The Only Main Actors Still Alive From 1980’s Magnum P.I.

The 1980s are often viewed as a pop cultural wasteland: a post-disco, style-over-substance hellscape where music videos turned vacuous bands and singers into chart-topping titans, blockbuster-chasing executives drained films of personality and artistic merit, and television pandered to a benumbed viewership with hacky sitcoms, formula dramas, and risible nighttime soaps. This was only half-true.

There was a good bit of dreck polluting the multiplexes and the airwaves throughout the eight-year Reagan era (and the Bush I hangover), but you’d have to be a killjoy to have lived through that time and turned up your nose at the bevy of brilliant artists who were working at their absolute peak. Prince, Spielberg, Streep, Selleck … yes, Selleck. Tom Selleck.

For eight immensely entertaining seasons, Tom Selleck was the handsomest, charmingest, mustachioed-est private detective on television as Magnum P.I. The creation of small-screen hit makers Donald P. Bellisario (“Quantum Leap,” “NCIS”) and Glen A. Larson (“Battlestar Galactica,” “The Fall Guy”), the series whisked viewers off once a week to Hawaii, where Selleck’s smooth-talking investigator routinely took time out from luxuriating in a mansion he did not own to solve crimes with the assistance of his pals T.C. (Roger E. Mosley) and Rick (Larry Manetti). The estate’s owner, Robin Masters (voiced by Orson Welles), is never seen, but Magnum’s fun-loving lifestyle is constantly cramped by Masters’ humorless manservant Higgins (John Hillerman). Magnum and Higgins are initially thorns in each other’s side, but they eventually settle into a warmly antagonistic relationship that gives the show a surprising bit of heart.

Between the Mike Post theme song, the very cherry Ferrari Magnum pushes around the island and that Detroit Tigers ballcap (which became an especially trendy piece of apparel when they won the 1984 World Series), it didn’t get more ’80s than “Magnum P.I.” — and the show has dated surprisingly well! Since the series continues to be popular on streaming, let’s take a moment to salute the cast members who are still with us (and show some love to those who’ve since departed).

Thomas Magnum’s job often required him to work in tandem with the island’s law enforcement professionals. This wasn’t always a harmonious relationship (our arrogant, Aloha-shirt-clad hero could press his charming luck a little too hard on occasion), but he was mostly an irresistible rake. One character who enjoyed a flirty back-and-forth with Magnum was District Attorney Carol Baldwin. And as happened every now and then on episodic television back in the day, this character wasn’t always played by the same actor.

The first iteration of Carol was portrayed by Patty McCormack, who continues to be best known to film and television viewers as the serial killer imp Rhonda Penmark in the classic thriller “The Bad Seed.” McCormack originated the role of the murderous little scamp on Broadway and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in the 1956 movie. McCormack only put in one appearance as Carol on “Magnum P.I.” during the show’s first season, but this is in keeping with the 78-year-old’s still thriving career. She’s bounced around from show to show like many veteran actors of her generation and always delivers wherever she turns up. Over the last 20 years, she’s dropped by hit series like “Cold Case,” “Scandal” and “Desperate Housewives,” while delivering a memorable moment or two in movies like Ron Howard’s “Frost/Nixon” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master.”

Carol Baldwin returned in season 3 and became a recurring character played with spiky confidence by Kathleen Lloyd. Though Lloyd had done her share of television prior to this (on shows like “Ironside,” “Adam-12” and “Kung Fu”), her most notable performance by far was as the daughter of a ruthless land baron in Arthur Penn’s bizarre 1976 Western “The Missouri Breaks.” That film’s oddness is provided almost entirely by star Marlon Brando, who goes sailing off the rails as a mercenary hired to kill a horse rustler played by Jack Nicholson. Moviegoers who showed up to this film expecting thespian fireworks between these two Oscar winners got their money’s worth, but Lloyd more than holds her own as a woman caught between two dishonest men.

Lloyd’s movie career briefly caught fire, and she’s particularly good in the 1977 cult horror classic “The Car.” But after a game performance in Larry Cohen’s killer-baby sequel “It Lives Again,” she returned to television and is probably best remembered today as the district attorney who put Magnum to work and put up with his endearingly smug shenanigans.

Sadly, Larry Manetti is the only surviving member of Magnum’s tight circle of friends/associates. Roger E. Mosley died at the age of 82 in 2022 from injuries sustained in a car wreck, while Hillerman passed away aged 84 from cardiovascular disease in 2017. Both men were terrifically talented actors, but they achieved television immortality as, respectively, helicopter pilot T.C. and the amusingly disapproving Higgins.

Manetti was a working actor in film and television throughout the 1970s, but he didn’t really make his mark until he landed the role of Orville “Rick” Wright. Rick, who loathed his given name, fancied himself something of an island operator as the owner of the King Kamehameha Club, but he was often an in-over-his-head comic foil to Selleck’s dashing detective. Manetti’s post-“Magnum P.I.” career found him making appearances on a host of hit network series (e.g. “JAG,” “Walker, Texas Ranger,” and “Las Vegas”), but he eventually found his way back to Hawaii in the CBS reboots of “Hawaii Five-0” and “Magnum P.I.” (though he played a new character, Nicky “The Kid” DeMarco, in both). He also reunited with Selleck on the star’s police drama “Blue Bloods.”

The man who almost was Indiana Jones got a pretty acceptable consolation prize in “Magnum P.I.” Actually, the series was the prize, at least as far as CBS was concerned in 1980 when they exercised their option on the actor to keep him from playing the adventuring archaeologist in Steven Spielberg’s franchise-launching blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” While this arrangement worked out well in the long term for Selleck and Harrison Ford, the former exuded such palpable star power the studios kept calling during and after the eight-season run of “Magnum P.I.” High-profile like “Lassiter” and “High Road to China” leaned into Selleck’s old-school leading man appeal, but they played like stiff retreads of classics that belonged to a long bygone era. He scored his biggest movie hit alongside Steve Guttenberg and fellow TV star Ted Danson in 1987’s wildly “Three Men and a Baby,” but couldn’t quite connect in the deeply underrated duo of “Quigley Down Under” (a rollicking Australian Western featuring Alan Rickman as yet another a deliciously nasty bad guy) and “Mr. Baseball” (a rousing fish-out-of-water comedy starring Selleck as a Major League Baseball slugger looking to extend his flagging career in Japan).

Aside from a very funny supporting turn opposite Kevin Kline in Frank Oz’s “In & Out” (and an underrated voiceover cameo in the Disney flick “Meet the Robinsons”), Selleck has stuck to television, and for good reason: his CBS cop drama “Blue Bloods” is set to conclude its 14-season run this year. I’d say Selleck might be best known to a younger generation of television viewers as Commissioner Frank Reagan, but let’s be honest here: the generations that tune into that show every week are the same ones that watched “Magnum P.I.” during its 1980s heyday.