Tom Selleck has revealed he “didn’t get the girl” during his stint on ‘The Dating Game’.
Tom Selleck has revealed he ‘didn’t get the girl’ during his stint on ‘The Dating Game’
The 79-year-old actor made the admission about his humble beginnings in showbusiness in an interview that has resurfaced as he promotes his new autobiography ‘You Never Know: A Memoir’, which charts the ups-and-downs and “mistakes” of his decades-long TV and film career.
He told People in the early 1980s about appearing on ‘The Dating Game’: “I was Bachelor No 2.
“I didn’t get the girl.”
Tom’s big break was landing the part of private investigator Thomas Magnum on the popular CBS show ‘Magnum, P.I.’, after he starred in soap opera ‘The Young and the Restless’ from 1974 to 1975.
He played Jed Andrews on the show – the love interest of Jaime Lyn Bauer’s Lorie Brooks.
‘Three Men and a Baby’ star Tom has now told People he never wanted to act to achieve fame, adding: “People would say, ‘Oh, he was bitten by the acting bug’, or, ‘He wanted to be a star’.
“I’ve never talked that way in my life. I just wanted to get a job and work.”
Tom took four years to finish his memoir, which he says is “a lot about failing: and his “endless failures”.
He added: “If you’re going to get in the acting business, you better get an appetite for it.
“And I tried to communicate that... because it was kind of a long road.”
Tom also said about being cautious about sharing anecdotes about the slew of famous faces he has met and worked with during his career: “I learned a long time ago, every time you share a story about someone else, they didn't necessarily say that’s okay.”
One of Tom’s biggest career misses was losing out on playing Indiana Jones in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ after he was offered the part by the movie’s director Steven Spielberg – as bosses of ‘Magnum, P.I.’ wouldn’t let him out of his contract to take it on after the show’s pilot was picked up for a full series.
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