She has faith in her charges

Beverlee Dean has survived two decades as a talent manager in the trenches of Hollywood, helping discover such diverse actors as Reese Witherspoon (“Sweet Home Alabama”), Jeremy London (“Party of Five,” “7th Heaven”) and Jason London (“Dazed and Confused”), and Kevin Sorbo (TV’s “Hercules”).

But it was her own battle against cancer -- a victory she attributes to her Roman Catholic faith and devotion to Saint Anthony of Padua -- that she credits for giving her the drive that has sustained her through a roller coaster career that is at a peak she never imagined.

As the manager of actor Jim Caviezel, who portrayed Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s controversial but successful film “The Passion of the Christ,” Dean has found her office phones ringing off the hook with producers interested in Caviezel as well as her other clients.

Her Beverly Hills office is also a haven for new performers drawn to her reputation for protecting actors wishing to avoid drugs and on-screen nudity. She’s convinced that her actors are well-positioned to ride the conservative zeitgeist of a world post-Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl breast-baring incident.

“I think ‘The Passion’ is the world showing that it’s not going to work anymore, that we have to bring some kind of decency into our culture,” Dean says. “Some people were afraid this movie would cause problems of division, but it’s bringing people together.”

WhileDean, 65, may sound like she’s out to thump Americans with her Bible and turn the nation’s cineplexes into celluloid churches, consider the types of dream projects she’s hoping to find for Caviezel.

After guiding his career as an intensely dramatic presence in films such as Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” the sci-fi father-son bonding flick “Frequency,” an adaptation of the classic revenge tale “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and most recently, the sports drama “Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius,” a box-office disappointment, she believes it’s time for him to lighten up.

“Jim’s due for a romantic comedy,” says Dean, who stood by Caviezel through seven years of small parts before his 1998 splash in “Thin Red Line.”

Times like this have been long in coming for Milwaukee native Dean as well. She grew up living upstairs from her dad’s bowling alley, jokingly recalling her family as “so functional that nobody in Hollywood could possibly understand who I am.” As a young devoted Catholic, she wanted to become a nun -- yet even she jokes “isn’t that a twist” that she was turned down twice by convents yet has found success in Hollywood.

She found happiness in marriage to a Jewish man named Sidney, with whom she had a son, Tom. Soon after, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer and given six months to live. Since her beloved Milwaukee Braves baseball team had just relocated to Atlanta, the family moved there to spend what she thought would be her last days.

“I heard about [actor-comedian] Danny Thomas and how his prayers to St. Jude changed his entire life, and I thought I had to go find a shrine to St. Jude,” she recalled. “Instead I had two months to live, and I could barely walk into a church called St. Anthony’s, but the priest there told me St. Anthony performed miracles too. I prayed there, walked out feeling good, and that night I ate well for the first time in ages.”

Soon, Dean’s cancer went into remission, a miracle, she says. Yet after all the strain of dealing with her illness, she and Sidney divorced. Dean began searching for a way to help children in honor of St. Anthony. The year was 1968 and illicit drugs were becoming a rampant presence among the nation’s youth, so Dean raised money to buy 1,000 acres of land in Colorado to create the St. Anthony Hope Without Dope center, designed to promote a drug free life.

Yet more money was needed, and after she appeared on a game show called “Charge Account,” Dean decided she could raise the funds by creating her own game show -- the idea that brought her to Hollywood.

She spent the next decade creating game show pilots for ABC with then-nascent talents such as Suzanne Somers (“Monte Carlo”) and David Letterman (who played a judge in “Disorder in the Court”).

“My son came out with me here and I was so excited, and Mike Ovitz was my agent, even though that lasted about three months,” she recalled with a chuckle. “I had put my savings into the pilot for the game show, so since I needed to work, I wound up casting movies with a casting director named Shari Rhodes, and that’s when I realized I could finally work well with kids.”

