Richard Dean Anderson

American actor, the former heartthrob of TV's "General Hospital" 1986-1991, leaving the soap when he felt overshadowed by another plotline. He segued into the starring role of the adventure series "MacGyver" for seven years. He made his movie debut in "Ordinary Heroes," 1986.

A sports enthusiast, he played hockey until he broke one arm then the other, then switched to the swim team until he split his head open on the diving board. Challenged by anything that involves speed, he has raced cars, scuba-dived, ski-raced, downhill raced, rock-climbed, mountain-biked, jumped out of planes and hang-glided, all of which gave him periodic injuries. He has had two back surgeries and two concussions.

The first-born of four sons of a teacher and an artist, he was raised in Minneapolis, MN. Anderson began his adventuring as a teenager with hitchhiking, random and slightly dangerous jaunts of misbehavior. At 17, he traveled 6,000 miles through Canada on his bicycle with a 60 lb. backpack. He began acting while in St. Cloud State College but in the '60s, spent a hippie year in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district with hair down to the middle of his back and a Manchu mustache, an exciting time. One day he looked around and later said, "I didn't see one person moving in a line that wasn't crooked." He returned to school at Ohio University in an actor's studio.

As a Hollywood apprentice, he worked as a street juggler and mime, then a jester/singer in a cabaret along with a job at a marine-show feeding killer whales

After spending much of a year working on a failed pilot about fire fighters, in 1997 he signed on an action sci-fi TV series, "Stargate SG-1. During filming, he shares a rented home in Vancouver with his girl friend Apryl Prose. He has spent much of his life with no permanent address, renting a house in Los Angeles. He dates women in a style to compete with Warren Beatty but has never married, admitting to having a problem settling down.