It would be difficult to imagine a more promising or electric series of debuts for a young American actor than those of the fresh-faced, fair-haired Corin "Corky" Nemec, who burst onto the scene as a teenager in the late '80s with several memorable turns that put him on the pop-culture map.
Nemec began whimsically, as Nicky Papadopolis -- the nephew of Alex Karras' former football player-turned-sportscaster George Papadopolis -- in the fifth and final, syndicated season of the hit sitcom Webster. That program wrapped by late 1988, but by that time, Nemec had already graduated to feature-film work, with a skillful portrayal of the teenage son of auto mogul Preston Tucker (portrayed by Jeff Bridges), in Francis Ford Coppola's pet project Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988). Nemec even surpassed this debut one year later, with his haunting portrayal of the sexually assaulted and brainwashed abductee Steven Stayner, in the superior telemovie I Know My First Name Is Steven; it remains a benchmark by which current made-for-television films continue to be judged.
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