Tom Selleck

Through an entirely paternal line, Selleck is a direct descendant of English colonist David Selleck who moved to Massachusetts from Somerset, England, in 1633.

Then Selleck shifted gears, portraying a cat burglar in 1930s London in Lassiter in 1984.

Thomas William Selleck (born January 29, 1945) is an American actor.

Selleck was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1945, to housewife Martha Selleck (Jagger) and Robert Dean Selleck, who was an executive and real estate investor.

Selleck's family moved to Sherman Oaks, California, in 1948.

He has an elder brother Robert (born 1944), a younger sister Martha (born 14 Nov 1953), and a younger brother Daniel (born 1956).

Selleck is of mostly English descent, though he also has some German ancestry.

Selleck graduated from Grant High School in 1962 and enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College, living at home and saving money.

Selleck, who stands 6 ft tall, transferred to the University of Southern California during his junior year to play for the USC Trojans men's basketball team.

He also was a pitcher and designated hitter for the USC baseball team.

He is a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and a member of the Trojan Knights.

While Selleck was majoring in Business Administration, a drama coach suggested he try acting and, in his senior year, he dropped out of the university.

Selleck then studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, under Milton Katselas.

Upon receiving a draft notice during the Vietnam War, Selleck joined the California National Guard.

Selleck's first television appearance was as a college senior on The Dating Game in 1965 and again in 1967.

Soon after, he appeared in commercials for products such as Pepsi-Cola.

He began his career with bit parts in smaller movies, including Myra Breckinridge (invited on the set by Mae West), Coma, and The Seven Minutes.

He appeared in a number of TV series, mini-series and TV movies.

He was also the face of Salem cigarettes and Revlon's Chaz cologne.

He served in the 160th Infantry Regiment of the California Army National Guard from 1967 to 1973.

He had a recurring role in the 1970s as private investigator Lance White in The Rockford Files.

Selleck is an avid outdoorsman, marksman and firearms collector.

Selleck appeared in a commercial for Right Guard deodorant in 1971, with Farrah Fawcett in 1972 for the aperitif Dubonnet, and another in 1977 for the toothpaste Close-Up.

He was also in a Safeguard deodorant soap commercial (1972).

In 1972, he starred in the B-movie Daughters of Satan.

These interests led him to leading-man cowboy roles in Western films, starting with his role as cowboy and frontier marshal Orrin Sackett in the 1979 film The Sacketts, opposite Sam Elliott, Jeff Osterhage, and Western legends Glenn Ford and Ben Johnson, and that same year, Concrete Cowboys with Jerry Reed.

His breakout role was playing private investigator Thomas Magnum in the television series Magnum, P.I. (1980–1988), for which he received five Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series, winning in 1985.

The Shadow Riders followed in 1982.

In films, Selleck has played bachelor architect Peter Mitchell in Three Men and a Baby (1987) and its sequel Three Men and a Little Lady (1990).

He has also appeared in more than 50 other film and television roles since Magnum, P.I., including the films Quigley Down Under, Mr. Baseball, and Lassiter.

He appeared in recurring television roles as Monica Geller's love interest Dr. Richard Burke in Friends, as Lance White, the likeable and naive partner on The Rockford Files, and as casino owner A.J. Cooper on Las Vegas.

He also had a lead role in the television western film The Sacketts, based on two of Louis L'Amour's books.

Selleck is a California Army National Guard veteran, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association of America (NRA), an endorser in advertisements for National Review magazine, and co-founder of the Character Counts!

organization.

Quigley Down Under is one of his best-known Western films, but it was for his 1997 role in Last Stand at Saber River that he won a "Western Heritage Award".

Selleck's big break came when he was cast in the lead role as Thomas Magnum in Magnum, P.I. The producers would not release the actor for other projects, so Selleck had to pass on the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, which meant that the role went to actor Harrison Ford instead.

It turned out that the shooting of the pilot for Magnum was delayed for over six months by a writers' strike, which would have enabled him to complete Raiders.

From 2005–2015, he portrayed troubled small-town police chief Jesse Stone in nine television films based on the Robert B. Parker novels.

Since 2010, Selleck has co-starred as New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan in the series Blue Bloods.

Through this line, Selleck is of the 11th generation of his family born in North America