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US Magazine, April 1999
Magnificent 7
A new wave of heartthrobs has hit Hollywood.
"I
get fan mail," says David James Elliott, star of the CBS
military-legal drama 'JAG.' "I get pictures of naked people. I've had,
like proposals-for all kinds of things." It wasn't always this way. "In
ninth grade," the 38-year old Canadian actor says, "I was sort of
tall and gangly. This girl who I really had a crush on said that one of
my brothers was really attractive, and then she said, 'What happened to you?'"
Elliott, the son of a heating-and-plumbing-wholesaler dad and an office-manager mom, grew up in Milton, Ontario, and graduated from Canada's top drama program, at Ryerson Polytechnical Academy. After a two-year apprenticeship at the prestigious Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, he got a role in a play called B-Movie: The Play. "It was the most successful Canadian play ever," says Elliott. "I played a male stripper named Dick. I ran around in my underwear for most of the piece."
While starring in the late-'80's Canadian TV series
'Street Legal', he began dating actress Nanci Chambers, who had appeared on
one episode. But he took off to pursue TV stardom in L.A. After a few months
of lonely-guy life, he went back to Toronto to see Chambers. "I drove up
to her place," he says, "and just started packing her stuff."
the two were married in 1992 and now live in Brentwood, Calif., with their 5-year
old daughter, Stephanie.
'JAG' flopped after debuting on NBC in 1995 but has thrived since CBS began running new episodes in January 1997. Though Elliott has had feature-film offers, the weekly series is keeping him busy enough, as he realized last summer. "We went away for a weekend," he has said, "and my daughter kept saying, 'I love you Mommy.' My wife said, "Why don't you tell Daddy that you love him?' She said, "I don't know him very well.' I said, 'You know, I think I better not work for a while.'"
