DOUGRAY Scott is the Hollywood star who rose without trace.

Broodingly handsome, there are 25 websites devoted to him already.

His female fans refer to him as 'Our man' and to themselves as Scottaholics. But asks: Who is Dougray Scott and where did he come from?

Learn from your mistakes. As classic parental advice goes, it is up there with: 'Don't forget to wash behind your ears.' But Dougray Scott's father was, it seems, wiser still. His axiom was instead: 'Don't learn from your mistakes. Learn from mine.' And his successful son is still driven by the memory of failure. Not his own, but that of Alan Scott - the film star who never was.

For Alan yearned to be on stage. He worked as a nine-to-five salesman by day but at night would catch a bus to the Unity Theatre in Glasgow, where he would act his heart out.

Dougray has never forgotten his father's dream - nor his frustration. 'He would take bit parts wherever and whenever he could because he loved acting so much,' he says. 'But he woke up every morning thinking of only one thing: selling a fridge to pay the bills at the end of the week so he could support his family. Now that is really pressure. He taught me a lot about the value of resilience and character throughout his life. '

When faced with such a warts-and-all expose of a parent's livelihood, a child will do one of two things. Do something entirely different - or exactly the same. The young boy, plain Stephen Scott back then, was bewitched. He idolised his father. 'I would tell my school friends to watch some late-night Dirk Bogarde movie because Dad had a ten-second appearance in it,' he says.

But, ironically, it was an external influence that lit the acting fuse.

Before he was born, the family moved from Glasgow to a council estate in the gritty overspill town of Glenrothes, Fife.

Alan and his wife Elizabeth, a nurse, wanted a better life for their new child, his older brother and two older sisters. But life for young Stephen was still tough, especially when he announced to his careers teacher: 'I'm going to be an actor.' 'Nobody in Glenrothes acts,' he once recalled. 'My teacher laughed and suggested that I go to the docks and be a fitter.' Alan Cummings, a former teacher at the town's Auchmuty High School, remembers: 'He was a very intense boy who liked his own company. Popular but standoffish.

I recall him having an interest in drama. And, no, I didn't think it was a good idea. I didn't reckon the poor wee boy had a chance. I was wrong.'

Dougray had also flirted with the idea of football as a career - another of the obsessions of his father, who had once played for Queen's Park. But he was sufficiently self-analytical to realise he didn't have the talent. His love of acting began with a chance casting in a school production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

'The play connected with me,' he says. 'There was a similarity between the character Willy Loman and my dad.' Classmates remember a lonely boy. Peter Cook, now a welder on the Clyde, says: 'Some of the girls seemed to quite like him. But he was always a bit of a loner. The only time he ever really joined in was on the football pitch. He was just a scrawny kid back then - and he didn't like getting tackled. He never got his knees dirty.' Dougray himself admits: 'I really hated school. I was a misfit. The teachers were patronising and orientated towards the middleclass kids. I left thinking: 'What's the point?'.' His father encouraged him to study drama at Kirkcaldy College, the same course that his friend Ewan McGregor went on to take just a few years later.

Then he won a coveted place at the Welsh College of Music and Drama.

Dougray has dismissed this coup with typical nonchalance: 'I wanted to see a different part of the country and it was very easy to get in.' But at Cardiff his talent finally came into its own. In his final year he won the award for 'Most promising student'.

Contemporary James Manners, now a film- set designer in Chicago, says: 'He was a natural. A really gifted actor. Take away the good looks and he could still act.'

'That's what people forget. He can do Shakespeare, he can do farce. He's not just this Hollywood hunk the studios make him out to be. In fact, he was never a ladies' man, not back then anyway. There were a couple of girls, sure. But it was all low key.' After qualifying, he moved to London but found himself jobless for six months.

Would-be actress Miranda Stuart, 33, now a mother of three living in Guildford, Surrey, recalls those bleak days.

