'This is bad, this is bad!' Justin Bowman screams from the back of the white Jeep Cherokee as it barrels through West Hollywood toward Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Slumped in the passenger seat is David Ward, a charismatic, promising 27-year-old actor haemorrhaging from a stab wound to his chest. 'Talk to me. Talk to me!' Bowman yells at Ward, trying to keep his friend conscious. Bowman, too, is hurt; there are slash and stab wounds on his chest, arm, hand. 'Get us to the hospital as quick as you can. I don't care what it takes. Just get us there,' Bowman tells driver Daniel Eppard, the only one of the three not injured. 'Everything is going to be fine. I don't want to hear anything else,' Eppard says, running red lights. 'Everything is going to be fine!'

The bloody race to the hospital was more than the conclusion of a senseless act of road rage. It was also the violent finale to the careers of two handsome young actors, David Ward and Nathaniel Moore. The two did not know each other, but they might easily have tried out for the same parts and prowled the same nightclubs. Like so many Los Angelenos, Ward and Moore shared common goals: success and glory. Both loomed imminent for Ward, who brimmed with the unwavering conviction of someone who has seen his future and knows he will matter. For Moore, lifelong ambition and years of training had yielded little more than one failed audition after another. Los Angeles is a city of close to 4m, and some days it seems as if half of them are actors. To stand above the Hollywood crowd rather than be trampled by it requires narcissism, vanity and confidence. It's not enough to look invincible; you have to be invincible. For very different reasons, both Ward and Moore believed they were. When the two were thrown together in an argument at a random intersection on 2 April 1999, their experiences and personalities indisputably shaped the quarrel's tragic outcome.

Scruffy and free-spirited, Ward was fearless, never backing down from a personal or professional challenge. He worked steadily in front of the camera - commercials, music videos, lead roles in independent films, featured parts in TV series. Eppard was an actor, too; a former surfer, then 26, he had been cast in several plays. Bowman, then 23, tried out for the occasional commercial, but he was content working at Rita Flora Kitchen, one of LA's best casual restaurants.

Moore, meanwhile, was Ward's opposite, a veteran of industry rejections who boiled over with frustration. Clean-cut, boyishly good-looking and 24 at the time of the incident, he had moved to Los Angeles after attending the Juilliard School for acting, dance and music in New York. Yet his movie and TV fantasy was unfulfilled - one of his few credits was essentially the third FBI agent from the left in the quickly forgotten movie Desert Blue , starring Christina Ricci. He spent time in the US Army Reserves and worked out constantly, honing the kind of skill set - jujitsu, Thai kick-boxing, tae kwon do - that might have allowed him to become the next Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme. But in one wrong turn, he used those very skills not to secure a starring role in some low-budget action film but to stab Bowman and Ward.

Eppard, Bowman and Ward are out for a few drinks, hitting North and Bar Marmont, both hip hangouts for young Hollywood. It is nearly 2am on Friday morning. They decide to head home. At that same moment a few blocks away, Moore and his friend Stephen Cook hook up to grab a late bite. Moore and Cook have spent the evening with Moore's roommate, Jesse John Petrick, watching Petrick's guest shot on the CBS series Promised Land. As Eppard, Bowman and Ward cruise south on Harper Avenue past Cook's apartment, they have to stop: Moore's double-parked 1978 Lincoln Continental is blocking the way. Moore, sitting behind the wheel, is chatting with Cook, who stands at the curb. Eppard honks, and Moore moves his car. Either he doesn't do so quickly enough, or Ward is simply annoyed his trip home has been momentarily delayed. As the Jeep passes, Ward, legally drunk, yells from the front passenger's seat: 'Get out of the fucking road!'

Hundreds of drivers hurl similar insults every day without consequence, but as had happened before in Moore's life and happens again in that instant, something inside him seems to snap. His demeanour changes; Cook says he looks 'pissed off'. Moore angrily turns to his friend, says, 'Hold on a second. I will be right back', and throws the big red car into gear. Flashing his lights, Moore chases the Jeep to the stop sign at the corner of Fountain Avenue. He jumps out, raises his arms, and pushes out his chest, yelling, 'What the fuck is wrong with you guys?' Ward, foolishly, replies from the passenger seat. 'You want some?'

