No Kidding
Back in the act after college, Kate and Allie cutie Fred Koehler aims to prove he's no longer a mild child.

Seasoned TV watchers may remember Fred Koehler as Chip, the cute carrot-topped son of single mom Jane Curtin on the '80s sitcom Kate & Allie. So pity any former fan who might have blithely channel-surfed onto HBO's prison drama Oz this summer, only to spy Koehler as a tattooed neo-Nazi punk lying naked on a cold cell floor in the throes of heroin withdrawal. It was the kind of I'm-all-grown-up-now role many ex-child stars would give their right dimples for -- as Koehler, 24, knows. "Yeah, let's talk about that full-frontal nudity!" he crows, his round baby cheeks only partly camouflaged by a goatee.

Ten years after Kate & Allie's finale, Koehler, who first charmed audiences in the 1983 movie Mr. Mom, is starting over in showbiz as a hungry young actor more embarrassed by his old bowl cuts ("one of the absolute worst hairstyles in the world") than by showing the full monty on national TV. When Kate & Allie's five-year run ended, the then-14-year-old finished high school and spent four years at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University (he earned a bachelor's degree in drama in 1997.) "I wanted to explore more what it was to be an actor," he says, "and not rest on the things I'd already done."

Koehler has since been getting a broad postgraduate education: doing theater in New York City and L.A., doing a turn as a high schooler on the ABC soap All My Children and yukking it up on an episode of Comedy Central's series Strangers With Candy. A few weeks ago he left the New York City apartment he shared with two friends ("my drama frat house") and moved to L.A. to shoot a movie, Pumpkin, in which he plays a mentally and physically disabled boy who falls for a college student played by Gretchen Mol. His elders have plenty of praise. "If he keeps doing what he's doing, he's going to be a great actor," says Chazz Palminteri, who directed one of his Oz outings. Jane Curtin, to whom Koehler is still close, caught his starring performance last year in an L.A. production of The Cripple of Inishmaan. "It was as if I was his mom, the pride I felt," she says. "He has grown into the together young man."

Much of that growth took place in the public eye. Like his TV alter ego, Koehler was raised by a single mom: Marilyn, a divorced perfume-company executive (now 56 and remarried.) Growing up in Queens, he became a popular advertising model. "You couldn't miss me, because I had this outrageous, fire-engine-red hair," he says. Watched over by older sisters Denise (now 35,) Roselle (34) and Michele (29,) Koehler says he "definitely wasn't pushed" into showbiz. Denise, a homemaker, remembers that their mother made sure Fred never got stressed out. "She would tell him, 'Today we're going to the Museum of Natural History, and then we'll go to lunch, and oh, there's an audition after that.'"

After his movie debut in Mr. Mom, Koehler started, at age 8, on Kate & Allie, which premiered in 1984. Costar Susan Saint James's children became his playmates on the New York City set. "It was a great place for kid actors," says Curtin, who recalls Koehler and adult costar Sam Freed once mooning her from offstage when the cameras were rolling. Koehler "would act up, but he knew when to stop."

Afterward, Koehler headed to L.A. and acted sporadically in movies and series such as Full House while attending Beverly Hills High. He battled culture shock -- "I still hadn't gotten my driver's license" -- and rejected fast-life temptations. "There was alot of excess," he says. "You have to make choices." To break from the scene, he settled on Carnegie Mellon, where he learned how to do his own laundry, survive without TV and stretch his thespian skills. "I had never done a play before," he says, admitting his first few outings were "absolutely awful."

A few praise-winning postgrad stage roles, though, sent Koehler, who says he is "single, dating and enjoying it," back into the spotlight. "I'm trying new things," he says. "I'm psyched about being an actor."