'He was fairly down. There we all were, handsomely equipped to fail. Young, talented, beautiful. Or at least that's what we thought. And not a job between us. We lived off benefits. Dougray spent most of his time visiting London churches. He was the most serious-minded of us all.'

Dougray later said he would have given up on acting but 'I didn't know how to do anything else.' He finally found work, in 1990, with a part in TV's Stay Lucky.

But jobs were few and far between, and for five years he struggled. But 1995 was a turning point. That was the year he changed his name to Dougray - 'Equity already had a Stephen Scott on their books' - landed his Soldier, Soldier role and met wife-to-be Sarah Trevis.

Men who have dominant mothers often seek out those traits in a wife or girlfriend. And Dougray, who remains fiercely close to his mother Elizabeth, 68, who still lives in Glenrothes, proved to be no exception.

Sarah was three years older, strikingly pretty and, as a casting agent, extremely knowledgeable and well-connected. She was also hugely capable and very keen.

The couple went on to have twins Gabriel and Eden, now three, but only married last year, with Ewan McGregor as the best man.

'When a couple are in their mid-30s, a gap of three years, especially when the woman is the older one and the man is a successful actor, can feel like a huge gulf. The worst thing is that Dougray hasn't really changed at all over the years. He has always looked 35 - even when he was 25.

'People might think it is strange I'm settling down as opportunities open up in Hollywood,' he says. 'But it only gives me the best of both worlds.' This from a father-of-two who has already been living with his partner for the best part of five years. A close friend and fellow actor says: 'He can sometimes put his foot in his mouth but his heart really is in the right place. He is not a natural philanderer. That's all that I would say.'

Nonetheless, Dougray prides himself on living dangerously: 'I always take risks. I never want to be stuck in a rut so if somebody says I can't do something, I'll do it. I want to try, even if I think I might fail.'

A year after he met Sarah, he left Soldier, Soldier: 'I knew I didn't want to stay in TV,' he says. 'It was a gamble but I was lucky.' He went on to work consistently but without flair. In 1996 he played stand-up comic Lewis McHoan in BBC Scotland's popular dramatisation of Iain Banks' The Crow Road. But in 1997 he was unforgettably cast as a sleazy detective in Twin Town, the Welsh equivalent of Trainspotting.

This was to prove a seminal role, as it brought him to the attention Hollywood power-player Tom Cruise - who immediately signed him up for Mission: Impossible 2.

But Dougray's abiding regret is that his father died, aged 79, in 1997 - just as he was on the cusp stardom, only months before he clinched his then most important role to date opposite Drew Barrymore in Ever After. Alan Scott had, however, seen Dougray take his first faltering steps as Major Rory Taylor in Soldier, Soldier.

'Dad revelled in my success and it is a shame he wasn't around to see me playing the lead role in a Dollars 40million movie,' he says. 'That would have given both of us a tremendous thrill.' But his success has seemingly come at a price. His old humility is long gone. Two years ago, Dougray posed for a newspaper sitting on a damp pavement holding a sign saying: 'Dougray Scott'.

Such signs are no longer necessary. As Enigma's co-producer Mick Jagger said: 'When we cast him, we felt he was on the edge of fame.' A method actor who idolises Brando, De Niro and Pacino, he lost a stone for Enigma by sticking to a cabbage soup diet. He then insisted his character - from the Home Counties in the novel - be a Mancunian.

'I felt making him some upperclass twit would be offputting for audiences,' he says. 'Why shouldn't he come from the North? People do have intelligence beyond Watford.' Dougray's own intelligence has produced a chip on his shoulder the size of the North/South divide and makes him tricky to live with.

His father died a thwarted actor, but intrinsically happy; a fulfilled family man. His son has it all but bristles with discontent - and his father's words clearly haunt him.

'He once told me: 'If you are making all this money and you're not happy, what's the point?' Maybe it is a working-class thing. It provides you with a steel skin when you have to get your hands dirty. Film acting is not a clean business.'

Copyright © 2001 Associated News Media Ltd.