Red carpet, 'Blue Valentine'

When he was still hanging out with the football team and the Beta Theta Pi brothers at Penn, 1966 College graduate John Doman never thought he would become an actor — let alone an actor in an Oscar-nominated film.

Blue Valentine follows the disintegrating marriage of a young couple, played by Michelle Williams — whose performance garnered her a Best Actress Oscar nomination — and Ryan Gosling. As Jerry Heller in the film, Doman’s role as the father of Williams’ character was small. Due to timing constraints in the film, much of his work was cut from the final product.

“That, of course, is disappointing, but something that all film actors have to live with — no control over how something is edited,” Doman wrote in an e-mail.

Though quick to define himself as a film actor now, that definition was not always so easy for Doman.

“I had absolutely no plans to become an actor when I was at Penn,” he wrote. “In fact, I had no plans to become anything during those years. I was playing football, partying hard at the Beta House and enjoying classes in English Literature.”

And before he set foot on Penn’s campus, he had no idea of ending up there either.

“Coming from a blue collar background in Philly,” he wrote, “the idea of going to Penn never crossed my mind. I was only interested in playing college football somewhere and Penn was not on my radar.”

But when Penn showed interest in Doman’s main talent at the time, he couldn’t pass it up.

His father — who never went to college himself — convinced Doman that it was an opportunity that couldn’t be ignored.

“Suddenly I was a student at a world class university and it opened my eyes and mind to the world beyond North Philly,” he wrote. Amid football, friends and Beta — not to mention classes — Doman’s experiences “broadened my horizons and changed my life forever.”

An unexpected change, however, came with the advent of the Vietnam War. As a way to avoid the draft after graduating from Penn, Doman enlisted in the Marine Corps Officer Candidate School and spent 13 months in Vietnam.

It was when Doman returned from the tour that he turned to a new, more theatrical, career.

During his first days back in the States, he went to the movies and saw Midnight Cowboy and The Graduate. Not an unusual way to celebrate a return home — but it was the way he reacted that set him apart.

“I was so impressed with Dustin Hoffman’s performances in those films that I thought that acting was something I would really like to do,” he wrote.

But that was, again, quite a change of pace.

“I knew nothing about acting at the time,” he wrote, “and my plan was to go to graduate school, get an MBA and go to New York and into the advertising business.”

He lasted 20 years in advertising before he decided to finally follow his silver screen dreams.

Despite starting off at the relatively late age of 46, Doman’s career hasn’t slowed down. In addition to appearing in a number of plays, he is now best known for his role as the lead character Bill Rawls on The Wire. Blue Valentine, filmed in Scranton, Pa., brought him closer to home. He is currently based in Prague, filming a new television series called Borgia, in which he plays one of the lead characters.

But come May, he’ll have a different reason to return home — his 45th class reunion at Penn. “I will always have a strong connection to Philadelphia,” he wrote.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.