation worse.
DJE: Every day the stakes got higher. And then the pressure mounted. I would go into a room and I would just ...like, fall apart and die.
Nanci: His agents, they were ready to sell him down the river to anything that came along and everyone was losing faith in him.
DJE: They were basically, like, "Let's get rid of him. He's hopeless."
Nanci: It was over. It was all over.
E!: In a desperate attempt to break through in Hollywood, David's agent recommended that Elliott meet with renowned acting coach Howard Fine.
Howard Fine: He was at a low point in terms of his confidence. He'd done a lot of theatre. He had been a member of several theatre companies. And he hadn't made the transition and head-set yet to Los Angeles.
DJE: I was going into these rooms trying to figure out what they wanted, you know. What do they want from me? Instead of saying, "Screw them! This is what I do. This is what I think about this role."
E!: David honed his techniques, hoping to unlock the secret to landing a role. Then, in the midst of David's struggle, Nanci revealed that the couple was going to have a baby. Suddenly the pressure on David and Nanci became almost unbearable.
Nanci: And I ended up having to model here to pay the bills. I modelled until I was about five months pregnant, 'til I couldn't do it any more. I mean, I was fainting. It was bad... sucking in my stomach all day, trying to still wear those little tiny clothes I was supposed to be wearing. I remember like it was yesterday. We were sitting on that couch - same couch! - and said, "We have a couple of thousand dollars. Do you wanna pack up and go home, or do you wanna go to the Bahamas? Let's go to the Bahamas!"
DJE: So we went away and went to the Bahamas, and we had some property, and my father and I had rebuilt the house that he grew up in. So Nanci and I went down for two months and we just kicked back there.
E!: Elliott returned to the island where his father grew up. The respite gave David a chance to reflect on where he'd been and where he was going.
DJE: I knew I needed to get out of town. I'd forgotten why I'd gotten into this business in the first place. And I remembered. I found my muse of fire again. I remembered why I did it.
E!: After returning to Los Angeles in the fall of 1992, David was called in to read for a high-profile new TV series - The Untouchables. David and Nanci realized that this was the most important audition of David's career.
Nanci: I was carrying Stephanie. We were umpteenth thousands of dollars in debt and plus we only had the $2,000, which we'd just spent.
DJE: My God, right now I'm so far in debt it's absurd. In debt, pregnant, I mean, you know ....

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