ERIK PALLADINO

Erik Palladino decided to become an actor after the indelible impression made on him as a youth by the Oscar-winning "Raging Bull" and "Saturday Night Live," which put him on a path veering away from the dead-end taken by many of his hardened running mates in Yonkers, New York.
"My life could have gone a different way if I didn't find acting," admits Palladino. "I was involved with a crowd as a teen that was pretty tough. I woke up years later and saw that a lot of those guys are in jail."

Palladino, who was born and raised in blue-collar Yonkers, now co-stars in the top-rated "ER" as a gregarious and up-front second-year resident in the emergency room. "Last year, I was on the lowest-rated series ('DiResta') in the history of prime-time network television," he says. "Now, I'm on the highest-rated. It's almost surreal."

Palladino is the youngest of three brothers whose father owns a heating contractor business in the Bronx that involves most of the family (his mother is a schoolteacher). At 14, he began performing with the Children's Repertory Company from nearby New Rochelle, and he even appeared with the troupe off-Broadway. He attended the same all-boys high school as Alan Alda (a recurring guest star on "ER" early this season) but remained aloof from acting, ever mindful of his wisecracking friends' disdain for it. However, he became a full-on theatre arts student when he auditioned for and was accepted at Marymount Manhattan College--an all-women's campus except for its theater program--where he later received his Bachelor of Arts degree.

While Palladino credits acting for "turning my life around in college," he later opted to play in No Happy Faces, an alternative rock band, for four years. Eventually, he worked his way back to his studied craft when he became a series regular in Comedy Central's "Short-Attention Span Theatre." In 1996, he even became a veejay on MTV while still performing in his band.

Perhaps Palladino's big career break came when he simply decided to cut his long hair. The next week, he was cast as a series regular in the comedy "Love and Marriage," followed quickly by gigs as a recurring regular on "Murphy Brown" and last year's comedy "DiResta" (as the title character's cousin who lived in the basement). His request to exit the series was honored, and he was cast on the last day of his series commitment in the upcoming feature film "U-571" as an American sailor in World War II opposite Matthew McConaughey, Bill Paxton and Harvey Keitel. His other features include "Can't Hardly Wait" and the independents "This Space Between Us," "The Week That Girl Died" and "Roadkill." He also guest starred on "Party of Five."

Palladino enjoys his offbeat character, who is not above bending the rules to save a patient. "He's really an adrenaline junkie," he says. "He enjoys people's quirks and likes to mess with them to get a reaction. He's tough, strong-willed and a straight-shooter."

In his leisure time, Palladino prefers to box (while also participating in other sports), write freeform prose and hang out with his mixed-breed mutt. In addition, he remains a loyal New York Yankee fan