SOAP START... AND BEYOND

When he wasn't dancing in Broadway musicals like Hello, Dolly! and Golden Boy, he worked in restaurant kitchens.

He was a self-taught hoofer from North Philadelphia. As a kid, he cut lids off cans and nailed them to his boots, dancing for money on a corner across from City Hall while a friend played a washboard.

In New York, Malcolm worked as an extra in soap operas, including The Edge of Night, before discovering there was bigger money in stunt work. Moving to Los Angeles, he had no trouble finding jobs on such television series as Land of the Giants and Baretta. He dodged falling fake bricks in Superman and gangsters in Shaft.

Stunt work was plentiful. So was cocaine. "I went from sniffing it to smoking it," said Malcolm, who landed in rehab for 14 months. "I became bigger than myself."

He burned through his money and owed the Internal Revenue Service, which still collects all his residual checks.

Read Malcolm Drummond's entire rags to riches to rags and back again story, here.