Picture this: handsome, amiable, Bruce Boxleitner playing a psychotic ex-con who savagely brutalizes a man he holds captive.

Unlikely? How about Boxleitner as a down-at-heel private eye working out of a Kansas City coffee shop?

These aren't images we associate with Boxleitner, whose great looks helped make him a leading good guy on series TV for 12 years. Yet he has already completed his ex-con role in an Aussie film called Breakaway and began work on the CBS pilot Triangle, in which he plays the P.I.

Clearly, something's going on with Boxleitner. As he tells it, he's finally growing up. "I'm just 39. I've been playing young men forever. Now there are roles that have some meat."

Not so fast, Bruce. In this month's CBS miniseries Till We Meet Again, he plays a handsome but dull flying officer in World War II who is smitten with a spirited aviatrix (Courteney Cox). Boxleitner's Jock Hampton provides Cox with a shoulder to cry on, but he's just too darn nice to ignite her passion.

This five-hour Judith Krantz family saga will hardly change Boxleitner's image — and indeed, he doesn't even pretend to be enthusiatic. "I'm not the happiest with it, to be frank," he says. "It was a necessary movie to make because I was going through a divorce and I had financial needs."

If Jock Hampton is too easygoing for his own good, the same has been said of Boxleitner, who has never achieved true superstardom. Charles Jarrott, director of Till We Meet Again, theorizes: "It's irritating to think, but often it's the S.O.B.'s who become stars, because they insist on doing things their way."

Boxleitner has generally avoided ego battles, even on the notoriously troubled Scarecrow and Mrs. King set, where costar Kate Jackson skirmished with producers and co-workers. Nor will he be drawn into attacking Jackson. He admits, though, that "couples shows are tough and sometimes the pressure got in between us."

That's also been true of Boxleitner and ex-wife Kitty Holcomb. They divorced this year following a long separation. He declines to dwell on the break-up, except to say, "You gotta go through the whole battle — and my God, we battled long enough. It's a rough thing." Now that the battles are over and he's in a new relationship — another subject he won't talk about — he is able to add that his ex-wife is "still my best friend."

These days, he's also friends with his kids, Sam, 9, and 4-year-old Lee, and they visit him often. Things weren't always so rosy. "I was probably a scary figure to them for a while," he admits. "I was a little short-tempered. You don't mean to be. It's just frustration and anxiety."

When they visit, the kids indulge Dad's cowboy fantasies. Boxleitner ropes for charity rodeos with good old boys Wilford Brimley, Ben Johnson and Richard Farnsworth.

Nothing in his early years suggests a yen for sagebrush. The son of a CPA, he grew up in a middle-class family in Mount Prospect, Illinois, with three younger sisters. But he spent a lot of time on his grandfather's farm and had a chance to be around farm animals.

He became a stage actor and eventually headed to Los Angeles looking for movie and TV work. Five lines on The Mary Tyler Moore Show gave him his union card, and then he was off and running. Galloping, really, on How the West Was Won and three Gambler TV movies.

From the start, Boxleitner considered himself an acting professional — yet he was often competing with young hunks with no experience. "They knew nothing — they'd been surfing," he recalls. "I'd see them making it big, having these little star fits. I didn't buy it."

Problem is, good-looking young guys are emerging in Hollywood all the time. "You're always looking over your shoulder," he shrugs. "But I'm a survivor. I'm really looking forward to my 40s. I feel I've got a lot to do yet. Going to Australia and doing something as different as Breakaway was a big thing emotionally. It just unleashed things I never knew I had."

The trick is to bring these emotional breakthroughs back to the USA and do riskier work. "Maybe I'll even get off eight o'clock television," says Boxleitner, smiling his famous smile. "Wouldn't that be something?"
 

Thanks, Claudia!