At any given moment, nearly three-quarters of the Screen Actors Guild's 100,000 members are making less than £5,000 a year acting. For every Hollywood superstar crisscrossing the country in the studio jet, hundreds of lesser names are driving their battered Toyotas across LA,waiting tables or working word-processing jobs at night in order to audition by day, taking acting jobs hardly a notch above porn for the experience and the free food. With enough direct-to-video movies and guest shots on instantly forgotten TV series, an actor can cobble together a video cassette of clips that resembles a body of work. Ward did just that and thanks to people like David DeCoteau, he did it much faster than usual.

The movies DeCoteau makes are bad, and the amiable 40-year-old director doesn't kid himself otherwise. But DeCoteau takes his job seriously and works very hard; in one 17-month period, he directed 11 movies. Some are shot in as little as four days, and the budgets are so low that the cost of the film itself can be the production's biggest expense. Actors might earn less than £250 for a starring role, working in a freezing hellhole in Romania during a bread riot, having to memorise 20 pages of dialogue a day, all for a film that may not make it into many video stores, let alone cinemas. And yet they line up around the block for the chance. The alumni of producer Charles Band, a one-time DeCoteau collaborator, include Demi Moore (Parasite) and Helen Hunt (Trancers).

DeCoteau auditions as many as 800 people for acting jobs in such movies as Voodoo Academy, Retro Puppet Master and Prison of the Dead. DeCoteau cast Ward in both 1998's The Killer Eye: Terror Vision and 1999's Witchouse. 'We have what we call a movie-star alarm,' says DeCoteau, who also directed James Coburn and Christopher Plummer in 1996's Skeletons. 'When David came in, it was like he had been doing this all his life. He was very confident. There was also an amazing amount of sweetness. He turned every head in the office, and the girls were going crazy.'

No matter what Ward faced, he rose to the challenge. When he thought his stunt double in a Levi's commercial didn't resemble him, Ward did the stunt on his own, jumping off a cliff into freezing rapids. 'He just knew he was going to be huge. There was no doubt in his mind,' says Naomi Jaramillo, a longtime friend. 'He put as much energy into lame commercials as he did movies.' Not that the movies were that much better.

'I said, "This role is a bisexual stoner,"' DeCoteau recalls telling Ward about his part in The Killer Eye, a dreadful horror film starring a giant eyeball that kills people with a blue light. 'He says, "Great, man, sounds good to me." I said, "You're gonna spend the entire movie in your underwear." "That's no problem," he said. I said, "Also, there's a scene where you and your bisexual lover have sex with a gorgeous blonde girl." He said, "Great, man."' When actress Jacqueline Lovell didn't want to pretend to have sex with two men, Ward agreed to fondle himself as he and the killer eyeball watched Lovell make out with a man. 'This guy never said no,' DeCoteau says.

It wasn't simply his spirit that separated Ward from hundreds of other wannabes. He had natural, easy talent. He originally wanted to become an attorney, but didn't finish college. While bartending in Florida in 1994, he entered a modelling competition, made it to the finals, took an acting seminar, filmed a mattress commercial, and never looked back, moving to LA in 1995. 'It was his calling. He just knew it,' says Wendy Armstrong, his fiancée at the time. 'He was the epitome of hip,' says Robert Ulrich, a casting director who put Ward in Wind on Water (and got a bouquet of flowers from the actor as a thank-you). 'He was a hustler, edgy. There was just something down and dirty about the guy that made him different from the norm.'

'I wanted a rebel type,' says director Yan Cui, who cast Ward in the independent film Yellow Wedding. 'A person who would do everything his parents told him not to.' It was all an act, of course; he was tremendously loyal to his family, and his three younger siblings idolised him. He would invite friends to audition for the same parts he was pursuing, creating more competition. When he had to do a love scene in Yellow Wedding, he grew concerned because the actress was nervous. 'He was very warm-hearted,' Cui says. 'Always thinking about other people.' Especially women; his tally of girlfriends is longer than his acting CV, and yet he remained friendly with most of his exes. 'He was somebody everybody knew or wanted to know,' his manager Laina Cohn says.

In a good year, Ward could earn as much as £35,000. But he never had a penny. Whenever he cashed a big pay cheque, he would treat friends to dinners, and he lent money to a young director to help her finish directing him in a short film, even though he had to eat spaghetti from a can a week later. The rest of Ward's money went towards taking care of his Golden Retriever, Marley May, sick with cancer. His Ford Bronco was forever at the garage or parked illegally. 'You could support a small town with the number of parking tickets the guy got,' his friend Alex Fox says.

