E!: In the winter of 1977, David James Elliott was a 17-year-old high school dropout named David Smith. What he lacked in money he made up for in determination.
Pat: He wanted to get away from the rules and regulations of home, and I think that's normal.
Frank: I quit high school as well and we moved to Toronto and we lived in a rooming house. We both shared the same room for a few months.
DJE: It was grisly. It was really grisly.
Pat: He would never let me see where he lived, so it must have been bad.
E!: David and Frank shared their dilapidated tenement house with two other band friends.
DJE: We were gonna make a go of this thing.
E!: The boys had lofty goals, but when it came to playing gigs, the venues were anything but glamorous.
Frank: The projectiles would start flying ... like beer bottles, a lot of spitting and that. David would just turn around and throw the bottles back or drink a whole bottle of beer and spit it on the audience. The classic punk thing to do, I suppose.
DJE: I looked around. I applied around the area and I get this job, and I think I was making $4 an hour and it was pretty grisly, putting buckles on belts. And I thought, what have I done?
E!: He may have been punk, but David missed the amenities of home.
Pat: Mom ironed; Mom did the laundry; Mom cooked. All of a sudden, he had to fend for himself, so it was a good lesson. Really. What is that, the college of hard knocks, they called that or something? He learned.
E!: David learned that he hated his new lifestyle and the poverty that came with it.
DJE: One day, I woke up. There was cockroaches everywhere. They had this community bathroom. You go in there and there'd be like roach traps that were just ladened with roaches. And I thought, this is it. I can't live like this any more.
Frank: David had left a note, saying, "I'm sorry, guys, I can't do this."
Pat: He phoned me at work one day and he
said, "Mom, can I come home and go back to school?" And I seem to think that
I ... I started to cry, I was so happy. I said, "David, you couldn't have
said anything that would make me happier. Come back." 
E!: Eight months older and infinitely wiser, David moved back home. In January of 1979, he returned to Milton High.
Pat: Actually, when you look back on it, it was the best thing for David to have left school when he did.
E!: Teacher Brenda Kearney noticed David's determination.
Mrs. Kearney: He came back to school with a mission in mind. I need to get an education. I gotta get it completed. Let's get it over with.
E!: David immediately signed up for a slate of classes calculated to get him to graduation as soon as possible. Looking for an easy credit, David enrolled in Mrs. Kearney's History of Theatre class.
DJE: I thought it was a bird course. I'll do this. This sounds easy.
Mrs. Kearney: I taught King Lear, one of Shakespeare's ... as you know ... Shakespeare's plays. Now picture this: adolescent young men, and I'm going to teach King Lear
E!: With low expectations, Mrs. Kearney assigned David the lead role.
Mrs. Kearney: When David read King Lear, everybody in the class turned and looked and thought, "Wait a minute here!" Something else evolved. There was really something there.
DJE: And she said, "My God, David! You should be an actor!" Ah! That's what I'll do!
E!: David had finally found a way to express himself.
DJE: We'd sit around and we'd talk about we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that ... and nobody ever ... it was tough to break out of that town. A lot of guys I knew quit high school and gave up their dreams.
E!: David didn't give up. 19-year-old David Smith graduated from Milton High School in the spring of 1980. David's brother suggested he train for his career at Toronto's Ryerson Polytechnic University. But the audition almost never happened.
Pat: I thought they had gone. And about half an hour after bus time, who comes walking through the door but Michael and David. And I said, "What are you doing? I thought you were on your way to Toronto!" "Oh my goodness!" They didn't know what the time was. Anyway, I had to get my car out and whip them into Toronto so I'm taking credit for his career.
E!: The audition process was intensely creative and really overwhelmed the introverted David.
DJE: And I went in, painfully shy as I was, and I really ... I mean, I'm sitting out in the hall waiting for my turn to go in and people are dancing and they're so flamboyant and way over the top and I'm sitting there kind of cowering in the corner going, "Oh my God!"
So I sang Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. Miracle of miracles, out of 900 people auditioning, they picked 30 and I was chosen. They told me later they saw, they said, .... "You're a natural, and you have no bad habits."
E!: David was thrilled with the opportunity. But his father, once more, disapproved.
DJE: He said, "No, you're not going. Absolutely not." And I went, "I'll do it without you."
Pat: His father wasn't too keen on him following that direction, but if that's what he wanted to do, that was fine by me. I'd like to be able to say that I recognized that David was talented, but I can't. I never would have guessed that, unless maybe he was convincing me of his innocence a lot of times and I wasn't aware that he was acting and he did a good job on it.