| read write ride roam home | ||
|
Rachel F. Elson Brooklyn New York rachelelson@yahoo.com 718-797-0047 |
From People.com Where Are They Now? TV's Hunks 'n' Babes BY RACHEL ELSON NOTE: The following series originally ran on People.com in September 2002. For photos and more information, please view the full version on People.com. Jaclyn Smith | Mark Harmon | Erik Estrada | David Cassidy | Tom Wopat | Philip Michael Thomas ===== Jaclyn Smith
Jaclyn Smith may not be the domestic diva her Kmart colleague Martha Stewart is, but a streak of business acumen has turned this onetime Angel into a one-woman retail empire of her own. Smith, who started as a model, was a Breck girl in 1973 but truly made her mark on the cultural landscape in 1976 with the debut of Charlie's Angels. One of the biggest TV hits of the '70s, the show featured beautiful babes, ferocious fashion and a dose of girl power set in an all-female detective agency run by the mysterious Charlie. A last-minute character swap with Rookies vet Kate Jackson landed the then-unknown Smith the role of former Las Vegas showgirl Kelly Garrett (instead of the more educated Sabrina Duncan), says Angels authority Jack Condon, author of the Charlie's Angels Casebook. Although the presence on the show of Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, both more established actresses, could have relegated Smith to the shadows, the charming Texan newcomer soon took her place as one of America's sweethearts -- and became a mainstay of the successful series. Ongoing cast shuffles eventually took their toll on the show, however, and Charlie's Angels was canceled in 1981. But Smith embarked on a steady progression of TV movies and miniseries -- including a starring role in 1981's Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, as well as appearances in Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels in 1983 and Danielle Steel's Family Album in 1994. Along with the acting gigs, Smith charted a new course in 1985, when she partnered with Kmart to launch a clothing line. One of the first and longest-running celebrity labels, the Jaclyn Smith brand racks up annual sales of $300 million in clothing, lingerie and accessories, Women's Wear Daily reported in March 2001. This fall the actress will unveil new furniture and home furnishings collections. But along the way, Smith has suffered some hard knocks in her personal life, including a trio of ill-fated marriages (and divorces). Now living in Southern California with her fourth husband, cardiologist Bradley Allen, the 56-year-old Smith's most recent battle was against breast cancer; she had a tumor removed in July, and then underwent radiation treatments. The still-gorgeous Smith will appear in a recurring role this season opposite Craig T. Nelson in the CBS show The District. She reportedly shot down a cameo in the 2000 Charlie's Angels film remake, but since then she seems to have thought better of the idea: The star will don her wings once more to reprise her role as Kelly Garrett for the film's sequel, Charlie's Angels 2, due out next year. ====== Mark Harmon
Most guys would love to be nationally recognized for being sexy. But Mark Harmon apparently is not one of them: He's still rather embarrassed by PEOPLE's 1986 nod as "Sexiest Man Alive," his publicist explains. If asked about the title, "he'll probably say, 'As opposed to dead?' and then change the subject," says Dana Anderson. Harmon would rather be known for his long string of TV and film roles, including memorable spots on medical mainstays such as St. Elsewhere and Chicago Hope. Or perhaps the Hollywood-style nod was just at odds with Harmon's working-guy streak: Although his mother is former actress Elyse Knox, now 85, the actor's father -- college football star, sportscaster and World War II vet Tom Harmon, who died in 1990 at 70 -- "came from the steel mills in Gary, Indiana," the actor told the Lansing State Journal this May. "He was a blue-collar guy all the way." The entertainment bug bit the family, though: One sister, Kelly, became a model; the other, Kris, married Ricky Nelson, and their children grew up to become actors (Tracy) and musicians (Matthew and Gunnar). Harmon himself went to UCLA, where he played football for a couple of years and then graduated cum laude in 1974 with a degree in communications. Although he made a living briefly as a carpenter, the actor soon found his way onto the TV screen, and by 1977, had turned up in a small but Emmy-nominated role in the TV movie Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years. A series of forgettable appearances followed, until Harmon got the chance to prove his mettle in 1983 with the TV series St. Elsewhere. In three seasons, the actor won viewers' hearts as suave Dr. Bobby Caldwell. By 1987, Harmon, now 51, had married fellow TV sweetheart Pam Dawber, of Mork & Mindy fame. The pair, who have two children (Sean Thomas, 14, and Ty Christian, 10), is one of Hollywood's longer-running celebrity couples. Following Elsewhere, a series of supporting roles and TV movies was punctuated by a three-year run on Chicago Hope, from 1996-2000. The