But the very abandon that made Ward so castable may have sparked his clash with Moore. Ward was scarcely timid and gave people the impression he was much taller than 5ft 7in. 'He would say, "There is not a single person I am afraid of,"' Jaramillo says. He refused to back down from the threat of a fight when his friends fled, Fox recalls. 'Years ago, me, Dave and Dan [Eppard] were walking out of the Hollywood bar Lava Lounge around midnight, and these four guys in a car slowed up and yelled, "Hey faggots! We're totally gonna beat your ass,"' Fox says. 'Dan runs, but Dave was like, "Stay with me, just stay with me. I'll take care of it." I thought they could have guns or something - it's just like every movie scene. So I ran. One guy chased me, and I took a punch in the nose. But Dave stood his ground and said, "Look,I don't want to fight you guys. But if you really want it, we're gonna do this."And they just let him go. They didn't do anything to him.' Ward was not as fortunate with Moore.

It's all over in four minutes. Moore reaches into his car and arms himself. Not with the tyre iron in his back seat. Not with the wooden club or the metal pipe in the car boot, next to a box of live ammunition and a cassette of Springsteen's Born to Run. Instead, Moore chooses an easily concealed, 8in martial-arts dagger. Emblazoned with the brand name Fury and razor-sharp on both sides, it's such an intimidating fighting weapon that it requires special training to avoid self-inflicted wounds. Moore keeps it under the floor mat, where others might find parking-meter change. He picks up the blade, tucks it into his back pocket, and moves toward the passenger door of Eppard's Jeep. Ward, expecting nothing worse than a fist fight, gets out.

Moore wanted to be an actor almost all of his life, but by the time he was a young adult, his childhood hopes of playing the leading man had turned into a series of fruitless, and increasingly infrequent, auditions. And Moore worked to make his dream happen. He started training at nine, graduating from the Pittsburgh High School for the Creative and Performing Arts. He studied singing and acting, played the drums, and was accepted into the undergraduate drama programme at Manhattan's prestigious Juilliard School, the training ground for Val Kilmer, Robin Williams and William Hurt. Juilliard staff found his admission audition impressive; one staff member called him 'energetic and trainable' and a another found him 'very charming - open'. Pretty in an almost feminine way, his cherubic face hid a sometimes difficult past, the pain that gives some actors the emotional intensity required by the job. His father died when Moore was 20 and his mother is a recovering alcoholic.

Not long after he arrived in Los Angeles in August 1996, Moore walked into the offices of Larry Corsa, an earnest talent agent whose small firm represents no recognisable names. Moore's look 'wasn't very compelling', Corsa says, but he had the impressive Juilliard connection and a great comic audition, a funny dialogue about ill-spoken romantic chitchat from the David Ives play Sure Thing . Corsa signed Moore up and sent him on the occasional audition. Over the course of 18 months, Corsa was never able to get Moore a job. 'Nathaniel was somebody who was a certain age where there is a lot of competition,' Corsa says. The only movie role Moore got under Corsa's representation, that of Agent Red in 1999's Desert Blue , came thanks to a connection from Moore's older sister, Jane, Corsa adds. Moore's one-time manager, Linda Wurzel, was more optimistic about her client's prospects and thought Moore was about to get a break.

Ward and Moore immediately scuffle; Ward falls to the ground. He gets back on his feet, and the fight moves into traffic on Fountain Avenue, with Bowman leaving the car to help his friend. As cars honk and drive around the altercation, Eppard spots the knife in Moore's right hand.

'Just walk away,' Eppard implores Ward. To Moore, he says, 'This is stupid. Get the fuck out of here.' Moore shouts: 'I will fucking take all three of you.' He says it as many as six times, but Ward is not scared. 'Who do you think you are?' he asks. Moore lunges at Ward, Ward grabs him, and Ward, Moore and Bowman fall in a scrum to the street, Ward on top of Moore. Bowman tries to pull them apart, but Moore slashes. Ward - stabbed in five places, including through the heart, and lacerated twice - is bleeding out. But he keeps trying to subdue Moore, feebly punching him, until he and Bowman eventually pin Moore on the pavement.

