He's Flying High
By Claire Bickley, The Toronto Sun, October 1, 1995

On Canadian TV, actor David James Elliott was last seen storming off to Florida and away from a Street Legal romance that lasted three years. South of the border, the abortion issue and an aversion to furniture soured the attraction between Carl The Moving Guy and Elaine on Seinfeld. Before that, things were looking good for him as Melrose Place football star Terry Parsons until the writers pushed him off the wagon and back into the cesspool of sex addiction. Now he's the star of JAG, a high-powered new drama series about the pursuit of military justice that's equal parts Top Gun and A Few Good Men. Except that Elliott "makes Tom Cruise look like a girl," swooned one female TV writer from the States. (I told her all Canadian guys look this good.) Quicker than you can say "I love a man in uniform," the green-eyed, 6'4" actor is being touted as TV's next big thing.

"It doesn't hurt that he's the same size as Tom Selleck was," says JAG executive producer Don Bellisario, a career-maker who cast Selleck in Magnum, P.I. and Scott Bakula in Quantum Leap.

"I find David to be in that same mold, the nice-guy mold," says Bellisario, predicting Elliott's star will rise with comparable speed. " He has a lot of strength and he has a sense of humor that took a while to find. He's got this Canadian reserve that means you have to get to know David a bit."

The object of all this attention is modest on all accounts.

"I couldn't even get a date in high school," says Elliott, [35], who grew up in Milton, Ontario and is now married and the father of a two-year-old daughter. As for riding JAG's jet fighters to stardom, he won't jinx himself.

"If this were the project that lifted me up, it would be fantastic. But do I project that? I would never presume to. I just show up and do the best job I can do," he says.

It took five tries until he did the best audition he could for the part of Lt. Harmon Rabb Jr., a lawyer and investigator for the military's Judge Advocate General. 

"I had a lot of actors come back a couple of times," says Bellisario. "David was the only one who kept improving." He was also the only one who studied a real officer's training manual, showing a discipline that undoubtedly appealed to Bellisario, who served four years in the Marine Corps.

For an actor whose favorite childhood game was War, Harmon Rabb is a dream role.

"The Canadian Army is not really seeing a lot of action so this is the safe way," jokes Elliott.

A lawman before, on Street Legal and as a G-man for two seasons of the syndicated series The Untouchables, Elliott expected to be lawyering on television sooner and in a different role. Last year, he starred as an assistant U.S. attorney in the drama pilot Golden Gate, but NBC passed on the series.

"It was a shame that it didn't go. Who knows why?" he says. "Sometimes with a few friends I'll sit down and pull it out and watch it and I love it."

He does approach the bench in this season's NBC courtroom miniseries Degree of Guilt in which he stars with Melrose's Daphne Zuniga. Before The Untouchables, Elliott was paired with fellow Canadian Shannon Tweed in the CBS latenight series Fly By Night.

It's been five years since he made his move to the U.S. permanent, lured by a development deal with Disney that never bore fruit. His athletic looks - in his off-time, he's a long-distance runner - won him a recurring role as a pro baseball player on the 1992 season of Knots Landing. "It seems like a long time. So much has happened," he says.

"Obviously there were some dry scary periods. It's been a rollercoaster and you know, I'm just along for the ride."

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