clean-cut actor has also taken on a few killer TV roles, including that of Thomas Capano in 2001's And Never Let Her Go and Ted Bundy in 1986's The Deliberate Stranger. In his free time, Harmon heads to his 280-acre country retreat in Bainbridge, N.Y., to enjoy trout fishing, hiking and finding and restoring old tools. "Mark's sensibilities are very 1940s," Dawber told InStyle in January 2000. "It helps him connect to a simpler, more natural way of life." But when Harmon got the offer of a guest spot on The West Wing this spring, he jumped at the chance. "I got a scene faxed to me by my agent late on a Wednesday afternoon," he told reporter Rick Porter in May. "Thursday morning I was working." People took notice; Harmon got his second Emmy nomination for the four-show role as bodyguard and love interest of press secretary C.J. (played by Allison Janney). ====== Erik Estrada
Erik Estrada, homebody? It's an image that will surprise anyone who remembers studly motorcycle cop Francis "Ponch" Poncherello from TV's CHiPs -- or, indeed, anyone who knew Estrada from his days as a prime-time party guy in the late 1970s. "I used to fly to New York on Friday with a girl," he recalls. "We'd sleep all day, then disco until 4 a.m. at Studio 54." These days, the 53-year-old actor says he spends his offscreen time with his 2-year-old daughter, Francesca, and two sons, Anthony Erik, 16, and Brandon Michael-Paul, 14, and fixing up his family's hillside home in Studio City, Calif. After two divorces, Estrada wed his current wife, former Hollywood production coordinator Nanette Mirkovich, 43, in 1997. The youngest of three children of a divorced seamstress, Estrada turned to acting to escape the streets of New York City's Spanish Harlem -- and to meet "this really cute girl" in his high school drama club. The acting bug stuck and Estrada began appearing onscreen in the early 1970s, with parts in films such as 1974's Airport 1975 and Midway in 1976. He landed the starring role as Ponch in 1977 and spent the next five years cruising California's small-screen highways in the name of law and order. But his star turn essentially fizzled with the series' end; since then, Estrada's steadiest TV work was in the early 1990s on a Mexican soap opera, Dos Mujeres, Un Camino ("Two Women, One Street") -- a show he credits with saving his career. These days, Estrada has a recurring guest spot on the daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful. And two decades after his most famous role, the actor also seems to have mastered the humble art of self-parody. Estrada has played himself in V.I.P., Popular and Andy Richter Controls the Universe, and this spring he appeared in the Diet Dr. Pepper ad CHimPs, as a motorist stopped by two chimpanzee motorcycle cops. He also does the voice of Latin hunk Marco on the Cartoon Network's animated Sealab 2021 -- which recently did its own CHiPs parody. "They wanted a character who's rugged, funny, a ladies' man," he told the New York Post last year. "And I thought, 'I don't have to shower, shave. I can just show up and do it.' " ====== David Cassidy
Before there was real-life rock and roll family The Osbournes, there was The Partridge Family. And before there were Justin Timberlake and Joey Fatone, there was Keith Partridge -- the shaggy-haired pop star played for four years by teen idol David Cassidy. The son of late actor Jack Cassidy and actress Evelyn Ward -- and stepson of Shirley Jones, 68 (who played his Partridge Family mom) -- Cassidy called Hollywood home from a young age. But the aspiring actor found himself catapulted to teen heartthrob status when early guest spots on Adam-12 and The Mod Squad (both in 1970) gave way to his role on The Partridge Family. The rush of success was overwhelming for a 19-year-old, he now says. "I did feel like, in a way, I was manufactured," he admitted this spring on ABC's Good Morning America. "People's perception of me was so different from what (I) was." After leaving the show in 1974, Cassidy spent almost three decades trying to escape his past, making only occasional onscreen appearances -- most notably in the 1990 film The Spirit of '76. Directing his labors toward a stage career, Cassidy starred in the original 1983 Broadway production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; he also played London's West End in 1987's Time with Sir Laurence Olivier, toured the United States and Canada in Blood Brothers with real-life brother Shaun Cassidy from 1993 to 1996, and in 1996 revamped and appeared in MGM Grand's $75 million Las Vegas musical extravaganza, EFX. These days, Cassidy is still performing onstage. His 2001 pop album, Then and Now, went platinum in the U.K., and he returned to the stage last year for an international concert tour; he has also helped develop two other shows in Las Vegas, where he lives with his third wife, 53-year-old songwriter Sue Shifrin-Cassidy, and their 10-year-old son, Beau. Offstage, his energies go to KidsCharities.org -- an umbrella of children's charities that Cassidy founded with his wife -- and to raising racehorses on the couple's farm outside Saratoga Springs, N.Y. Still sporting the same infectious grin -- though without the shag haircut -- Cassidy, now 52, says he has come to terms with his early success. "I was never uncomfortable with the Partridge Family," he told reporters last year. "I was never uncomfortable with the fact that it had a tremendous impact and was so successful. I just didn't want to be a nostalgia act. I wanted to go on and have a present." ====== Tom Wopat