Her move to management

The breakthrough movie for Dean came in 1990, when she and Rhodes cast the film “The Man in the Moon” and discovered the then-13-year-old Witherspoon along with the London brothers.

And so, after more than two decades spent trying to establish the drug-rehab center for teens, Dean started her own talent management firm and essentially became a Beverly Hills den mother to her actors. She turned her apartment offices into a place where her young charges could drop by any time and discuss all types of personal and career issues, share homemade pasta dinners and perform in improvisational jam sessions for talent scouts, agents and production executives.

“A lot of these kids, especially Reese, knew more than I did, but I made up for my lack of knowledge by offering them real life lessons especially against drugs, a safe place to practice their acting, great food,” Dean says.

On a recent Thursday night in Dean’s apartment, a dozen or so of her actors line up for an hour of improvisational performance games.

The goal is to hone their chops at teamwork, thinking fast, playing multiple characters and being funny on the spot. More than that, however, they are seeking to be noticed -- Dean has invited several producers, directors and casting agents over for dinner and to see what her clients have to offer.

The evening offers an opportunity for performers and those that seek to discover fresh faces to meet outside of audition rooms and cattle calls. Here, each performer gets several chances to shine or flail and then absorb some industry wisdom during a Q&A; session with the visiting experts.

“What Bev’s doing is very unique -- she’s cultivating talent, and some of you are so witty and talented, and it’s a great venue to see you,” Iren Koster, an independent filmmaker, tells the performers afterward. “Casting directors don’t usually get to see people in contexts like this, and would I cast some of you? ... Yeah.”

Upholding beliefs

Dean believes that the standards she expects of her clients -- who have various religious backgrounds -- meant they missed opportunities in “anything goes” raunchy comedies like “Road Trip” and “Scary Movie.”

And while some of her clients have moved on to other agents as they’ve entered adulthood, she still professes a lot of pride in their accomplishments. Her disappointments, she says, come when her clients face dry spells and the other frustrations of trying to make it as actors. Or worse, turn to drugs.

But as the cultural tide seems to be turning, she feels her stance is starting to pay off.

Consider J. Skylar Testa, who enjoyed success as a child star in the early-’90s John Ritter sitcom “Hearts Afire” before leaving the business to attend college. As he returned to Hollywood in the past year after graduation, Testa said he never thought twice about seeking her out again.

“We have very much the same views on life and morals, and in a town run by money above all else, she really is there to protect the interests of her clients, and it seems there’s not a lot of people in this town who aren’t looking out for themselves,” Testa says. “I will never leave Bev; she’s a big part of my life and any time I’ve needed someone outside of my family, she’s been more available to me than maybe anybody else I’ve known.”

Speaking with several of her other acting clients, the recurring theme that comes up about Dean is that she often seems more of a surrogate mother than a manager, and “a friend foremost.” Ryan Krueger, a former Notre Dame quarterback and actor from Indiana, recalls how far Dean went for clients even as her own mother was dying.

“She opened her home to us for dinners even amid such an incredibly hard time, and that really showed me what an amazingly caring woman she was because we all came together like family,” Krueger says. “She’s also a genius when it comes to talent, because her knack for finding people and standing behind those she believes in is really rare from what I’ve seen and heard.”

With a combination of her religious faith and an earthly belief in the clients she signs to her stable of performers, Dean feels that the ultimate key to her success as a manager has been the personal struggles she’s faced.

She also dreams of bringing Christians and Jews closer together, working with her son, who is now based in New York City as a marketing president, and the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. They hope “The Passion” can first stir such discussionsand hope to eventually create a Broadway musical about the two faiths.

“I still don’t know the most about the business, but I have learned about sticking out adversity and never giving up, from my health to believing Jim [Caviezel] would be the biggest star on the planet someday,” she says. “I’m still trying to fight drugs in a town where drugs often seem more important than food, but today is a time where there’s really hope and I can sit back and people will say wow at what’s going on. You can never lose your faith.”