People Weekly 8/82

Bruce enjoys a picnic with Sam and Kathryn, who says her husband came home with "a lot of bruises" from all the tumbles he took on TRON.

Only last year Bruce Boxleitner was just another ruggedly handsome Hollywood actor hoping to parlay his macho appeal into Tom Selleck-sized stardom. "I was at the point where my career didn't have any direction," he recalls. But today all that's changed. Boxleitner, 32, has the title role in TRON, playing Jeff Bridges'computerized warrior sidekick. What's more, he's landed the lead in CBS' upcoming fall series Bring 'Em Back Alive, portraying a famed animal catcher in Singapore and the jungles of southern Asia just before World War II.

"We're grooming Bruce to be the next Clark Gable or Alan Ladd," says manager Jay Bernstein (formerly Farrah Fawcett's Svengali), who's steered Boxleitner's career since they crossed paths at a Malibu beach party last fall. Bruce frankly admits that his TRON performance is unlikely to stir up any memories of Rhett Butler or Shane. "I know that Tron is a wooden character," he says, "but I liked the billing and I wanted to work with Jeff Bridges, whom I've admired for years."

Playing second fiddle to a microchip also doesn't faze him. Since his days as a broke New York actor who skipped out on a month's rent in 1972 to search for success in Hollywood, Bruce has been waiting for the big breakthrough. TRON is the closest thing to it yet. Born in Elgin, Ill., Bruce began acting in high school plays before coming to New York. "I thought I had it made," he recalls, "but I had a hard time surviving."

Things improved in Hollywood, where he appeared on the Mary Tyler Moore Show, the ABC miniseries East of Eden (repeated this week) and won a role in the ABC series How the West Was Won, in which actress Kathryn Holcomb, now 30, played his sister. They were married in 1977. The Boxleitners live in a rambling, $750,000 San Fernando Valley ranch home with son Sam, 1. They collect Western art and own two quarter horses which they ride on weekends.

Fearing that TRON merchandising could turn Bruce into a cartoon character, manager Bernstein has no plans for a sequel in the future. Says Boxleitner playfully: "He's going to make me the Farrah of the 1980s. With a name like Boxleitner, you have to do something to be remembered."

Thanks, Jim!