It's a long way from Hazzard County, Ga., to 42nd Street, New York City -- but for actor Tom Wopat, that's just the point. The Wisconsin native began his career onstage in New York and Washington, D.C., in his early 20s, and had already appeared in one Broadway show in 1978 -- I Love My Wife -- when he won the role as rowdy redneck Luke Duke on TV's The Dukes of Hazzard. The show lasted from 1979 to 1985, and made sex symbols of Wopat and costars Catherine Bach and John Schneider. But Wopat says his rural upbringing kept him grounded in the face of stardom. "Of course it was strange," he says now. "You don't aspire to be beefcake. But I grew up on a dairy farm; I milked cows for eight years -- it's not hard to remember where I come from." Dukes also created for Wopat a down-home persona that led to four country albums released between 1982 and 1992 (Tom Wopat, A Little Bit Closer, Don't Look Back and Learning to Love) -- a career choice that, he now says, may have been a mistake. "Luke Duke and country music were departures from what I would have been doing otherwise," he says. "When we decided to do country, it was because middle-of-the-road music had disappeared, and country was country-pop. I don't think it ever really caught on." Off the country-music scene, Wopat followed up Dukes with occasional TV movies and small-screen series, then landed a regular role on Cybill in 1995. Along the way he married and divorced twice; the actor has five children: Lindsay and Joey, both 18; Adam, 13; Taylor, 10; and Walker, 6. And in the '90s, Wopat returned to his Broadway roots. After performing in City of Angels in 1991 and Guys and Dolls in 1992, he landed a role opposite Bernadette Peters in the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun; the show, which opened in February 1999, scored Wopat a Tony nomination and some big-city respect. Two years ago he released an album of jazz standards, The Still of the Night, and followed it up with a well-received cabaret tour; this past summer he leapt into Broadway favorite 42nd Street. Still a little bit country, Wopat lives in New Jersey these days, where he has a truck, a vegetable garden and "a little cabin by a lake;" he stays in New York just a few nights a week. The distance seems to suit him: Although he praises the warmth of the Broadway community, he admits that, with his checkered career path, "I've always felt like an outsider wherever I was." ====== Philip Michael Thomas
Philip Michael Thomas is no longer strolling Miami's beaches looking for crooks, but most recently he used the Sunshine State as a launching pad for his new musical, Sacha and the Magic Cookie Factory -- a family oriented fairy tale about a little girl who discovers a magic cookie factory after her brother breaks her new toy. The tale is based on songs he wrote for his daughter, Sacha, now 27, when she was a little girl. For the 53-year-old Thomas, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, and grew up in Southern California, the move into theater is a return to his roots. Before he began landing TV roles, including guest spots on '70s mainstays Starsky & Hutch and Trapper John MD, he appeared on Broadway in shows such as Hair and The Selling of the President. The onetime youth minister had been working as an actor for a dozen years before he landed Miami Vice, the fast-paced TV action series noted as much for its flashy fashion as for the chemistry between Thomas and Don Johnson. "The role was perfect for me," Thomas says. The show catapulted him to new heights, and images of him and Johnson wound up on millions of teenagers' bedroom walls. But while Johnson went on to career success and a second try at marriage to star Melanie Griffith after the show wrapped, Thomas's professional life took a downturn. Today Thomas focuses on interests in music and photography, acts in smaller films and does occasional guest spots on TV (including a few on Johnson's late-'90s show, Nash Bridges). The perennially single Thomas's personal life has also taken a nosedive recently. Four years ago, a bank foreclosed on his six-bedroom Miami house after he stopped paying the mortgage. Shortly after, then-girlfriend Kassandra Thomas took the actor to` court, accusing him of abandoning her and their five children -- sons Sovereign, Sacred, Kharisma and Noble, and daughter Imajhananda -- while he traveled in pursuit of acting gigs. Still, the actor, who has a total of 12 kids, insists he's happy with his past; even today, young police officers will tell him that he and Johnson were childhood role models. Says Thomas: "It's a phenomenal experience when you know you've had a positive effect on people through your work." From People.com, September 2003 |
|