Mark Harmon may have grown up the child of a Hollywood starlet and Heisman Trophy winning football player, but he wasn’t always sure he’d end up working in Hollywood.
The beloved NCIS actor was born in California in 1951, to Tom Harmon, former pilot, later football player turned sports broadcaster, and Elyse Knox, a model and actress.
And though he made his acting debut early into his 20s, in an episode of the sitcom Ozzie’s Girls in the early 1970s, there was an, albeit brief, time in which he had a regular job.
© GettyMark, speaking earlier this month on The Fifth Column dodcast, recalled how after graduating from UCLA with a B.A. in Communications, he intended on pursuing a career in either advertising or law, and landed a gig as a merchandising director.
However it didn’t take long for him to get the acting bug. “When the advertising stuff kind of stopped being… I just knew I had to get out of that and do something else,” Mark explained on the podcast.
“I said that to my parents. I had been in acting class, and I had been going and doing that,” he continued, however noted: “I didn’t know where to go from there. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t know what to do.”
© Getty ImagesIt was a cold call that ultimately changed his life, after one day when he was watching Dragnet, saw the studio indent for the show’s production company, Mark VII Limited, and called its owner Jack Webb.
“I looked it up in the phonebook, and I called,” he recalled, sharing how Jack’s secretary, who “didn’t have to put me through,” luckily did.
“We talked for a couple minutes, and he said, ‘Why don’t you come in and talk to me?'” Mark further shared, adding: “And I said ‘Okay,’ and I went into Universal, and I went into Mark VII, which at that time at Universal, was a big enchilada, man.”
© CBS Photo ArchiveHe eventually landed a gig as Officer Gus Corbin in a 1975 episode of Adam-12, which Mark VII Limited produced, and just 11 years later, he was being branded People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive.
© Getty ImagesHe also reflected in the podcast on the title — he was only the second man to receive it — which he called rather “foolish” noting: “I was just trying to move forward, I was trying to get a part, trying to stretch as an actor.”
Mark later on became known for his roles on The West Wing, Freaky Friday, and most notably as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, though now, while still an executive producer for the franchise, he has also dedicated his time to writing, and has published three history books, Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, Ghosts of Panama: A Strongman Out of Control, A Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion, and Ghosts of Sicily: The True Story of the Naval Intelligence Agents Who Courted the Mob to Fight Nazis in America and the Battlefields of Italy.
