Despite playing lovable dads on-screen in films like “Sixteen Candles” and “Runaway Bride,” Paul Dooley recently revealed he spent years estranged from his real-life children.
In the recently released memoir, “Movie Dad: Finding Myself and My Family, On Screen and Off,” the actor, 94, claims he suddenly lost contact with his daughter Robin and son Adam.
At the time, Dooley had divorced the children’s mom — his second wife, whose name he does not reveal — and would see Adam and Robin on a “regular basis,” including one month every summer.
However, Dooley claims they disappeared after a “great summer” together and alleges that he found a letter in his mailbox from his ex-wife that read, “I’m leaving. I’m taking the kids. We’re not coming back.”
“I was devastated,” he tells Page Six in an exclusive interview. “Naturally, I was in shock and I couldn’t believe my ears and I kind of was in denial and I thought, surely this won’t continue.”
Ironically, during this period of despair, Dooley began getting cast in more roles, playing fathers in movies including “Breaking Away,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Runaway Bride.”
“I thought that was really strange,” he concedes. “And I ask myself, what is it about me that makes me seem so fatherly? And I thought, having lost my children and having missed them, the yearning for them becomes so much a part of me that it could actually be felt by an audience.”
The “Popeye” star tells us he hired private detectives to find his children but called off the search after a year. He also writes in his book, which came out in December that he tried to sue in court to no avail.
“I said to myself, ‘What happens if I find them?’ … If I went there with authorities and took them back, that would only traumatize them another time … That might have traumatized them in such a way they’d never get over it, you know, probably hate me.’ So, I had to decide that I’m going to bite my tongue and see what happens.”
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The “Cars” actor tells us that his kids eventually contacted him 10 years later — when they were about 18 years old.
Dooley explains in his memoir that his son reached out to him after finding his number in the New York phone book and the two arranged to meet in a hotel room.
“I did that because a reunion could have been traumatic for him,” he writes. “For me, it was more of a celebration. Within days he moved into my apartment. Our reunion was complete.”
Adam now lives near Dooley in California. And while Robin lives on the East Coast, she makes regular trips to see her dad.
Not only did Dooley’s relationship with his kids improve, but so did his love life.
Since 1984, he has been happily married to screenwriter and dramatist Winnie Holzman, with whom he shares daughter Savannah. Holzman is best known for creating “My So-Called Life” and co-writing the long-running Broadway musical, “Wicked.”
Despite his long list of movie and TV credits and string of television commercials, Dooley says that he’s still the most recognized for his role in “Sixteen Candles,” which almost didn’t happen.
He had turned down the role twice until then-writer-director John Hughes called explaining that he’d written a new scene — “which is the iconic scene that so many women relate to” — and asked Dooley to look at the script again.
“[Hughes] wanted me very badly because having turned him down twice, but he based it on the movie ‘Breaking Away,’ which is a very successful movie for me, and it stamped me as a kind of a dad,” he revealed.