If Moore honestly told you what he did, he was not an actor but a waiter. Soon after moving to LA, he started waiting at the Hard Rock Cafe, finally moving to the swanky Alto Palato, where on a good night he took home £80. The audition rejections started to take their toll. 'For two years, I found Los Angeles to be both cold and uninviting,' he once wrote. His roommate Petrick said that Moore was insecure and had a quick temper. Moore was also drinking heavily (eventually he enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous). The rest of the time, it seems, he hung out with friends, took an acting and writing workshop, and practised combat moves. He kept a set of Asian daggers in his living room, as well as a pair of nunchakus.

Mastering martial arts demands both respect for others and self- control. Moore had neither. In his first term at Juilliard in 1993, Moore's room-mates, playing a prank, locked him and another student out. Moore grew 'very belligerent' and 'almost violent', according to an incident report. Weeks later, he swore at a school security guard after being told not to use a handicapped entrance. Another guard reported that Moore told her to 'Go and fuck yourself'. (Later, he blamed the outbursts on immaturity and family problems, which included his parents' divorce and his father's failing health.) In school records, teachers reported that students were 'possibly afraid of him'. In January 1996, less than a month after his father died, Juilliard expelled him, citing poor attendance and his inability 'to function effectively as a productive member of an ensemble'.

When Moore moved west, he didn't leave his anger behind. In his LA building car park, neighbour Anthony Catter once left a note on Moore's windshield, asking Moore not to park his large Lincoln so near Catter's car, which was constantly being dented. Moore left his own page-long retort, written in red ink. 'Don't fuck with me,' the note said, Catter later recalled. 'I'll park my car any fucking way I want to. You park too close, and you just better be careful that you don't get in my way because you don't know what I am capable of.' Three months before Ward was killed, Catter alerted Moore that he'd left his car lights on. Moore looked 'as though he wanted to attack' him, Catter later told police.

Bowman might be more seriously wounded, perhaps fatally, if Moore doesn't accidentally cut himself in one of the scrums, severing an artery in his right leg with his own knife. 'Let me go. I have got to get to the hospital. Get off me,' Moore says, bleeding profusely. Only when Eppard, who has joined the fight, kicks Moore twice in the side and once in the arm does Moore release his weapon, which clatters across the sidewalk into a flowerbed. Everybody disentangles, but Ward is clearly in distress. He struggles upright, takes a few steps, and falls on his face to the pavement. Moore hurries off to his car and pulls around the Jeep, while Eppard picks up Ward, pushing him into his car. Eppard, Bowman and Ward then begin their frantic race to Cedars-Sinai. Just as their Jeep approaches the intersection of La Cienega and Melrose, Moore, driving just ahead but only able to use his left foot because of the injury to his right leg, jumps a red light, and his Lincoln broadsides a Land Rover (paramedics responding to the crash take Moore to the same hospital soon after). Eppard reaches the emergency room at 2.08am. Ward's heart is trembling, in fibrillation, at 42 beats per minute, and despite multiple units of packed red-blood cells and cardiac massage, he cannot be saved. Bowman, on a stretcher next to him, watches his friend flat-line. Ward is pronounced dead at 2.40am.

Like many actors, Moore studied improvisation, but this time his audience was the police, and his skills had slipped. He admitted chasing the other car but claimed he was sideswiped and wanted insurance information. The knife wasn't his. Then it was. Then it wasn't. His credibility shot, Moore was indicted for murder on 15 May 1999. He was taken into custody three days later and remained behind bars for three years while he changed lawyers twice, postponing trial dates. After contemplating a trial where he would likely argue self-defence, Moore pled no contest to voluntary manslaughter on 3 March this year.

In a packed courtroom on 17 May, dressed in an ill-fitting green suit and still affected by the wound in his leg, Moore addressed Ward's mother, stepfather, sister and two half-brothers for 10 minutes. 'I'm sure the words fall hollow on your ears,' he said. 'I cannot feel sorry for myself. As bad as my situation may be, this man's life is over. And he didn't deserve that. It was so senseless. I just want you to know that I have to live with this the rest of my life.' He still, though, maintained in a letter to the judge that he was attacked, not the other way around. Although Moore and his family asked for leniency, Superior Court Judge Keith Schwartz sentenced him to the maximum term of 12 years. Even counting the three years already spent in custody, Moore will not be eligible for release until late 2009.

'He's a pretty bad actor,' Ward's mother, Barbara, says, appalled by what she feels was Moore's lack of remorse. 'Even in a part you don't want to play, you have to be convincing.'